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Muhammed Hosni El Sayed Mubarak qualified for the appellation of one of Africa’s sit-tight dictators. He was the fourth president of Egypt. He had inherited power in 1981 and only lost it in 2011. When he died last week, the general reaction among Egyptians was “a collective shrug.” To most Egyptians, he had ‘kind of’ vanished in 2011 when he finally succumbed to 18 days of nation-wide protests during the Arab Springs and offered to hand over power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
It seemed unlikely that anyone ever suggested to him the virtue of bowing out while the ovation was loudest because his idea of his position was made clear to Egyptians at every opportunity: “you have a choice; it is either me or chaos.” He thus couldn’t contemplate Egypt without him as leader – the inescapable delusion of the sit-tight leader through the ages. In the few and brief moments he realised he wouldn’t live forever, he anointed and prepared his son, Gamal, who was waiting in the wings to take over.
On October 8, 1981, the day his predecessor, President Anwar Sadat, was killed while reviewing a national parade, Mubarak was also wounded. He was then the barely known vice president of Egypt. He recovered from his wounds and was sworn-in eight days after Sadat’s assassination. As vice president, he was viewed almost contemptuously as a yes-man. Indeed, there was the joke that Sadat once lamented, “if only he could vary the way he said yes to everything.”But the former fighter pilot of the Egyptian Air Force (he retired as Air Chief Marshal) seemed to have been underrated. As he took over, he turned out to be quite a man of steel, cold, calculating and, sometimes, capable of cruelty. Following the mutiny of October 8, 1981, he declared a state of emergency throughout Egypt and ruled the country with no consideration for issues like fundamental human rights and due process, or democracy. The longer he lasted, the more iron-fisted he became. The emergency lasted nearly three decades.
He had promised to stick to the policies of Sadat, which broadly meant honouring the Egyptian peace treaty with Israel for which Sadat was assassinated by the Islamists. The peace treaty was anathema to the fundamentalists because it implied the down-grading of the Palestinian question and the abdication of Egypt’s historic destiny of leading the pan-Arab movement in its confrontation with Israel.
Yet it was impossible not to sympathise with the situation of the Egyptian leaders, who had to bear the brunt of the endless bloody fighting and occasional humiliation of Egyptian forces in Israeli hands, quite apart from the economic ruins of being in a perpetual state of war. Again, the Camp David Accords were guaranteed by the United States which had offered the parties military and economic incentives valued at about $1.3 billion per annum to keep to the terms, a largesse the Egyptian economy could not do without. To the United States, as long as Mubarak kept the Islamists in check and kept the peace with Israel, he was a guarantor of stability in the Middle East. It did not matter how repressive he became. To Israelis, with whom he co-operated bilaterally and fulfilled the conditions of the peace treaty, Mubarak was an agent of stability and peace.
Indeed, last week, Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel (2006-2009) in the Jerusalem Post of February 28, 2020 wrote an unusually warm tribute to Mubarak, recalling how he opened up “a direct channel of communication with the Egyptian president. When I became prime minister, I nurtured this channel and I had a close personal relationship with Mubarak. Not a week went by without the two of us talking on the phone. I also travelled to meet with Mubarak personally a number of times, mostly to Sharm e-Sheikh, but also a few times to Cairo.”
President Mubarak, after 30 years in power, fell victim of the Arab Springs, a popular revolt of Arab youth, who demonstrated against mass unemployment, oppressive, tyrannical administrations, endemic corruption in Arab governments, and the need for change. Millions of Egyptian youth demonstrated daily at the Tahrir Square until Mubarak capitulated and a transition to democracy and free and fair elections were arranged which saw the emergence of Mohamed Morsi of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood who held sway for about a year before the military pushed him out and returned Egypt to what an observer called ‘Mubarak redux.’
He went through arraignment and prosecution in Egyptian courts sequestered in a cage-like box in which he was accused of corruption in one instance and killing protesters in another. When he died last week, he was 91, and it was left to speculation how long he would have lived had he not gone through the vicissitudes of falling from grace to grass.
