Profile: Egypt's Hosni Mubarak

Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s autocratic president since October 1981, is one of the world’s longest-serving presidents. His iron grip on every level of Egyptian society has kept the Arab world’s most populous nation stable, but at a price. It has exacerbated economic inequalities, kept most of Egypt’s 80 million people in poverty, abetted brutality and torture by police and in the nation’s prisons, and stoked resentment and Islamist fervor against the regime. Those are ingredients of revolution. With his health failing and his succession unclear, Mubarak’s hold on power is overshadowing Egypt’s want of reform.

Mubarak declared emergency rule immediately after Sadat’s assassination. It’s been renewed regularly since. The decree allows Mubarak to seize or censor all publications and other media outlets, including advertising, search and seize mail, tap phone and Internet communication links, require all political meetings to be reported in advance for approval, seize and hold individuals without trial, or convict political dissidents and other individuals in secret trials. Mubarak promised to end emergency rule while campaigning for his sixth presidential term in 2005. Token gestures aside, he did not keep the promise.

Mubarak’s rule has been defined by the tightening and relaxing of controls on opposition movements, especially Islamists, by patronage and corruption and (mostly empty) promises to tackle both, and by Mubarak’s inability, or unwillingness, to diminish the country’s crushing poverty and inequality. Like his predecessors, Mubarak has unleashed bloody crackdowns on Islamists, especially in the 1990s, when thousands died and were imprisoned following strings of terrorist attacks and assassinations, including attempts on Mubarak’s life. Violence ebbed after 2000 and a pledge by Al Gamaa al-Islamiyya to lay down arms.

Following a push by the Bush administration in 2004 and 2005 to bring democracy to the Middle East, Mubarak promised a few reforms and more open elections. When candidates backed by the Muslim Brotherhood won 20% of parliamentary seats in 2005, Mubarak cracked down on the Brotherhood again. When opposition candidate Ayman Nour of the Tomorrow Party (Hizb al-Ghad) won more than 7% of the vote in the 2005 presidential election (to Mubarak’s 89%), Mubarak imprisoned Nour on dubious charges—for three years. Voter turnout in the single digits suggests Egyptians are disgusted and see through the sham elections.

Like Sadat, Mubarak made few friends among Palestinians. Sadat was an effective negotiator on Egypt’s behalf, but only a half-hearted one on Palestinians’ behalf. Mubarak in comparison has been quarter-hearted at best. He’s proved incapable of influencing the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, stopping Hamas from attacking Israel or Israel from repeatedly attacking, invading and demolishing Gaza or parts of the West Bank. Mubarak has been more effective at contributing to the Israeli-imposed siege on Gaza, his overriding interest being the preservation of peace with Israel, not the settlement of the Palestinian issue.

Mubarak has never aspired to be a pan-Arab leader, as Gamal Abdel Nasser had. He’s never been the media-savvy showboat Sadat had been. Dull, taciturn, reliably grim-faced, Mubarak’s strength lies in his shrewd ability to navigate Egypt through the roils of the world’s most unstable region, keeping it out of wars and minimizing rivalries. Sadat’s two predecessors took on plenty. Nasser lost far more than he won, including two wars with Israel and chances for peace. Sadat won more than he lost, including, psychologically at least, the 1973 war and the 1979 peace treaty. But he was assassinated.

Mubarak has survived by aiming lower and achieving less. He’s been a caretaker president, content to let Egypt’s many and fundamental problems be a successor’s headaches. As a result, problems have festered, resentments have swelled, and talk of revolution is rife in Egyptian streets, where the atmosphere is often compared to the days before the July 1952 revolution that brought an end to King Farouk’s dynasty. It hasn’t helped that Mubarak has been unwilling to appoint a vice president or establish a clear line of succession, though his son Gamal is the heir apparent.

As Hamdi Qandil, an Egyptian journalist and critic of Mubarak’s regime, wrote, “This regime is clinically dead and we merely await its funeral. All paths for peaceful and gradual change are blocked. The only course left is civil disobedience.”