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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n10/adam-shatz/mubaraks-last-breath
Mubarak’s Last Breath
Adam Shatz reports from Egypt
On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark
the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with
Israel. It was also an occasion to display the American, British and
French aircraft Egypt had recently acquired: symbols of its realignment
with the West after more than two decades as a Soviet ally. Sadat wore a
Prussian-style uniform but no bullet-proof vest: it would have ruined
the line. Rumours of a plot were in the air, and his vice president,
Hosni Mubarak, had warned him not to go. Sadat brushed this off, but
when he stood to receive the salute, he was killed in a hail of grenades
and bullets, fired by a group of Islamist soldiers in his own army. ‘I
have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,’ the lead assassin, a
24-year-old lieutenant, declared.
Only eight days later a new pharaoh rose in Egypt, and he has been in
power ever since. Hosni Mubarak, who stood beside Sadat at the
procession, was an improbable successor: a circumspect career soldier
whose appointment to the vice presidency in 1975 had come as a shock to
political observers. Born in 1928 in a small village in the Nile River
Delta, the son of an inspector in the Ministry of Justice, Mubarak was
little known to Egyptians, or even to his colleagues: he was a loner,
with no outside interests to speak of, and no taste, or talent, for the
rituals of mass politics at which both Nasser and Sadat excelled. Unlike
them he had not been among the Free Officers who seized power in the
1952 coup against the monarchy. He had, however, loyally served the
state and – as commander in chief of the air force – launched the
surprise attack in 1973 which allowed ground forces to cross into the
Sinai Peninsula. Mubarak admitted his political inexperience when he
took office, pledging to ask for advice, and suggesting limited
presidential terms. He is now 82, and has ruled Egypt – and presided
over its decline – for 29 years. Presidential elections are scheduled
for next year, but he has said he will serve ‘until the last breath in
my lungs, and the last beat of my heart’. This is a promise he’s likely
to keep.
Egypt has never been a democracy. The military has always dominated its
political life. Even during the age of liberal nationalism after the
First World War, when it had a lively parliamentary life, popular
sovereignty was sharply curtailed by British power. Since the 1952 coup
which brought Nasser to power, it has been ruled by military
dictatorship, although the establishment of multi-party politics in the
late 1970s brought a measure of cosmetic diversification. Still,
autocratic though they were, both Nasser and Sadat ensured that what
Egypt did mattered. Nasser’s failures were spectacular: the aborted
union with Syria in the United Arab Republic; the disastrous
intervention in the civil war in Yemen; the catastrophic 1967 defeat to
Israel that resulted in the destruction of three-quarters of Egypt’s air
force and the loss of the Sinai; the creation of a vast and inefficient
public sector which the state could not afford; the suppression of
dissent, indeed of politics itself. But he also carried out land reform,
nationalised the Suez Canal, built the Aswan High Dam, and turned Egypt
into a major force in the Non-Aligned Movement. When Nasser spoke, the
Arab world listened. Sadat broke with Nasser’s pan-Arab vision,
promoting an Egypt-first agenda that ultimately led the country into the
arms of the US and Israel. But, like Nasser, he was a statesman of
considerable flair and cunning, with a prodigious ability to seize the
initiative. By leading Egypt to a partial victory in the 1973 war, he
washed away some of the shame of 1967, and eventually secured the
restoration of the Sinai. And though his peace with Israel infuriated
the Arabs, whom Nasser had electrified, he made Egypt a player in the
world. Under Mubarak, Egypt, the ‘mother of the earth’ (umm idduniya),
has seen its influence plummet. Nowhere is the decline of the Sunni Arab
world so acutely felt as in Cairo ‘the Victorious’, a mega-city much of
which has turned into an enormous slum. The air is so thick with fumes
you can hardly breathe, the atmosphere as constricted as the country’s
political life.
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