July 27, 2005 - As Egypt grieves over Saturday's bombing at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egyptians worry that they will be victims twice over - in lives lost, but also in livelihoods threatened as tourists leave the country. What also remains to be seen is the extent to which the vicious attacks will claim yet another victim: Egypt's nascent democracy reform movement.
Egypt is experiencing the first faint stirrings of a reform movement that, while still small, has shown unprecedented boldness in making its demands in the streets of Egypt's cities. Will it continue?
Saturday's attack creates the possibility that the threat of Islamist militancy in Egypt will serve as a pretext for preserving and even expanding repressive laws that extend far beyond the imperative of combatting terror.
To argue that this attack represents a new emergency is to ignore the fact that President Hosni Mubarak has imposed a continual state of emergency since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. While pro-regime intellectuals argue that the attack shows the continued need for political repression, it also shows that 25 years of emergency law have failed to stop religious extremist violence.
The regime uses terror as a pretext to act with impunity, cracking down on journalists and opposition parties in addition to its broad extra-constitutional assault on the nonviolent pro-democracy adherents of banned religious parties.
Mubarak has systematically eviscerated any opposition, refusing to license opposition parties and their newspapers, systematically jettisoning potential rivals to political backwaters, jailing political opponents and monopolizing Egyptian broadcast media to ensure that no rival voices are heard.
On its best days, Egypt's democracy movement is a fractious hodge-podge of different factions, united more by discontent with the regime than by a particular alternative vision for Egypt. Still, the barrier of fear that kept such groups from expressing themselves publicly - particularly in street demonstrations - has been broken. The Egyptian press, while far from free, now features frank criticism in some quarters. Opposition groups recently united to boycott September's presidential vote, slated to be the first multi-party presidential election in Egypt's history, which they consider a fraudulent half-measure to provide the regime with undeserved legitimacy.
Democracy in Egypt first requires achieving the measure of political liberty and breathing space necessary to create viable opposition parties. This will take years. But it cannot be done without international pressure. Even as opposition politicians proclaim their independence from foreign intervention, they depend on American prodding to protect them from the Mubarak regime's excesses.
The confluence of elections this fall, a discontented populace no longer afraid to demonstrate, the looming question of presidential succession and newly vigorous foreign pressure create a unique opportunity for reform in Egyptian politics.
America will continue to cooperate with the current Mubarak regime to fight terror and provide stability in the region - to do otherwise would be against its national interest. But it should not turn a tragedy into a blank check for a president who stretched a 1981 murder into a quarter-century of nondemocratic, extraconstitutional rule.
Daniel Benaim is a summer fellow at the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo.
