From pharaoh to a forlorn figure
He ruled with an iron fist in the biggest Arab country, but his life ended in disgrace
It’s a tough neighbourhood, the Middle East, and few men knew its harsher ways better than Mohamed Hosni Sayyid Mubarak.
His own ascent to power was a blooddrenched affair, an assault that claimed the life of then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, gunned down one Cairo afternoon in October 1981. Sadat’s killers were Islamist militants incensed at the peace treaty he had signed two years earlier with Israel.
At the time of the attack, Mubarak was seated next to his mentor, both of them in a VIP viewing gallery, and he himself was wounded in the shooting. As vicepresident, he quickly assumed his country’s top political post.
The violence of that day undoubtedly concentrated Mubarak’s mind and may well have contributed to the abiding and often brutal preoccupation with security that marked his three-decade reign as Egypt’s strong-arm president.
Still, shocking though it was, Sadat’s abrupt demise did not seem to prepare Mubarak for his own eventual removal from high office or for the cruel if not undeserved ignominy of his own death on Tuesday at age 91, a disgraced and widely reviled man. State TV said he died at a Cairo hospital after an unspecified surgery.
In June 2012, an Egyptian court had convicted the former ruler of failing to prevent the murder the previous year of hundreds of peaceful protesters, most of them shot by police during an uprising against Mubarak’s rule. That was overturned in 2014, but in a 2015 retrial, he was sentenced to three years in prison for corruption. He was freed in 2017.
“This dear nation … is where I lived,” he said during the breathtaking days now known as the Arab Spring, as his regime seemed to crumble around him.
“I fought for it and defended its soil, sovereignty and interests. On its soil, I will die.”
And, on its soil, he did. Mubarak’s fall from power was as rapid as it was ignominious, a loss of status and authority that is almost dizzying to contemplate. In a matter of weeks, Mubarak traded his nearly godlike sway at the helm of the Arab world’s most populous land for a pair of pyjamas, a set of dark eye-glasses, a hospital bed and not much else.
For his ensuing trial on charges of corruption, abuse of power and complicity in murder, Mubarak’s minions were obliged to manoeuvre the former president into the defendant’s cage on a gurney. He said little during the proceedings, merely glared at the ceiling, his face fixed in a bitter and gloomy cast.
In the first trial, he was acquitted on all charges but one — failure to prevent the killing of his opponents — but his conviction on that charge meant life in jail, and he seemed incapable of absorbing this sudden metamorphosis, from allpowerful pharaoh to some guy in a cell.
Mubarak’s descent was not only personal but also generational — a punctuated presidency and a dynasty stillborn. His two sons, Alaa and Gamal, the second of whom was thought to be Mubarak’s chosen successor, also served time in prison after Mubarak’s fall.
After his trial, Mubarak was flown to the Tora prison by helicopter. It was reported in the Egyptian media that he suffered a sort of nervous breakdown after landing.
He wept profusely, it is said, and fought with all his ebbing strength to remain aboard the military aircraft, anything but be locked in a prison — he, who had once commanded the Egyptian air force, who had won distinction for his part in the 1973 October War against Israel, who had once reigned supreme in a storied country of more than 80 million people — now a pathetic old man reduced in the end to petulance, misery and fear.
And what has Mubarak bequeathed to the land he governed for so long?
His legacy is surely not what he himself would have wanted, but neither is it what many of his opponents had hoped for, either.
The heady exultation that greeted Mubarak’s downfall on Feb. 10, 2011 — when tens of thousands celebrated their apparent victory in Cairo’s Tahrir Square — has now been replaced by something very different, under a new autocrat.
Long a bulwark of U.S. support in a volatile region, this dour, square-jawed, and seemingly impregnable man presided for decades over a powerful domestic network of cronies and goons, systematically repressing or marginalizing his adversaries while tolerating only the mildest forms of dissent.
He was the antithesis of a democrat. Still, although many Egyptians despised him, others revere him still.
