Obituaries

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Sadat successor,but increasingly dictatorial former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak:


Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak[a] (4 May 1928 – 25 February 2020) was an Egyptian military and political leader who served as the fourth president of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. 


Before he entered politics, Mubarak was a career officer in the Egyptian Air Force. He served as its commander from 1972 to 1975 and rose to the rank of air chief marshal in 1973.[2] Some time in the 1950s, he returned to the Air Force Academy as an instructor, remaining there until early 1959.[2] He assumed the presidency after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Mubarak's presidency lasted almost thirty years, making him Egypt's longest-serving ruler since Muhammad Ali Pasha, who ruled the country from 1805 to 1848, a reign of 43 years.[3] Mubarak stepped down after 18 days of demonstrations during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.[4] On 11 February 2011, former Vice President Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak and he had resigned as president and vice president respectively and transferred authority to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.[5][6]   

On 13 April 2011, a prosecutor ordered Mubarak and both of his sons (Alaa and Gamal) to be detained for 15 days of questioning about allegations of corruption and abuse of power.[7] Mubarak was then ordered to stand trial on charges of negligence for failing to halt the killing of peaceful protesters during the revolution.[8] These trials began on 3 August 2011.[9] On 2 June 2012, an Egyptian court sentenced Mubarak to life imprisonment. After sentencing, he was reported to have suffered a series of health crises. On 13 January 2013, Egypt's Court of Cassation (the nation's high court of appeal) overturned Mubarak's sentence and ordered a retrial.[10] On retrial, Mubarak and his sons were convicted on 9 May 2015 of corruption and given prison sentences.[11] Mubarak was detained in a military hospital and his sons were freed 12 October 2015 by a Cairo court.[12] He was acquitted on 2 March 2017 by the Court of Cassation and released on 24 March 2017.[13][14]

He died on 25 February 2020.[15][16]

Mubarak was injured during the assassination of President Sadat in October 1981 by soldiers led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli.[33] Following Sadat's death, Mubarak became the fourth president of Egypt.


Egypt's return to the Arab League

Until Libya's suspension from the Arab League at the beginning of the Libyan Civil War, Egypt was the only state in the history of the organization to have had its membership suspended, because of President Sadat's peace treaty with Israel.[citation needed] In June 1982, Mubarak met King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, which marked a beginning of an Egyptian-Saudi rapprochement.[34] Since Egypt is the most populous Arab country and Saudi Arabia the richest, the Saudi–Egyptian axis was a powerful force in the Arab world. At an Arab League summit later in 1982 in Fez, Saudi Arabia put forward an Egyptian peace plan where in exchange for Israel resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by allowing a Palestinian state, the entire Arab world would make peace with Israel.[34]

The Islamic Republic of Iran had, from 1979 onward, been making the claim to be the leader of the Islamic world, and in particular Ayatollah Khomeini had called for the overthrow of the governments of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the southern shores of the Persian Gulf, calling these states illegitimate.[35] The claim of the Ayatollah Khomeini to be the rightful leader of the Islamic world and his attempts to export the Iranian revolution by working to overthrow governments that Khomeini deemed un-Islamic caused profound alarm and fear in the governments that were targeted like Iraq and Saudi Arabia.[35] In the face of the Iranian challenge, the other Arab states looked towards Egypt as an ally.[35] For King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and the other leaders of the Arab Gulf states, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict faded into the background and the main concern was resisting Iranian pretensions to be the leader of the Islamic world, meaning that Egypt could not be ignored.[35]
During the Iran–Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, Egypt supported Iraq militarily and economically with one million Egyptians working in Iraq to take the place of Iraqi men serving on the front-line.[35] In December 1983, Mubarak welcomed Yasser Arafat of the PLO to a summit in Cairo, marking a rapprochement with the PLO, and from that time, Egypt became the PLO's main ally.[36] In 1985, the Achille Lauro hijacking caused a major crisis in relations when the U.S Air Force forced an EgyptAir plane carrying the Achille Lauro hi-jackers to Tunisia to land in Italy; otherwise the plane would have been shot down. Mubarak stated in a press conference on 12 October 1985: "I am very wounded. Now there is coolness and strain as a result of this incident."[37] Egypt had been ostracized by the other Arab states for signing the Camp David Accords in 1979, but Egypt's weight within the Arab world had led to Egypt regaining its "central place in the Arab world" by 1989.[38] In 1989, Egypt was re-admitted as a full member to the Arab League and the League's headquarters were moved to their original location in Cairo.[39]

