Protesters set themselves on fire in Egypt, Algeria and Mauritania on Monday in apparent copycat self-immolation attempts inspired by the act that helped trigger a popular uprising in Tunisia. 
 
 A monitor displays video of 48-year old Abdou Abdel-Monaam Hamadah, at a Cairo hospital, in Egypt, Monday, Jan. 17, 2011, as unidentified plastic surgeon, right, talks about the medical case. Hamadah... (Associated Press) 
 
 The desperate acts raised concerns that the practice could become a trend among activists seeking to force change in a region that has little or no tolerance for dissent. 
 
 The Egyptian man was engulfed by flames after he ignited himself outside the parliament building in central Cairo. Policemen guarding the building and motorists driving by at the time used fire extinguishers to quickly put out the blaze, according to security officials. 
 
 Health Ministry spokesman Abdel-Rahman Shahine said the man was taken to the hospital with light burns, mostly to his face, neck and legs. Officials identified him as Abdu Abdel-Moneim Hamadah, a 48-year-old owner of a small restaurant from Qantara, an area close to the Suez Canal city of Ismailia east of Cairo. 
 
 Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, said Hamadah was protesting a government policy preventing restaurant owners from buying cheap subsidized bread to resell to their patrons. 
 
 A subsidized loaf of typical Egyptian flat bread sells for about 1 U.S. cent apiece, but sells for five times that much to restaurant owners. 
 
 Hamadah asked policemen guarding the parliament building to meet speaker Fathi Sorour, officials said. When they refused, Hamadah stepped back, took out a bottle filled with petrol from his pocket, doused himself with the liquid and set himself alight. 
 
 The policemen and passing motorists rushed to him with fire extinguishers to put out the flames. 
 
 The website of Egypt's leading Al-Ahram daily said Hamadah was a father of four and had repeatedly entered heated arguments with local officials over the bread issue. 
 
 A Mauritanian man reportedly unhappy with the government also was hospitalized after setting himself on fire Monday. 
 
 Witnesses say 43-year-old Yacoub Ould Dahoud drove to a government building in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, and torched himself in his car. Foreign ministry official Abdou Ould Sidi says police rushed him to the hospital. 
 
 Algeria, for its part, has reported cases of self-immolation in seven towns since Saturday, two of them Monday. 
 
 In Ghardaia, a man suffering from a chronic illness set himself on fire because of a dispute over medical costs. He was hospitalized with burns, said a local official. 
 
 In the town of Mascara, meanwhile, passers-by stopped a fishmonger who had poured gasoline on himself and kept him from setting himself alight, said an official. 
 
 Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns. 
 
 The incidents appeared to be attempts to copy the fatal self-immolation last month of an unemployed Tunisian man. That event triggered the protests that led to the ouster of Tunisia's authoritarian president. 
 
 Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old with a university degree, set himself on fire after police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling without a permit. He later died in a hospital near Tunis, and his desperate act touched a nerve with educated, unemployed youths nationwide in Tunisia, and sparked the mass protests that toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. 
 
 News of the Tunisian uprising has dominated the Arab media over the past few days. 
 
 Opposition and independent newspapers lauded Ben Ali's fall and drew parallels between his toppled regime and that of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled for nearly 30 years. 
 
 Egypt has posted impressive economic growth rates over the past few years, in part fueled by a host of ambitious reforms. But the growth has failed to filter down to many of the estimated 80 million Egyptians. 
 
 Nearly half of all Egyptians live under or just above the poverty line set by the U.N. at $2 a day. Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic Party have been pledging to ensure that the fruits of economic reforms benefit more Egyptians. 
 
 Self-immolation as a method of protest is uncommon in Egypt, although women in rural and poor urban areas have been known to set themselves on fire to protest violent husbands, abusive parents or an unwanted suitor. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writers Ahmed Mohamed in Nouakchott, Mauritania and Aomar Ouali in Algiers, Algeria contributed to this report. ||||| As protesters overwhelmed former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's security forces in Tunis, the regional office of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), the George W. Bush administration's signature democracy promotion organization, watched as its mandate was fulfilled in the most unlikely of places. 
 
