Egypt Shuts Door on Dissent As U.S. Officials Back Away

A supporter of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, foreground, challenges government supporters during a clash near Cairo in 2005. The country's democracy movement has withered under repression by a government that remains a key U.S. ally. (Photos By Amr Nabil -- Associated Press)

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"No parliamentary seat justifies that kind of violence, that kind of brutality," Shahbendar said.

The United States later criticized the vote, but many in the opposition were struck by the comments Dec. 2 of Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman. He said that the United States had "not received, at this point, any indication that the Egyptian government isn't interested in having peaceful, free and fair elections." Less than three months later, with the Brotherhood forming the biggest opposition bloc and the Islamic group Hamas having scored a victory in Palestinian elections in January, Rice struck a far different tone than in her address at the American University of Cairo.

"We have to realize that this is a parliament that is fundamentally different than the parliament before the elections, a president who has sought the consent of the governed," she said. As she stood in Cairo next to Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, there were no more musts. "We can't judge Egypt," she said. "We can't tell Egypt what its course can be or should be."

"It takes time," she added later. "We understand that."

To Shahbendar, who had helped train 200 election monitors for the parliamentary vote, the message was clear: Fearful of the Brotherhood's success and irritated by the tenor of Kifaya's protests, the government was closing the door on dissent, and the Americans were not going to stop it.

"The party is over," she said.

'They Were Turning Ugly'

On May 12, 2006, Gamal Mubarak paid what Egypt's ambassador called a private visit to Washington, where he joined Vice President Cheney at the White House. As those talks went on, Seif, the blogger, sat in prison. So did Wael Khalil, the activist who heard an anti-Mubarak slogan being shouted for the first time in 2001.

Before his arrest, Seif, always casually dressed, had helped design Kifaya's Web site, 20 blogs for opposition colleagues and home pages for Kifaya candidates. Soon, in what emerged as the last gasp of a retreating movement, he helped organize protests in solidarity with two Egyptian judges who faced expulsion from the bench after they had called for judicial independence and criticized the parliamentary balloting. The security forces arrested hundreds of people, particularly after the Brotherhood joined the demonstrations. Seif was detained May 7, when 300 police moved on a few dozen protesters outside a courthouse.

They blindfolded him tied his arms behind his back and took him to a police station. Among the charges: insulting the president, illegal assembly and obstructing traffic, the latter offense difficult to define in a city whose streets are snarled in distilled anarchy. From there he was taken to prison, where his hair was cut, a gesture used to humiliate prisoners. For a day, he was in solitary.

"I knew they were turning ugly," Khalil said. "It was clear they were holding us captive until the movement subsided."

Khalil had been arrested earlier as he drank sugar-cane juice in front of the courthouse. He was released the same day as Seif, on June 22.

As his friends sat in prison, Wael Abbas, a 32-year-old goateed blogger, heard word that he was wanted, too.