The opposition is upping the ante despite a clampdown on dissidents, writes Amira Howeidy For three weeks a group of young political activists have met in an office in downtown Cairo on Saturday to attend an unconventional workshop. The subject? Ways to struggle for peaceful political change. The activists, members of Youth for Change, Kifaya's offshoot of younger members, are completing a training course that they, and older leaders of the anti-Mubarak group, deem necessary if they are to pursue their quest for political reform. Over the river, in the smart Zamalek district, the National Front for Change (NFC), an umbrella organisation of 11 parties and political groups, launched its campaign to end the 25-year-old emergency law on Saturday. Under the slogan "Mubarak's rule is entirely emergency", the three-months long campaign aims to pressure the government, and the National Democratic Party (NDP) majority in parliament, not to renew the emergency law next May. The NDP-dominated parliament is unlikely to respond to the campaign -- not the first to seek the abolition of the notorious law -- though it will remind the public of the hefty price the emergency law has exacted over a quarter of a century. Egypt, says George Ishak, the vocal spokesman of Kifaya, "is unwell". The "despicable" law, said an NFC statement, gives the president all the powers of a martial ruler. The danger inherent in such a situation is exacerbated, the statement continued, by the fact that some of those powers are necessarily delegated to the interior minister. The minister "gets to control the destiny of people... he has the authority to arrest, detain, forcefully adjourn meetings, close newspapers and confiscate property under the loathsome law." The interior minister, through the security apparatus, has used the law to curb political activity and impose restrictions on existing political parties and hinder the creation of new ones. But the greatest casualty of the emergency law, said the statement, is human rights. "Torture in prisons and police stations... is systematic and institutionalised ... [so is] taking family members of wanted defendants as hostage, effectively kidnapping them." And then there are the repeated administrative detentions of those acquitted by courts of any charges, the result being that thousands are incarcerated for "tens of years". An estimated 40,000 have been imprisoned on such detention orders since the mid- 1990s. The emergency law came in force following the assassination of president Anwar El-Sadat in 1981. Earlier, following the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement, journalists, intellectuals and politicians critical of Sadat were detained in a massive clampdown. The NFC campaign comes in the wake of the arrest of 20 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition bloc in parliament. It also follows the sentencing of two journalists to a year in prison for publishing stories on high- level corruption and the referral of four senior judges -- who questioned the transparency of the November- December parliamentary elections -- for interrogation after their immunity was lifted. The NFC launched its campaign from the Zamalek office of its founder, former prime minister Aziz Sedki. "The emergency law has prevented Egyptians from pursuing a normal life," said the MB's supreme guide, Mahdi Akef, who attended the press conference. The MB had earlier tried to hold their own press conference in a hotel but was informed that the security apparatus would not allow it, said Akef. "Mubarak's entire reign has been associated with martial law. I find it very strange that while the world progresses and regimes change their visions and backtrack on earlier positions here nothing changes," he said. Speakers at the launch of the NFC campaign voiced fears that the emergency law would be abolished only to be replaced by an anti-terrorism bill enshrining its most repressive clauses. "Legalising emergency rule under any name or pretext," Kifaya's George Ishak pointed out, "means replacing a temporary situation with a permanent one." Three days later, speaking from London, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said the government plans to replace the emergency law with anti-terrorism legislation within "a few months". Chillingly, Nazif continued by saying "we cannot take the risk of not having a legislative environment that would allow us to fight terrorism and combat it effectively." How, asked economist Hazem El-Beblawi in his address to the NFC press conference, are foreign investors expected to trust Egypt when the country's own establishment is telling them it is such an unsafe country that it has needed martial laws to be extended for more than a quarter of a century? The NFC campaign will involve a series of conferences and meetings outside Cairo, a mass petition against the emergency law, and coordinated protests with civil society organisations and the parliamentary opposition bloc. Formed last October ahead of the parliamentary elections the NFC -- the largest coalition yet to emerge between political parties and the various movements for change -- has done little to impress the public it wanted to mobilise. The poor showing of its members in the elections underlined its lack of grassroots support and appeared to have dampened the spirit of its founders. The front's subsequent silence led many to write it off as just one more short-lived reform project. Its reemergence is just one among many signs that the discontent that came into clear focus with the violent and blatantly unfair parliamentary elections has not receded. The Saturday Kifaya workshops are not the only evidence. Last Thursday the 9 March Group, campaigning for an end to security interference in Egyptian universities, held its second annual conference, attracting a high turn out of academics. Several reform groups, including Kifaya, plan to stage a demonstration today in central Cairo's Tahrir Square in support of "journalists who face prison sentences and judges who are persecuted for exposing election fraud," according to the Web site of Manal Bahey and Alaa Abdel-Fattah (manalaa.net), two of the event's organisers. The demonstration intends to send a message of solidarity to the two extraordinary general assemblies -- in the Press Syndicate and the Judges Club -- that will convene the following day. Meanwhile, Ahmed Fouad Negm, Egypt's celebrated colloquial poet and lyricist, has announced his plans to "return" to writing political poetry after a 10-year hiatus, and a Negm poem ridiculing Gamal Mubarak's succession of his father has recently been doing the rounds. "I can't be quiet any longer," Negm told Al-Ahram Weekly. "It would be a crime to remain silent when Egypt needs people to speak out now more than ever." Negm's performance at Al-Azhar Park last week was cancelled by the authorities.