 It is, to say the least, an awkward bit of symbolism. MEPI defines its mission as "develop[ing] more pluralistic, participatory, and prosperous societies." And in the country where it is based, the Tunisian people proved themselves to be uniquely and spectacularly unhappy with their regime. 
 
 But according to current and former democracy promotion advocates in the U.S. government, the decision to base MEPI's offices in Tunisia was made because the embassy had enough free space to accommodate its staff, and the country was thought to be stable enough to not interfere with the organization's sometimes controversial work. 
 
 Scott Carpenter, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration who oversaw the creation of MEPI, said that the Ben Ali regime was "constantly paranoid" about the organization's presence in the country, and never allowed it to undertake significant democracy promotion programs. As a result, "we were doing a lot of stuff very, very quietly - not to say covert, but very quietly," Carpenter said. 
 
 The Ben Ali regime's hostility to any efforts to open up the political system was attested to by other Western diplomats who served in Tunis. Alan Goulty, who served as the British ambassador in the country from 2004 to 2008, said that the government would constantly raise the specter of terrorism to discourage any contact with Tunisian opposition figures. 
 
 "There was one explosion in 1987 of a bomb, where a British lady was wounded and lost her leg," Goulty said. "I lost count of the times that Tunisian officials, 15 years later, reminded me of that incident to justify their claims that the Tunisian opposition, whatever form it took, was terrorist." 
 
 In theory, the European Union should have had considerable economic and political leverage to convince the Ben Ali regime to liberalize. Trade between EU member states and Tunisia in 2009 was in excess of $20 billion - by comparison, total U.S. imports and exports to the country were valued at around $800 million. The EU association agreement with Tunisia also provided a ready-made avenue for discussion human rights and political liberalization. In practice, however, EU efforts in the country were anemic at best. 
 
 "Frankly, the EU always pulled its punches [on democracy promotion], because of the need to operate unanimously," said Goulty. "And a different approach was taken by [our] Mediterranean partners, principally France and Italy, who believed that the best way forward was to get close to the regime and further one's economic interests." 
 
 In fact, the primary contribution that the United States made to Tunisia's recent unrest was neglect. As U.S. relations with the other North African states improved over the past two decades, the relative importance of Tunisia as a U.S. ally in the region declined. U.S. diplomats may not have had much success promoting liberalization in the country, but the national security implications of the fall of Ben Ali's regime raised steadily fewer concerns in Washington. 
 
 David Mack, currently a scholar at the Middle East Institute, served as the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Tunisia from 1979 to 1982. "If you go back to the time when I was there, our relations were disappearing with Libya, we had poor relations with Algeria, and strained relationships in many parts of the Muslim world," he noted. "But the reality is that today Tunisia plays a smaller role overall in U.S. strategic political calculation." 
 
 However, diplomats insisted that Tunisia's apparent stability under Ben Ali did not cause them to underestimate the population's grievances with his regime. A prescient June 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks criticizes the "sclerotic" regime, which it says has "lost touch with the Tunisian people." The same memo complains that "make it exceptionally difficult for the US Mission to conduct business" and meet with regime opponents. 
 
 Those who spent time in the country seconded that assessment. "The place was so sterile -- you just feel people's fear, and the complete lack of dynamism in the society," said Carpenter. "Within the State Department we used to refer to it as ‘Syria with a smile.'" 
 
 PHILIPPE MERLE/AFP/Getty Images
– A restaurant owner screaming anti-government slogans set himself on fire outside the Egyptian parliament in Cairo today, in the latest of several attempted self-immolations mimicking the one that set off Tunisia’s uprising last month. But security officials, with the help of passing motorists, doused the blaze with fire-extinguishers, thwarting the suicide attempt, the AP reports. Today also saw a man set himself on fire inside his car in Mauritania, and two light up in Algeria. Algeria has now seen a total of seven men set themselves on fire. The protesters had various reasons for their actions—one terminally-ill Algerian was protesting medical costs, while the Cairo man’s grievance was apparently the price of bread—but all seem to be imitating Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old whose death set off massive protests that have captivated the Arab world. "Are we now seeing a trend?" asks Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy. "It's a shocking, desperate tactic that instantly attracts attention, revulsion, but also sympathy."