Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 91, died Tuesday, February 25, at the Galaa Military Hospital in Cairo. In power from 1981 to 2011, the former raïs who enjoyed a reputation as "moderate" in the Arab world, will be driven from power in favor of the "Nile Revolution", before being brought to justice, then imprisoned and finally acquitted in 2017.
Born on May 4, 1928, in the Nile Delta region, and from a modest background, Hosni Mubarak envisaged from his earliest childhood to devote his life to the army. A graduate of the Air Force Academy in 1950, he was sent to the Soviet Union for various training courses, then appointed to command posts.
In 1972, he was appointed commander of the Egyptian Air Force and played an active role during the Yom Kippur War against Israel. Considered a war hero, he was promoted to general, then parachuted by President Anouar al-Sadat to the Vice-Presidency of the Republic in 1975. A few days after the assassination of Sadat by Islamists during a military ceremony at Cairo, October 6, 1981, Hosni Mubarak, who escaped the shooting that day, was unanimously elected president by the People's Assembly. At 53, he began a long reign at the top of the state.
Re-elected head of the country in 1987, 1993 and 1999, according to the same constitutional process, Hosni Mubarak then won, in 2005, the first direct presidential election ever organized in the country. Targeted by at least six assassination attempts, notably by the armed Islamist group Jamaa Islamiya, the raïs tightened the security screw several times during its various mandates. Throughout his reign, the issue of electoral fraud, human rights violations and the freedom of action devolved to the security forces, on which he relies to assert his power, will be frequently singled out. At the heart of criticism: the law on the state of emergency, introduced after the assassination of Sadat, and which gives wider powers to the police in matters of arrest and detention, and allows referral to the courts of exception. It will not be lifted until May 2012 by the army.
For three decades in power, the Egyptian president has focused on giving his country a key role on the international stage. Even if, on the regional level, Egypt will not find that in May 1989 its place within the Arab League, which it had lost in 1979 for having signed peace with Israel. Egypt, Sunni and moderate power, however constitutes a particularly strategic pole and allows Hosni Mubarak to play the mediators in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hosni Mubarak will also make his country, the pivot between Africa and the Middle East, an essential intermediary in the resolution of continental and regional crises.
But it is above all on the United States, then the main strategic and economic ally of Egypt and its army, that the Egyptian president will rely on to maintain his international influence. It is in this sense that Hosni Mubarak (here in 2010 with President Barack Obama) will side with Washington against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War (1990-1991).
Received with great fanfare and listened to by the leaders of the main world powers, Hosni Mubarak established himself as an ally of the West, before whom he presented himself as a guarantor of regional stability and a bulwark against terrorism and Islamism. He will be received on several occasions in France, notably by President Jacques Chirac, with whom he weaves personal and friendly ties.
However, inside the country, the power of raïs, which is at the center of a personality cult organized by the power, is disputed. In 2005, faced with the growing discontent of the population and the critics accusing them of having locked Egyptian political life, Hosni Mubarak had the Constitution modified to allow the holding of multiparty elections. A "pluralism" which does not prevent Hosni Mubarak from being re-elected with more than 88% of the vote.
At the beginning of the 2010s, as anger increased due to social inequalities and corruption scandals, paradoxically, the verdict at the polls did not show any sign of dissatisfaction. The legislative elections held between the end of November and the beginning of December 2010, on the contrary, offer the government an overwhelming victory. A victory at the cost of accusations of fraud emanating from the influential brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood, officially prohibited but tolerated in fact by Hosni Mubarak, and international critics. On January 25, 2011, mass demonstrations against his power began. On February 1, more than a million demonstrators marched against police violence and the corruption of the "Mubarak system". A human tide invades Tahrir Square, in Cairo, the epicenter of protest.
While the Egyptians demand the departure of the rais, who is also suspected of wanting to transmit power to his son Gamal, Hosni Mubarak tries to regain control. While a presidential election is scheduled for September 2011, he announced in a televised speech on February 1 that he would not seek a new mandate, while promising reforms. "Get out," say the protesters. Dropped by turns by Washington, then by the Egyptian army, Hosni Mubarak is forced to leave power after 18 days of mobilization unprecedented in the history of the Arab Republic of Egypt. On February 11, Egyptian state television interrupted its programs to announce the resignation of the head of state and the handing over of his powers to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
Two months after his fall, Hosni Mubarak and his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, are taken into custody by the Egyptian justice system as part of an investigation into the use of violence against the demonstrators during the January and February uprising. The repression of the movement has left at least 850 dead. The former Egyptian strongman will then be brought to justice, and sentenced, after a long judicial soap opera, to life imprisonment for complicity and conspiracy to kill demonstrators.
In total, he will remain imprisoned for six years, before being released following the return to power of the army, led by the current president, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, when the last charges are dropped against him in March 2017. Ironically, his last public appearance took place in December 2018, during a trial against Mohamed Morsi, the former head of state from the Muslim Brotherhood, imprisoned since his overthrow in 2013.
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