THE GUARDIAN: Critics said the president would never leave voluntarily but few political rights and falling prosperity forced an end
Hosni Mubarak's presidency was born amid gunfire and bloodshed and ended in an equally dramatic fashion. As vice-president, Mubarak was sitting next to Anwar Sadat on 6 October 1981 at an army parade in the Cairo district of Nasser City when soldiers with Islamist sympathies turned on their leader, pouring automatic weapons fire into the reviewing stand. Sadat was killed outright. Mubarak narrowly escaped. Eight days later, he was sworn in as Egypt's third president.
That Mubarak should be ejected from the job he has held for nearly 30 years is, with hindsight, hardly a surprise. It had become clear to Egyptians and the world in recent years that even at the age of 82 he regarded the presidency as his by right, hence his nickname of "pharaoh" – and that he would not quit voluntarily. As the crisis overwhelmed him, he said he had had no intention of standing again in September. Few believed him. Others assumed he planned instead to install his second son, Gamal, in a dynastic succession.
Mubarak's attitude to his people was by turns paternalistic, aloof and repressive. Though he claimed to love his fellow Egyptians, he did not trust them, maintaining the harsh emergency laws imposed after Sadat's assassination throughout his reign. Leading an unswervingly secular, pro-western regime, he demonised even moderate Islamist parties and made of the Muslim Brotherhood a bogeyman with which to scare the Americans.
Yet, in rare interviews he implied that he believed he held some sort of divine mandate, that he ruled through and by God's will. After he survived an attempt on his life by Gema'a Islamiya (Muslim Group) terrorists in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June 1995, one of up to eight attempted assassinations over 30 years, he returned to Cairo proclaiming that God had saved him through an act of divine providence, as in 1981.
Imperious, abstemious (he does not smoke or drink), and intensely private, he suggested Egyptians were lucky to have him in charge. Without him, he said repeatedly, there would be only chaos. And this claim to ensure stability was, in truth, his entire electoral manifesto. >>> Simon Tisdall | Friday, February 11, 2011
