The carnage in Cairo yesterday is yet more bloody proof that, despite the Egyptian authorities' best efforts, Islamist militancy can be neither slammed into jail and tortured away, nor undermined through state-sponsored religious evangelism.

Egypt's government had been congratulating itself on how well it had contained the threat from militant groups such as the Gama'a al-Islamiya, the prime suspect in the attack which killed 10 people and wounded 19. With the glaring exception of April last year, when 17 Greeks were fatally mistaken for Israeli tourists by gun-wielding militants, attacks on tourists have been rare for the past two years.

Instead, the talk in Cairo has been of privatisation and the global economy. With the Islamist threat supposedly behind it, the government was free to woo a new, albeit small, entrepreneurial class that was more interested in talking about the stockmarket on its mobile phones than worrying about religion. International banks began to establish themselves and stability, that prerequisite to any serious money-making, was said to have arrived.

But away from the cordon sanitaire surrounding Cairo and the tourist sites in the south, the battle with the militants has been continuing. The Gama'a al-Islamiya has been fighting to install its version of an Islamic state in Egypt since 1992. In that time more than 1,100 people, 26 of them foreigners (not including yesterday's victims), have died. Most have been policemen and the militants themselves.

Also in those five years, many thousands of young men have been arrested on suspicion of belonging to militant groups. Some were connected with underground organisations. Many more were guilty of nothing more than having a beard - often seen as a sign of fundamentalist leanings - or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Human rights groups have tirelessly catalogued a range of abuses by the infamous state security apparatus under the guise of fighting militancy. Holding family members hostage, torture, collective punishment, extra-judicial killing, unlawful arrest - the list is long.

After the initial attacks on high-profile tourist targets, the battle took on the characteristics of a vendetta between the police and the Islamists. And the Islamists kept coming, no matter how many people were arrested or how sophisticated the police arsenal became.

In the meantime, the policy-makers in Cairo belatedly realised that poverty and militancy were related and did a hasty renovation of some of Cairo' s most notorious slums. But little was done in the country's poverty-stricken south.

They also tried to beat the militants at their own game and pronounced themselves the true custodians of religion. Islamic teleevangelists preached a conservative version of Islam through the airwaves and officials at the venerable Al-Azhar University, respected as the fount of orthodoxy throughout the Sunni Islamic world, were given free rein to censor books and pronounce on social issues.

Since then, at least one avowed secularist has been assassinated, Nobel prize laureate Neguib Mahfouz has been attacked and liberal religious scholars have been hounded out of the country. In addition, the population at large has become far more religious than it was before and, paradoxically, has become more sympathetic to the aims, if not the means, of the militants themselves.

Parliamentary elections in 1995 were held up by liberal Egyptians as a chance for the government to give a voice to the frustrated, disenfranchised youth who were signing up with the Islamists. But instead of allowing Islamists or, for that matter, anybody else a say in the affairs of the country - easing the lid of the pressure cooker, in the words of one analyst - the poll was roundly condemned as unfair when the ruling National Democratic Party walked off with more than 94 per cent of the seats.

Still, as the government points out, attacks of the kind that was launched on the tourists yesterday are far less frequent than two years ago. And even at the height of the militant activity in 1993 and 1994, Egypt was far safer than many Western European or American cities.

But the Egyptian government does not seem to have learnt any lessons from the past five years. A call by jailed militant leaders for a ceasefire with the government two months ago was answered with the biggest police operation in Minya province since 1992. Thirteen alleged militants were killed and 100 were arrested.

And earlier this week the government sent four of Gama'a members to the gallows after a military trial with no fewer than 97 defendants. Eight others were sentenced to life imprisonment in a verdict that allows no appeal.

Whether this was related to yesterday's attack remains to be seen. But the defiant chants of "God is Great" that erupted in the courtroom when the verdict was read were as much an indictment of a policy that does not for allow any response to economic hardship and political repression as the tragic killing of innocents outside a museum.