Hosni Mubarak: President toppled in Arab Spring 1928-2020
● Hosni Mubarak, who has died aged 91, ruled Egypt for three decades until being forced from power in 2011 during the Arab Spring that engulfed much of North Africa and the Middle East.
Mubarak was thrust into the top job suddenly and dramatically when then president Anwar Sadat was assassinated at a military parade on October 6 1981.
Within 24 hours Mubarak, who had served as vicepresident since 1975, was approved by parliament as Sadat’s successor.
Few would have predicted that he would remain in power for almost 30 years.
He promised to honour the Camp David accords, signed by Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin in 1978, which led to full diplomatic relations between Egypt and Israel in 1980.
Mubarak’s diplomatic efforts were not always welcomed at home, but he dealt ruthlessly with any opposition. After Sadat’s assassination he jailed more than 2,500 people, most of them Islamic fundamentalists, but also Coptic church leaders, politicians and journalists. He kept the country under emergency law, giving the state sweeping powers of arrest.
Of particular concern were the attacks aimed at Egypt’s tourism industry. Mubarak survived an estimated eight assassination attempts, including one when his limousine was showered with bullets as he attended a meeting in Addis Ababa in 1995.
His regime was particularly intolerant of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been founded in 1928 and dissolved by president Abdul Nasser in 1954. The brotherhood sought to work within the political system to make Egypt an Islamic state based on sharia law. Yet in 2000 it became the largest opposition group in parliament with 17 seats.
Having suppressed most domestic opposition, Mubarak won 97% of the popular vote in the 1987 election and 96% in 1993. As the years passed, however, Egypt’s most powerful ally, the US, began to press him to burnish his democratic credentials, and in the 2005 poll rival candidates were allowed to stand. Mubarak still won 88%.
In September 2002 Mubarak named one of his sons, Gamal, head of the National Democratic Party, fuelling speculation of a family dynasty.
By early 2011 the unrest of the Arab Spring had spread to Egypt. There were mass protests in Cairo and other Egyptian cities, and Mubarak was forced to renounce further presidential ambitions. But the protests intensified, and on February 11 he resigned, power being transferred to the Armed Forces Supreme Council.
Within weeks he was under arrest, and he and his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, were set to stand trial for the deaths of protesters. It was the start of a legal process that would last six years, during which the former president (allegedly in ill health) frequently appeared in court on an upright stretcher and wearing sunglasses.
Mubarak protested his innocence, but in June 2012 he was found guilty of complicity in the murder of some of the demonstrators. He appealed, and seven months later was granted a retrial.
In May 2014 Mubarak was found guilty of embezzlement, and sentenced to three years’ jail. His sons received four years each.
Finally, in November 2014, Mubarak was acquitted in a retrial of conspiring to kill demonstrators in the 2011 uprising. His acquittal was upheld by Egypt’s highest appeals court in March 2017, and he returned home from the military hospital where he had been held for six years.
Mohamed Hosni Mubarak was born on May 4 1928, one of five children of a ministry of justice inspector, and educated near his home village of Kafr ElMeselha in the Nile delta province of Monufia. At the national military academy he completed his training in two years instead of the usual three, and then spent two years at the air force academy.
He also had advanced training in the Soviet Union, and in 1964/65 spent a year at the elite Frunze general staff academy in central Asia. As a pilot he flew Soviet-made bombers.
Mubarak married Suzanne Thabet, the daughter of an Egyptian doctor and a Welsh nurse, in 1958.
Their two sons were freed in October 2015. In 2018 they were arrested again on charges of stock market manipulation but acquitted three days before their father’s death.