Governing style

Throughout the 1980s, Mubarak increased the production of affordable housing, clothing, furniture, and medicine. By the time he became President, Mubarak was one of a few Egyptian officials who refused to visit Israel and vowed to take a less enthusiastic approach to normalizing relations with the Israeli government.[30] Under Mubarak, Israeli journalists often wrote about the "cold peace" with Egypt, observing Israeli–Egyptian relations were frosty at best.[40] Mubarak was quick to deny that his policies would result in difficulties for Egyptian–Israeli dealings in the future.[30]

The Israeli historian Major Efraim Karsh wrote in 2006 that in Egypt "...numberless articles, scholarly writings, books, cartoons, public statements, and radio and television programs, Jews are painted in the blackest terms imaginable".[41] Karsh accused Mubarak of being personally antisemitic, writing he "evidently shared the premises" of his propaganda.[40]

Egypt's heavy dependence on US aid[42] and its hopes for US pressure on Israel for a Palestinian settlement continued under Mubarak.[43] He quietly improved relations with the former Soviet Union. In 1987, Mubarak won an election to a second six-year term.[19]
In his early years in power, Mubarak expanded the Egyptian State Security Investigations Service (Mabahith Amn ad-Dawla) and the Central Security Forces (anti-riot and containment forces).[44] According to Tarek Osman, the experience of seeing his predecessor assassinated "right in front of him" and his lengthy military career—which was longer than those of Nasser or Sadat—may have instilled in him more focus and absorption with security than seemed the case with the latter heads of state. Mubarak sought advice and confidence not in leading ministers, senior advisers or leading intellectuals, but from his security chiefs—"interior ministers, army commanders, and the heads of the ultra-influential intelligence services."[45] All through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, violations of human rights by the security services in Egypt were described as "systematic" by Amnesty International.[46] In 2007, Amnesty International reported that the Egyptian police routinely engaged in "beatings, electric shocks, prolonged suspension by the wrists and ankles in contorted positions, death threats and sexual abuse".[46] The state remained large under Mubarak employing 8 million people out of a population of 75 million.[46]

Because of his positions against Islamic fundamentalism and his diplomacy towards Israel, Mubarak was the target of repeated assassination attempts. According to the BBC, Mubarak survived six attempts on his life.[47] In June 1995, there was an alleged assassination attempt involving noxious gases and Egyptian Islamic Jihad while Mubarak was in Ethiopia for a conference of the Organization of African Unity.[48] He was also reportedly injured by a knife-wielding assailant in Port Said in September 1999.[49]

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Mubarak in West Berlin in 1989

Gulf War of 1991
Egypt was a member of the allied coalition during the 1991 Gulf War; Egyptian infantry were some of the first to land in Saudi Arabia to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait.[50] Egypt's participation in the war solidified its central role in the Arab World and brought financial benefits for the Egyptian government.[50] Reports that sums of up to US$20 billion worth of debt forgiven were published in the news media.[50] According to The Economist:

Quote:The programme worked like a charm: a textbook case, says the [International Monetary Fund]. In fact, luck was on Hosni Mubarak's side; when the US was hunting for a military alliance to force Iraq out of Kuwait, Egypt's president joined without hesitation. After the war, his reward was that America, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and Europe forgave Egypt around $20 billion of debt.[51]

Iraqi stamp about the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Cooperation_Council]Arab Cooperation Council (ACC), founded 1989 by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Ali Abdullah Saleh of (North) Yemen, King Hussein of Jordan and President Saddam Hussein of Iraq

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosni_Mubarak