Johannesburg — The path Cairo takes could set the stage for the Middle East for decades to come

EVERY morning, promptly at nine o'clock, the green police van pulled up outside my window in Cairo's sleepy suburb of Zamalek to collect the 10 policemen who had gathered.

My hotel's guard watched this event slumped apparently uninterested in his chair, fiddling with his AK-47, perhaps because the end of his 12-hour shift was some way off.

Cairo is a contradiction between function and frenetic activity; a contrast of the deep-rooted knowledge and power that built the three great pyramids of Giza, and today's sprawling, uncontrolled and poverty-stricken metropolis housing at least three times more people than its closest African rival, Lagos.

Enveloped in pollution and dust, it emits a cacophony of noise from more than half-a-million cars, and its 15-million-or-so Cairenes, a quarter of Egypt's population. Yet its people remain mostly the epitome of warm hospitality and friendliness for which Arabs are renowned.

It is, the author David Lamb notes, a paradox of civilisation's birthplace and developing country status, a mix of east and west, first and third worlds and of old and new.

But as might be expected of the nation living in such a 1000 -yearold city where Plato once reportedly studied and for which Verdi composed Aida, Egyptians regard themselves as unique as Lamb puts it, "a cut above the rest of the Arab world". Anwar Sadat's national security adviser, Hafiz Ismail, is quoted as saying: "We Egyptians are Arab, and don't ever forget this but we are not like other Arabs."

Such self-belief, founded in its Pharaonic history combined with the knowledge that one in four Arabs is Egyptian, granted Egypt leadership of the post-independence Arab world. This role was carefully cultivated and skilfully mastered by Gamal Abdel Nasser who, preaching a mix of pan-Arabism, anti-Zionism and Arab socialism, developed a "bold and farreaching" foreign policy, emphasising Egypt's strategic location in the overlapping worlds of Arab, African, nonaligned and Islamic states.

This recent history should not overshadow an important development in Arab politics of increasing diversity between states and of the shift during the past three decades towards Arab nationalism, a result principally of the devaluation of the other "isms", including socialism and anti-imperialism. But it is in the struggle between Arab nationalism and the most potentially damaging of all the "isms" Islamic radicalism where the struggle may define the direction of Middle Eastern politics and society for decades.

Unemployment in Egypt is officially 9,9%, having risen 1% since 2002. Total foreign debt is up $800m in the past year to $29,1bn. Yet these figures do not begin to tell the full story. With 2-million bureaucrats on the government's payroll, teachers earn just $40 a month, senior diplomats under $200 and the soldiers guarding my hotel just $5.

Nasser's (now expired) promise of a job for every university graduate prompted massive expansion in the public service and a drain on the fiscus, but with the low pay no simultaneous improvement in services.

According to the World Bank, in 2000, 17% of the country lived in poverty. The 25% devaluation in the Egyptian pound has hit the country's poorest hardest.

In this environment, many Egyptians have left to find jobs abroad, a diaspora now put at more than 3million. But there is potentially a much graver threat to stability.

It would be incorrect to describe Egypt as a democracy, at least in the western, liberal sense. President Hosni Mubarak has admitted that Egyptian democracy is "limited".

There is no likelihood of an opposition party rivalling the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) at the polls, and Mubarak's position is unchallengeable. Hence the grooming of his son, Gamal, as his heir.

US President George Bush has called on Egypt which, he said, "had shown the way toward peace in the Middle East", to "show the way toward democracy in the Middle East". But while the limited nature of Egypt's democracy cannot be applauded, it is perhaps more understandable given the pressures that Mubarak is under, especially those of radicalism from below. The largest opposition force in parliament is the Muslim Brotherhood, with 16 of 454 deputies. Elected as independents because of the ban on the Brotherhood's political activities, this is nonetheless the body that the government keeps the closest watch on.

Founded in 1928, the Brotherhood has endured bannings, imprisonment and crackdowns including the assassination of founder Hassan al-Banna in 1949. Described as a "state within a state", it has been both close to and estranged from government, being implicated in the assassination of Egyptian prime minister Fahmi Nokrashi in December 1948; four attempts against Nasser, the first in 1954; and Sadat's assassination in 1981.

The Brotherhood now apparently sees a role for itself as a watchdog against public and government corruption, though it still calls for the establishment of an Islamic state by peaceful means. As its leader, Maamoun al-Hodeibi, put it in November, corruption reflects "the stagnation of the political regime", leading "to a suffocating economic crisis" and "scientific, cultural and technological underdevelopment".

He observed: "The Zionist entity (Israel) has sold airborne radar systems worth billions of dollars to India (in October), and we are still unable to fully manufacture a car; we either have to import it or import parts of it for local assembly."

In today's tough economic environment, many observers fear that in free elections the Brotherhood's religious, populist slogans would prove too enticing to the electorate.

Whereas Nasser, like Muammar Gaddafi, could always captivate, lead and focus his population with his vision of pan-Arabism and antiZionism, this sort of rhetoric, however tempting, would ring hollow today, particularly since peace was made between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1977. And instead of being a focus of ire a deflection from domestic problems Israel's comparative economic success, military prowess and fully functioning democracy, is a constant reminder of the failure of Arab states to develop their own political economies and, more importantly, to build constructive alliances between each other.

But the onus is not only on government to achieve the impossible to reform simultaneously its political system and economy. The Brotherhood has also to mature from representing sectarianism to more of secularism if it is to play a role in developing Egyptian society in the same way that Turkey's ruling Islamic Justice and Development Party recognised the responsibility of government.

But the Brotherhood has instead developed links not with conservative forces, but with radical movements such as Hamas, Gama'a alIslamiya and Islamic Jihad elsewhere in the region.

In such circumstances, Mubarak, like other Arab leaders, will find it difficult to relax the political environment despite the contention by some notables such as Jordan's Prince Hassan, uncle of King Abdullah, that Arab "ruling elites are isolated, cut off from the people". Yet finding a third way between old-style party politics and Islamic radicalism will not be easy.

The threateningly tectonic impact of getting the formula for change wrong explains why, as Michael Oren argues, "politics in the Middle East are more often than not random and unpredictable, arbitrary in their course and potentially explosive in their outcome".

In the same way that Egypt was the forerunner of civilisation, Arab unity and of peace with Israel, the way that Cairo confronts the tension between political reform and terrorism could set the stage for politics in the Middle East for decades, shaping the relationship and bridging the divide between rulers and the ruled, and between states and nongovernment, nonconventional political forces such as al-Qaeda.

But if it gets the answers wrong, those policemen outside my hotel might find themselves with an altogether more dangerous environment on their hands.

Mills is the national director of the South African Institute of International Affairs, and has been doing research in the Middle East.