Hosni Mubarak, ex-despot of Egypt, died on February 25th, aged 91
Feb 25th 2020BACK IN 1981, when assassins’ bullets felled Anwar Sadat at a military parade and propelled Hosni Mubarak to Egypt’s highest office, no one dreamed he would fill it for longer than his two predecessors put together. As Sadat’s vice-president, the former air-force commander had kept the low profile of a stolid, trusted retainer. This was not by accident. Mr Mubarak was a military man to the core. To his dying breath he held to the code of silent dutifulness that marks Egypt’s officer class, a praetorian guard that has quietly run the most populous Arab state—with a brief interruption—since seizing power in the coup that toppled King Farouk in 1952. In one of his final speeches as president, a week into the 2011 uprising that would soon end his rule, he vowed not to flee into exile as Tunisia’s dictator had weeks earlier. “Egypt and I shall not be parted until I am buried in her soil,” he said. And so he shall be.Like many officers of his generation, Mr Mubarak owed to the armed forces his escape from the provincial working class, and shared their grudge against Egypt’s cosmopolitan elite and its intellectual ways. Getting into the air-force academy through the influence of a distant relative, a big landowner in his village, he found excitement flying Spitfires and later, after almost three years’ training in the Soviet Union, Ilyushin and Tupolev bombers.He was a squadron leader in the early 1960s, when Egypt’s then-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, sank the country in a ruinous effort to bolster the republican side in Yemen’s civil war. Mr Mubarak, a man almost obsessively protective of personal details, never revealed whether he himself flew the missions that struck the coastal town of Jizan and sprayed Yemen’s mountains with poison gas. But the Yemeni distraction left Egypt ill-prepared for the six-day war of 1967, when Israeli raids destroyed most of its aircraft on the tarmac.Mr Mubarak’s new job was to rebuild that shattered force. His grim determination, which bore fruit in a respectable showing during the October war of 1973, when Egypt seized back lost territory, won him notice from above. But a fellow pilot recalled his horror when Mr Mubarak ordered a hastily trained squadron to scramble and fly their new MiG-21s to a narrow, blacked-out landing strip on a moonless night, just, as it turned out, for practice. It was a miracle no one was killed, he said.Mr Mubarak showed less taste for risk as Egypt’s president. For three decades he held rigidly to his predecessor’s course, maintaining peace with Israel and close ties to America, while slowly winning back the favour with fellow Arabs that Sadat had lost by consorting with the “Zionist enemy”. This brought rewards in foreign aid, but Mr Mubarak’s risk-aversion in domestic politics carried a heavy cost. The economy stalled and schools and courts floundered as the population surged.His lack of imagination was reflected in bureaucratic inertia, compounded by unrestrained security agencies and an ever-expanding network of ex-army men rewarded with provincial governorships, board memberships and the like. Talent slowly drained from Egypt’s government as Mr Mubarak rewarded loyalty over competence. His principal officials were grey, uninspiring figures.A brief period of political liberalisation in the 1980s, which allowed Islamist groups to surface, was followed by a brutal clampdown. The screws turned even tighter after Mr Mubarak narrowly escaped assassination (one of several attempts) in 1995. His intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, had suggested he have his own car flown to a summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Jihadist militants ambushed the convoy on the road from the airport. The bullet-proof vehicle saved Mr Mubarak’s life. In subsequent years his police imprisoned as many as 30,000 suspected jihadists, while he himself posed to the West as an indispensable bulwark against the fundamentalist menace.In person he was vigorous, priding himself on his average but enthusiastic squash-playing. He led a no-drinking, no-smoking life, but it was far from plain, with several rococo palaces and a fortune, guessed at $40bn, salted away abroad. His jet-black hair was maintained with dye, and the stripes on his suits were stitched, by London tailors, with the tiny repeated letters of his own name.He was good-humoured in a brusque sort of way, but the bonhomie fell flat in public. Cinema crowds cackled with laughter when a newsreel caught the puzzled president, trowel in hand, struggling to insert a brick on a foundation plinth, then grinning with relief as an aide turned it the other way round. When Mr Mubarak was honoured with a state visit by Queen Elizabeth, his gift to her was a machine-made carpet with a computer-generated design showing the faces of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Jokes abounded: one of the cruellest pictured him in hell, dandling Marilyn Monroe on his knee. “We’re torturing Marilyn Monroe,” the Devil explained.After the revolution Mr Mubarak spent years on trial for murder and corruption, his cases slowly winding through the same dilapidated, overworked courts he had neglected as president. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but the ruling was overturned on appeal. Then, in 2013, came the coup that ended Egypt’s brief democratic experiment, along with efforts to hold Mr Mubarak accountable. Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the general who seized power, grew paranoid about any challenges to his rule—among them, unlikely as it may seem, nostalgia for Mr Mubarak (and his sons), for a dictator who ruled with a lighter touch. Better he simply be forgotten. After decades in the public eye Mr Mubarak lived out his final days in quiet seclusion, occasionally photographed doting on his grandchildren.In a pair of rare interviews last year he reminisced about his days as soldier and statesman, sharing stories about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the Gulf War. He spoke far less about his presidency. Whatever his inner thoughts, Mr Mubarak, his black hair long since faded to grey, gave no public reflection on the failures that caused millions of his countrymen—and, eventually, his own allies—to turn on him. Did he blame his sons, whose greed and ambition alienated not only his people but, crucially, his fellow army officers? Did he blame his glib intelligence men, or the ever-plotting Muslim Brothers, or his gutless American allies? The stolid soldier gave nothing away.Reuse this contentThe Trust Project