After his sentencing, Ayman Nour shouts to supporters through the bars of the defendant's dock, before being forcibly removed by police
But Nours political career is now in ruins after having dared challenge a regime that is apparently determined to perpetuate itself in power. Last week, Nour was convicted on charges of forging signatures in establishing his party in 2004. The allegations surfaced soon after Nour founded his party calling for democracy and slamming Mubarak as a dictator. He had to run his presidential campaign beneath the cloud of the forgery allegations and then in elections last month lost his parliamentary seat amid widespread allegations of voter intimidation. To seal his fate, a state security court sentenced Nour to five years in prison last week and had him hauled off to begin serving his time. Even if Nour is exonerated on appeal, his lack of a parliamentary seat removes him from eligibility to run for president again in six years.
Nours troubles fit a longstanding pattern of government intimidation against democratic alternatives that might appeal to many Egyptians fed up with autocracy as well as to Western governments that have otherwise long done business with Mubaraks regime. In 2000, veteran Egyptian democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim was jailed on charges of accepting and misusing funds from foreign sources to support his research and monitoring work. Like Ibrahim, whose conviction was later overturned—after some pressuring from the U.S.—Nour was vilified in Egypts influential state-run media. Again, the U.S. is demanding that Nour be released. But the Egyptian government says that the arrest is in no way politically motivated.
Mubaraks regime appears to be intent upon neutralizing reformers like Nour to ensure that his ruling party remains the countrys only viable force for achieving development and stability. To strengthen his position, Mubarak has adopted reform as his own agenda and promised change from within. Another part of Mubaraks strategy seems to be to show that it is Muslim fundamentalists who pose the real challenge, and that his steady regime alone can prevent them from taking over and imposing an Islamic state.
That seemed to be the intended message in Novembers parliamentary poll. As the liberal Nour was suffering his defeat, Egypts Muslim Brotherhood, a party that seeks to reestablish an Islamic caliphate, was given unprecedented leeway by the regime to field its candidates. It captured nearly 20 percent of the seats, a sixfold improvement on its previous best showing, making the fundamentalists the largest opposition force in parliament. Egypts future has thus become a polarizing struggle between Mubarak and Islam, a contest that liberals, with Nour in jail rather than in parliament, have little hope of winning.