Editor's Note: The following article comes from Worldcrunch, an innovative, new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. Bahey el-din Hassan is director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. This article was originally published in Al-Masry Al-Youm.

By Bahey el-din Hassan, Worldcrunch

CAIRO - I traveled to Tunisia last month to witness the country‘s first free elections. As I left Cairo, I had given in to an increasingly shared sense that Egypt had lost its way. I returned to find Egyptians even further engulfed in pessimism about the future.

The Oct. 9 Maspero massacre, which took the lives of more than two dozen Copts, has left many with an overwhelming feeling that the country is moving in a terrible direction, perhaps even to the brink of internal strife. But this does not seem to alarm the generals ruling the country, one of whom said recently in a private meeting that he feared Egypt would “go the way of Somalia.”

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