EGYPT - Dealing With The Secular Groups.

Mubarak's regime - caught between frequent US demands for democratisation in the Middle East and an increasingly vocal opposition, emboldened by the Iraq war - is trying to relieve pressure with a small opening while not risking losing control of the situation. A similar pattern of behaviour has been seen with the government's arrest of the secular opposition member of parliament, Ayman Nour.

Nour's Al-Ghad (tomorrow) party was officially licenced late last year, the first new party permitted in years. Nour then announced that he would run for president in opposition to Mubarak. On Jan. 29, the government lifted his parliamentary immunity and then arrested him on charges that he had forged signatures on the petition for his party licence. It then held him for six weeks.

Nour, who says the charges were fabricated, is out on bail, and the government said last week he would be tried in June. That incident prompted US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cancel a February trip to Cairo.

Under current rules, only one presidential candidate is nominated by parliament, which Mubarak's ruling NDP controls. Abdel Halim Qandeel, a Kifaya leader and another secular figure in the opposition, says: "We assume the rules for the election will make it impossible to legally put forth viable opposition candidates. But there is an opening here. For the first time, there's open criticism of Mubarak and his family. We need street protests to break the barrier of fear around political activity".

Qandeel, who is also an editor at the anti-government Al-Arabi newspaper, concedes that his movement is "still small". But he says Kifaya can take credit for stirring the Muslim Brotherhood. "The Brotherhood is like an enormous body with a very small brain. It takes time to get it moving", he says.

Qandeel, a socialist whose vision is sharply at odds with the Muslim Brotherhood, says he is happy that the Islamist movement is becoming more confrontational. "They don't want to miss out - our pressure forced them to organise their own demonstration", he says, adding: "This is not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone has to fight Egypt's political stagnation".

The Muslim Brotherhood has been outlining its demands for change in recent weeks in a new pamphlet, which calls for the cancellation of all laws limiting freedom of assembly and expression. It particularly wants to abolish Egypt's Emergency Law, which has been used for decades to control the political opposition.

Reformers in Kifaya are also hostile to the US. Both the Kifaya movement and the Brotherhood allege that America has propped up Mubarak and defied democracy in Egypt.

However, as a simple but very effective message, Kifaya has become the mantra of a growing number of democracy activists, not only in Egypt but in other Arab countries. As it translates to "enough" Kifaya has become the buzzword of what some Western commentators are calling the "Arab Spring". In rallies from the tiny island state of Bahrain to Egypt, demonstrators are shouting kifaya to dictators, kifaya to corruptions, and kifaya to the silence of Arabs eager for change.

Kifaya's Mixed Messages: There is no question that the freedom rhetoric of the US and President Bush has helped crack the door for political activism in the Middle East. A look behind the simple word, however, reveals a complex web of secular and Islamist activists who say they share Bush's zeal for democracy, but expect that real political change will lead to a repudiation of the US as well.

In Lebanon, largely pro-Western demonstrators saying enough to the Syrian occupation of their country have been met by demonstrators led by Hizbullah, an Iran-backed Shiite Islamist group still openly supporting the Damascus regime and saying enough to what they view as US meddling in Lebanese politics.

In Bahrain last week, the largest protests in memory saw the country's politically disenfranchised Shiite majority saying enough to pro-American King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa's policies. And in Cairo the chants have included "Enough to Mubarak, Enough to Bush, Enough to Blair", along with "We will not be ruled by the CIA" and "Down with the White House".

It is a reminder that, while the US has contributed to the shift in climate in the Middle East, a real democratic opening - at least in the short term - may not serve American interests. Most in the region appear angry at America's close relationship with Israel and its invasion of Iraq, and say that statements prodding allies to reform have not overcome decades of support for Arab dictators.

The assumption that being pro-democracy means one is pro-US foreign policy is misleading. As a secular and modern Egyptian democrat, Jihan Shabaan is the very image of the Arabs President Bush hopes will take to the streets and demand freedom. She says a lifetime without political freedoms, in which she has watched average Egyptians drift deeper into poverty, has convinced her to risk everything at the forefront of Kifaya, which is demanding that President Mubarak step down and be replaced by a freely elected leader.

For Ms. Shabaan and most of her colleagues in Kifaya, however, "enough" does not only apply to President Mubarak. She expects that a democratic Egypt would distance itself from the US and hit out at what she calls decades of "hypocritical" US policy in the Middle East. She says: "If things really change here [in Egypt], America's illusions that its interests in the region would be advanced by democracy will be laid bare. A real democratic government in Egypt would be strongly against the US occupation of Iraq and regional US policies, particularly over Palestine. We are strongly against US influence".

Despite the apparently genuine sentiment, Kifaya organisers say there are also practical reasons to make the distance from the US clear. In the past the Cairo government has tried to paint democracy activists as foreign puppets, alleging they take foreign money. Says Ms Shabaan: "The regimes are the ones taking American money. But they always accuse us of having foreign money whenever there are calls for democracy".

Bush's conviction that his rhetoric will help secure US interests in the region clashes with the anti-US leanings of many of the Arab world's democracy activists, who generally belong either to Islamist parties or to left-leaning, anti-US groups. Qandeel says: "We want a transformation against America and all its projects in the region... We have two kinds of resistance in the region - armed resistance as in Iraq and Palestine, and political resistance in Arab capitals...and all of the opposition movements are staunchly anti-imperialist, whether Islamists" or secular nationalists.

The nucleus of Kifaya began organising in 2000 in response to the Palestinian uprising and gained momentum in March 2003 when about 10,000 Egyptians took to the streets of Cairo to protest the US invasion of Iraq. That protest quickly evolved into an anti-Mubarak demonstration, the first in his 24-year rule. While those causes might seem far afield from demands for change inside Egypt, the country's activists see them as inextricably linked. The US has provided aid to Egypt since 1980; Egypt's activists see in the unpopular peace treaty with Israel and relative Egyptian silence over the invasion evidence that the country's foreign policy "has been colonised by the US", as Qandeel puts it.