“He’s a good man,” a Cairo restaurant waitress insisted just days after Mubarak’s downfall, pointing at a magazine photo of the deposed autocrat for the benefit of a visiting journalist.
She was hardly alone in her belief, not then and not now.
The future president was born outside Cairo on May 4, 1928, in a village called Kafr el-Meselha that occupied a modest portion of the Nile River delta. His father was a low-level government employee. From an early age, Mubarak demonstrated an affinity for the armed forces — the air wing especially — and later would study at military academies in Egypt, Moscow and Bishkek in what is now Kyrgyzstan.
On his return to Cairo, he rose quickly through the air force ranks. In 1972, now with the rank of air chief marshal, he became the force’s commander. His appointment came just a year before the outbreak of renewed armed hostilities with Israel, a contest known to Arabs as the October War and to Israelis as the Yom Kippur War.
By most accounts, Egyptian pilots distinguished themselves in the conflict. As air force commander, Mubarak won honour as well, and it was likely for this reason that Sadat selected him to serve as the country’s vice-president, a huge and wholly unexpected promotion that came in 1975, when Mubarak was just 47.
Four years later, Sadat astonished not only his compatriots but the entire world by securing a peace treaty with Israel. The agreement resulted in the return of the huge Sinai Peninsula to Egyptian hands, but it also led to Egypt’s ostracism by the rest of the Arab world.
The accord was deeply controversial among Egyptians, too, and was fervently opposed by a band of religious zealots led by a disaffected army officer named Lt. Khaled Al-Islambouli. The officer and several armed colleagues assassinated Sadat during a public ceremony in Cairo in 1981.
And so Mubarak ascended to the presidency.
Many observers expected him to remain in office only a short while, but Mubarak proved to be a far more resilient character, surviving at least six assassination attempts and remaining in power for a longer period than any Egyptian leader since Muhammad Ali Pasha, whose dynasty ruled the country from 1805 till 1953.
Married to the former Suzanne Thabet, a woman of mixed Egyptian and Welsh origins, Mubarak was a private individual, who kept the details of his personal life to himself and who went about the job of running Egypt with a generous allotment of noblesse oblige, as if carrying out a sacred trust.
He lashed his fortunes to the mast of U.S. geopolitical influence, acted as an intermediary between the Palestinians and Israelis, and gradually restored Egypt’s standing among its Arab neighbours, initially with the support of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
But Mubarak opposed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and contributed nearly 40,000 troops to the U.S.-led operation to push the Iraqis back.
At home, he rigorously repressed his adversaries, banning the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization, from engaging in political activity.
Criticism of the president himself was not permitted, no matter the source.
Given the extent of his power, it is not very difficult to imagine how stunned Mubarak must have been to learn that his sacrifice — the long hours, the sometimes brutal repression of his foes, the endless payoffs to flunkies and subordinates, the sumptuous state banquets, the mysterious accumulation of funds — was so little appreciated by his compatriots.
When the Arab Spring erupted in Egypt late in January 2011, following a similar uprising in Tunisia, it must have appeared at first to Mubarak as merely a perverse and temporary trick of the political weather. But, of course, it was far more than that. No longer an overgrown sultanate, Egypt was an emerging country in the act of asserting itself.
Mubarak did not go gently. For 18 days, he resorted to every survival tactic he knew. He unleashed the thugs, he feinted and prevaricated, he offered compromises and deals, promising almost anything that might extend his lease on the presidential palace for a few more weeks or months.
In the end, he was largely abandoned by his own armed forces, not to mention the Barack Obama administration in Washington, and he had little or nothing left to prop him up apart from his own fierce pride, and that was not enough.
He flew away in disgrace to a presidential mansion in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on the Red Sea, leaving a welter of social, religious and political forces to jostle for advantage in his wake.
Eventually, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected president. But in 2013, about two and a half years after Mubarak’s fall from power, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sissi led his overthrow.
El-Sissi, now president, is considered by many even more oppressive than Mubarak.
Mubarak’s fall from power was as rapid as it was ignominious, a loss of status and authority that is almost dizzying to contemplate