Not even a miracle could salvage the reputation of 2005; its departure trail is strewn with grief and disappointment. Assem El-Kersh, editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly, reviews a year of impossible challenges and wasted opportunities The winding year was both exceptional and insane. In Egypt it was full of trying times and equivocal promises, while in Iraq, Palestine and much of the Middle East, it was a kind of nightmarish déjà vu of years gone by. More than anything else, this was a year of battles, battles on all fronts, waged by choice or chance, waged harshly, haphazardly, or by design. Few were worthy fighting (one cannot help thinking of Iraq), many (those that marred Egypt's parliamentary elections earlier this month) rendered their very object (an electoral contest) a meaningless waste of energy and time. On Saturday, the last morning of 2005, Egyptians will stand before the mirror to inspect their country's most recent makeover, as it were. They will have sighted democracy, sampled the refreshing taste of freedom, and realised that one could open the window without fear of catching cold. But though it makes some of us happy, the image reflected in the glass will undoubtedly upset others too. Such a contrast of perspectives of Egypt is extremely telling, for at bottom it raises the philosophical question of whether there could be more than one version of the country. Each party in the raging debate certainly insists on seeing its own picture, making their vision either all black or all white. The black camp paints a bleak picture of discontent and frustration, flagrant inflation, suffocated freedoms, inept media. They level charges of corruption and abortive reform, political paralysis, deteriorating regional and international status and no end of self delusion. Yet the white camp is no less unreasonable in conjuring up a kind of heaven on earth in which there are no problems to speak of: unlimited liberty, equal opportunities, a promising economy, a joyful people and enough optimism to make the head spin. This divergence begins to make sense in light of the recent parliamentary elections, which exposed the worst side of Egyptians, be they in the administration or among the candidates or voters. Even more disappointing was the silent majority who never left their homes, whether to cast a vote or protest the imbalance of power that the results revealed: a parliament with no options other than the glaring bipolarity of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) and the Muslim Brotherhood, who have finally emerged from underground, demonstrating that they are shrewd and organised enough to come out unexpectedly the uncontested winner. Even as it maintained the majority of seats, the NDP discovered that it would take rather more than "new thinking" -- its ubiquitous slogan -- to be in touch with the proverbial man on the street. The elections also showed the extent to which the opposition parties have lost the confidence of Egyptians, who punished the opposition along with the government. Thus the year began with Kifaya partisans on the streets protesting a new presidential term -- such demonstrations were allowed for the first time in recent history -- and ended with 88 Brothers in parliament in an unprecedented display of power. Yet Kifaya managed to draw attention to itself too, generating an exceptional state of political mobility whose remarkably speedy birth and maturity it was content to register -- until it stopped growing, perhaps in anticipation of new choices in 2006. The argument that Egypt favoured the discourse of reform over the move towards it finds a counterargument in the view, held by many, that the amendment of Article 76 of the Constitution permitting multi-candidate presidential elections is in itself a major achievement, yet reservations about the way in which it was legally drafted, said to divest the amendment of all meaning, make up yet another case against the notion of reform. Mohamed El-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Al-Ahram Centre of Political and Strategic Studies, for one, is willing, reluctantly, to concede a limited formal change at the level of political process, while careful to point out that it has yielded no concrete results. In an interview with the Weekly, he describes 2005 as the year of aborted expectations -- what he calls "the half intifada ". What he regrets the most, he says, is that a genuine opportunity to democratise Egypt -- to undertake a serious, radical change bravely championed by Egyptians themselves -- was lost. More optimistically, Osama El-Ghazali Harb, editor in chief of Al-Siyasa Al-Dawliya and member of the NDP's Policies Committee, credits 2005 with placing Egypt on the threshold of democracy. It was a watershed year that may well be the end of one stage and the start of another. Though he would have liked to see a better implementation of the constitutional amendment -- one that realises its