Ex-Egyptian president Mubarak dies at 91
CAIRO — Hosni Mubarak, the former autocratic president of Egypt, whose hold on power was broken and place in history upended by a public uprising against the poverty, corruption and repressive police tactics that came to define his 30 years in office, died Tuesday in Cairo. He was 91.
State television said he died at a hospital after undergoing surgery there but gave no other details.
Mubarak spent most of his final years at the Maadi Military Hospital in southern Cairo, under guard as he defiantly battled courtroom charges of corruption and conspiracy to murder. He was released March 24, 2017, having been convicted in a single, relatively minor case, and was spirited across the city to his mansion in the affluent neighborhood of Heliopolis.
Mubarak survived several assassination attempts, held power longer than anyone since Muhammad Ali Pasha, the founder of the modern Egyptian state, and suppressed a wave of terrorism by Islamic militants.
But his edifice of power, built on strong-arm rule, cronyism and an alliance with the West, was ultimately brought down by the wave of popular unrest in the Arab world — calls for democracy, the rule of law and an end to corruption — that came to be called the Arab Spring.
Mubarak was forced to resign Feb. 11, 2011, after 18 days of protests. The crowds demanded that he and his family be investigated for corruption and that he be held accountable for the more than 800 people killed during the days of protest.
He was arrested on murder and corruption charges and remanded to a military hospital while he awaited trial. His sons,
Alaa and Gamal, were jailed in the notorious Tora prison.
“Like many rulers who isolate themselves and concentrate power around them, he misread the Egyptian people and their commitment to collective life,” said Diane Singerman, a professor at American
University and an expert on contemporary Egypt.
In June 2012, Mubarak was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But an appeals court overturned the verdict and ordered a retrial, and he was ultimately exonerated.
He also skirted several corruption accusations.
Mubarak’s rise was set in motion when Islamist radicals in the military shot and killed his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, as he sat reviewing a military parade, his vice president, Mubarak, beside him.
The guiding principles of the Mubarak regime were security and stability, and the pillars of his state were the police, the intelligence services and himself. He won the West’s support largely by remaining committed to the peace treaty with Israel that had been signed by Sadat and by pressing for a resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
But to preserve stability and security, he relied on an emergency law that had been imposed after Sadat was killed and remained in place throughout his tenure. It put broad restrictions on civil liberties, curbing the right to assembly and allowing for arrest and detention without charges.
Economic change was restricted to only partial privatization. Citizens could criticize the government but not organize.
His focus on security came to mean regime security. He kept in place a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood and silenced secular political movements that might have challenged his monopoly on power. He helped move Egyptian society to become far more religious. Then, to ally himself with the Islamic trend but also to challenge the Brotherhood, he gave room to religious radicals known as Salafis and portrayed the government as the guardian of Islamic values.
Mohammed Hosni Mubarak was born on May 4, 1928, in the village of Kafr el-Museiliha in the Nile Delta governate of Minufiya. Mubarak’s father was an official in the Ministry of Justice, and the son was admitted to the military academy. Mubarak received fighter-pilot training in the Soviet Union and in 1972 became deputy war minister as well as air force commander in chief.
Sadat named Mubarak his vice president in 1975. The former general became president after Sadat’s assassination in 1981.
In his later years in power, Mubarak, like other Arab leaders, recognized that a stunted economy was a threat to social stability — and to his own power — so he began to move toward privatizing stateowned industries and opening the economy. He appointed a new government. For a time, Egypt’s economic indicators showed significant growth.
But the boom did little to improve the circumstances of the poor, a majority of the nation, and many of the ministers considered reformers were later investigated for corruption and largely evaded accountability.