(The fist part of this article appeared on Tuesday)

MANY remember the case of a man in Upper Egypt who was charged by police with murdering his absent wife. After the usual fisticuffs and battering of the prisoner, he confessed to the crime – another police “success” which lost some of its glow when the wife returned to her village, explaining that she had stayed with neighbours after a row with her husband. It must, as they say, have been quite an interrogation.

It's as if the police don't have enough on their hands already. In Old Cairo, for example, they man iron barricades around the Coptic streets. Whereas the occasional patrol would move through the area a few years ago, there are now muhabarat intelligence service members guarding the barriers. Even tourists must dismount from their buses and be checked by the cops to visit the Christian churches. Just how bad Muslim-Coptic relations have become was evident last month when a priest claimed that his wife had been kidnapped.

Word went round that she had been seized by Muslims. The cops found her staying with Coptic friends because – like the wife in Upper Egypt – she had had a row with her husband. The police took her. President Mubarak has renewed the emergency laws under which Egypt has been governed for decades, because of “serious threats against national security” and “the struggle against terrorism and drug trafficking”. Although 500 prisoners under “administrative detention” – including 191 Muslim Brothers – were freed under an amended law three months ago, around 9,500 men remain in prison for largely political offences, men who should also have been given their freedom, according to the president of the Egyptian parliament, Ahmad Fathi Surour.

Complaints against the government – for widespread corruption, of course, for suppression of human rights, for police brutality – rise almost monthly. There is widespread criticism of Egypt's new agreement with oil companies over the sharing out of profits on oil exploration in the desert, on the grounds that it gives greater advantages to foreign investors than to Egypt. The man who signed the most important exploration agreement in the history of Egypt was Tony Hayward of BP.

Meanwhile, even in education, the Mubarak regime plays off Muslim and Western fears. No sooner had the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Hany Halal, last month banned female students from wearing the “niqab” covering in Egyptian universities – thus bringing Egypt into line with Syria (and France) – than the Minister of Education, Ahmed Zaki Badr, announced that private international schools in Egypt – the British School and the Canadian School, for example – must include Arabic language and the religion and history of Egypt in their courses; their pupils must salute the Egyptian flag at the start of each school day. Give state school Muslims a taste of secularism here, make the secular schools remember religion. It's typical “Mubarakism” – it confuses the masses while you arrange the next elections.

It's next year's presidential elections, of course – rather than the imminent parliamentary poll – that Mr Mubarak is watching. Forget, I fear, poor Mr ElBaradei, beloved by the elite youth and middle classes of Egypt for his vague intention to oppose Mr Mubarak. He will only stand, he says, if the elections are truly democratic – which is like asking the Nile to flow upstream. The government's election riggers have honed their practice to PhD standards since Nasser's dictatorship, and they are not likely to change. ElBaradei is what you might call a “nice” man, but Egyptian elections, which usually anoint the pharaoh with a result in the 90 per cent range, are unlikely to embrace the former UN arms inspector.And what of Egypt as a great Arab power? Its status as the Great Peacemaker is fading. Turkey is – or was – the Great Negotiator in the Middle East. And the peace treaty with Israel – which Anwar El Sadat believed would give international prestige to Egypt – has neutered his country's independence. In Gaza, Egypt finds itself acting as a colonial vassal, sealing off 1.5 million Palestinians to maintain Israel's outrageous siege.

The American-Israeli alliance, along with the UN and the EU, has forced Egypt into the complicity of semi-occupation. Egypt briefly opened its frontier to Gaza after the Turkish flotilla killings – but why did it not do this before? Because, needless to say, it fears Hamas even more than Israel. Because if Israel regards Hamas as an Iranian proxy, Egypt regards it as an infection. It will willingly help Israel to bottle up the Islamist germs if this protects Egypt from a return to an Islamist insurgency.

Egyptians know their history. They know what Gamal Abdel Nasser represented – heroism and failure – and what Sadat represented: heroism, peace and humiliation. And Mr Mubarak? Let's see when the squash courts open.—Dawn/The Independent News Service