aims without beating round the bush -- Harb feels that the events of 2005 have sent shock waves into the polity, resulting in political vitality even despite the fact that the triumph of strategy was beset by tactical failure. On other less tense battlegrounds, attention seemed to be divided equally between the star du'aa (religious preachers) of satellite television and the immodest fascination of the video clip. Egyptians broke records in chit- chatting or text-messaging on mobile phones, even as they cohabited uncomfortably with the ever-on-time Black Cloud. Happiness with the football club Al-Ahly's rise to the finals of the World Club Cup in Japan was short-lived as the club lost its first match. Others lost their temper over an ill-considered stage play that upset the delicate balance of Coptic- Muslim coexistence in Alexandria. An additional cause for outrage was the fact that 12 months of debating women's empowerment yielded no more than four woman MPs. Author of more than one volume of What Happened to the Egyptians, scholar Galal Amin notes a number of phenomena emerging in 2005: the increasing, fast spreading dominance of money over public life, reflected in an upsurge of TV advertising and hugely expensive campaigns for the parliamentary elections; the rise of political Islam in a way that raises concerns over the possibility of sectarian division, possibly spurred by outside pressures on Egypt; and weakness of the state, evidenced by more chaotic traffic and a greater number of road accidents as well as the decision to sell natural gas to Israel. All of which makes Amin pessimistic about the prospects of 2006. The winding year had turbulent implications for the press, with veteran editors-in-chief suddenly requested to leave positions they had occupied for a quarter century. Thus they abandoned journalism to the harsh duality of a national press more allied to the government than ever and independent newspapers testing the margin of freedom to its very limits. They did so in the face of an official media that will have to reinvent itself to evade the fate of the dinosaur. While comedy superstar Adel Imam's film The Embassy in the Building was a reminder of the eternal gap separating Egypt from Israel, it was interesting that (supposedly left-wing) Egyptian factory workers should demonstrate against being excluded from greater economic normalisation with Israel -- namely the QIZ agreement. And while the American campaign for reform in Egypt subsided, Washington kept shifting its weight from Iran to Syria to Sudan; it has yet to decide which it will punish next. It was interesting to meditate on a recent poll that classified Egyptians as among the happiest peoples on earth -- a conclusion that contradicts the results of a Davos World Economic Forum survey conducted at the end of 2004, according to which seven out of 10 Egyptians are anxious and pessimistic about the future. In fact, the entire Middle East is clearly among the world's least optimistic, most anxious regions -- not surprising in the light of what Israel and America are doing to us and, perhaps to a greater extent, what we are doing to ourselves. In contrast, according to a lecture given by the Israeli military intelligence director, Major General Aharon Ze'evi Farkash, Israel -- still delaying payments on the peace cheque, with the exception of a single act that was to its own benefit, namely the withdrawal from Gaza -- ends the year in good spirits, content with the strategic balance tilted in its favour. As 2005 demonstrated, the Palestinians, who have no cards to deal, are unable to do much more than wait for the Americans to finish with their absurdities in Iraq and pay attention to them. Iraqis, for their part, spent another year of tightrope walking, for with the exception of the elections, which complicated the situation further, Iraq is still caught in the vicious circle of resistance and its reactions, without real hope on the horizon. Likewise with Syria: it faces an extremely critical 12 months, withdrawing from Lebanon against its will and suffering the humiliation of being a suspect in the killing of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri and a string of subsequent assassinations. Forced separations -- whether surgically in a number of successful operations or by recourse to kitchen knives in a series of domestic crimes that terrorised Egyptian society, or else by explosion, as in the case of Syria and Lebanon -- may well be an appropriate title for the winding year. But be that as it may, Egypt and the region spent the whole of 2005 in the waiting room of the hospital, as it were, awaiting the emergence of the five twins they had been promised: peace, democracy, liberation and prosperity. Even if they add an extra second to the age of the universe to set the nuclear clock that maintains the rhythm of the universe -- such is the plan for the last midnight of 2005 -- the chances are the year will end without good news.
