SARANDO, Egypt -- Tractors are a rare sight in the Nile River delta, where tenant farmers still labor with hand and hoe, so the arrival of three loud machines in early March created a stir in an already volatile community.
Sarando peasants had been feuding bitterly with a landlord over rents and evictions. Were the tractors there to destroy crops? they recalled wondering. To plow fields on disputed land? Who were the brawny strangers who said the landlord had sent them? No one waited to find out. Within a few hours, fighting with fists and rifles had broken out, one visitor was dead, farmers had fled in fear of the law and police had placed Sarando under a six-day siege.
Whether city or country, farm or factory, dissatisfaction with President Hosni Mubarak is palpable as his quarter-century of rule nears its end, either by the weight of failed policies or by the logic of his age, 77.
In Cairo, political activists hold demonstrations aimed at driving him from power. Long-dormant labor movements have begun to protest layoffs and low salaries. Judges oppose government proposals to use them as election monitors in September's presidential vote, which they say is a fraud-in-waiting.
Intense poverty, arbitrary justice and botched government programs that draw widespread complaints in Egypt all contributed to the explosion in Sarando. When the violence broke out here, lawyers and activists hurried from Cairo to side with the farmers.
Whether Egypt is awakening or just turning over in its sleep is an open question. Mubarak's government is trying to manage change through free market reforms and by holding presidential elections that are open to a limited selection of rival candidates. Opposition groups, though loud, have been unable to mobilize large numbers of ordinary Egyptians onto the streets.
A third of Egypt's 70 million people live on the land, and they have largely remained on the political sidelines. Yet observers see in Sarando the potential for rural conflict in a time of change. "There is a lot of anger on the farm. There is no development, economic program or political power. It is a silent time bomb," said Karem Saber, director of the Land Center for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization.
The rights group has noted a general upswing in rural violence, some of it directed against landowners, some of it in feuds among farmers, Saber said.
The Sarando landlord, Salah Nawar, a white-haired patriarch of an extended family of landowners, regards the conflict as signaling a larger danger. "If the peasants get away with this, such things will spread all over. They will revolt and attack all the owners," he said in an interview in his apartment in Alexandria.
Sarando sits in the wide, green delta about 20 miles east of the provincial capital of Damanhour. On the surface, the fields present a picture of bucolic, eternal Egypt. In canals that carry precious water from the Nile, women wash pots and clothing, men bathe their donkeys and naked boys splash around in glee.
Bent grandfathers in turbans tend cows and goats. White birds with long plumes decorate the plots of rice and wheat. Date palms punctuate the horizon. Except for the occasional three- and four-story brick house and diesel-powered pump, a pharaoh would have no trouble recognizing the scene.
A closer look reveals dilapidated schools, illiterate children, under-equipped clinics and dissatisfaction over new agricultural policies. Starting in 1997, rents for tenant farmers were freed from government regulation, and they recently shot up from the equivalent of about $4 an acre annually to as high as $60, the Land Center estimates. That sum can be three months' earnings for a farmer in Egypt.
