Egyptians talk democratic reform

"No one trusts this language of reform anymore,'' says Ahmed Sef al-Islam Hamed, a human rights lawyer and political organizer. "The government is simply trying to avoid international reform pressure with words."

But Mr. Sef concedes that "five years ago, a person like me couldn't dream of speaking as freely as we can now. The red light "on criticizing the president and his family doesn't exist anymore. We can talk about succession, we can criticize the rise of Gamal, and we don't go to jail."

Sef says US demands for reform have been coupled ironically, with public anger over the close relationship between the government and the US in the wake of the Palestinian intifada and invasion of Iraq, creating pressures that Mr. Mubarak's party feel it can no longer ignore or contain by simply rounding up a few political opponents.

"We're braver now. My feeling is that there's a crisis within the kitchen cabinet that really runs Egypt. They're not sure what to do and that's giving us more space," he says.

That opening has been used most visibly to try to derail what some opposition figures believe is a campaign to position Gamal Mubarak as the presumptive successor to his father, who spent much of July in Germany for back surgery and who collapsed during a nationally televised speech last November.

After Egyptian athletes won five medals from the Athens Olympics, the best performance in 50 years, a huge poster went up in Cairo's main Tahrir Square showing Gamal Mubarak congratulating one of the winners. It was later pulled down after an opposition group filed a lawsuit to have the poster removed.

"It's the first time in Egypt's history where the question of who will become president has become an issue before the process started,'' says Sef, who helped file the lawsuit. "Gamal probably won't be president - it will probably be a military man like his father - but we want to begin the process of involving society."

Mubarak has said repeatedly in interviews that Gamal will not replace him, but a number of his allies have gained ministerial positions - seen as a boost for Gamal Mubarak.

The younger Mubarak is part of a new generation within the NDP, many with private-sector backgrounds, who are pushing for the government to liberalize the economy through privatization and reducing requirements for investors.

Brushing aside questions about the country's emergency laws, Gamal Mubarak told reporters that "radical economic reforms'' should come before major political changes, and he said the emergency laws needed to stay in place to "fight terrorism." But the price tag put on a proposal to halve corporate taxes to about 20 percent, shows how badly the economy has done under the NDP.

A party official said the tax cut would take $600 million from the budget, implying annual corporate tax revenues of $1.2 billion in this country of 70 million people. By contrast, Massachusetts, with a population of 6.5 million, takes in about $1.7 billion a year in corporate taxes.

"Getting rid of the emergency laws would do more for reform in Egypt than anything else,'' says Sef. "They would have to release thousands of people, mostly Islamists, from jail if they dumped them. I don't think they want to lose that kind of control."

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