Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, hanging on to power in the face of mass protests demanding h is immediate exit, has responded with the same contemptuous paternalism that has characterised his 30 years in power.
Apparently deaf to the rage that has convulsed the streets for a week, Mubarak, 82, has named his intelligence chief as vice-president, reshuffled the cabinet and made routine economic pledges, as if business as usual could somehow resume.
For three decades, he has enjoyed firm backing from the United States, Israel and Europe, which saw him as a guarantor of stability and peace, and a rampart against Islamists.
But even Washington, which has given Egypt billions of dollars in mostly military aid despite Mubarak’s resistance to its occasional pressure for political change, says his response to the protests has been inadequate.
“This is not about appointments, it’s about actions,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday.
The army has not publicly deserted Mubarak, but said it would not fire on protesters hoping to mobilise a million people today, and endorsed their “legitimate demands”.
One of the demonstrators defying an overnight curfew in Cairo’s Tahrir Square summed up the mood. “The only thing we will accept from him is that he gets on a plane and leaves,” lawyer Ahmed Helmi, 45, said.
Mubarak came to power in 1981 when Islamist revolutionaries shot dead his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, at a military parade.
Throughout the intervening three decades and despite scores of promises, Mubarak has done nothing to create an institutional framework for a peaceful and democratic transfer of power in the
Arab world’s most populous nation.
Instead he has perpetuated a suffocating system in which conventional politics hardly exists, running the country by administrative fiat as if it were an army or a corporation.
Described as a dictator in leaked US embassy cables, Mubarak won four terms in single-candidate referenda and easily carried off the first contested election in 2005. He never deigned to debate his main rival, liberal lawyer Ayman Nour, who was later imprisoned for five years on dubious forgery charges.
Many Egyptians had expected him to run for a sixth term in September this year or install his businessman son Gamal in his place. They knew they would have no say in choosing their next
leader.
The final straw? Mubarak’s ruling party gained around 90 per cent of seats in parliament in a November poll in which the main Islamist opposition improbably lost all its 88 seats.
Mubarak owes his presidential career to Sadat, who saw him as a loyal subordinate and appointed him vice-president in 1975, when he commanded the air force and had no political ambitions.
At first, his solid, cautious style helped calm Egyptians traumatised by Sadat’s killing and fearful of the violence used by Islamist rebels hostile to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.
But once in power, Mubarak offered no vision beyond economic development under the same authoritarian system inherited from the army officers who toppled a British-backed king in 1952.
He has now ruled Egypt longer than anyone since Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Albanian adventurer who founded in the early 19th century the royal dynasty that fell in the 1952 coup.
“Governing Egypt is not a picnic, not something easy,” Mubarak declared in 2005. “You have limited resources, high population growth and the requirements of the people.”
He has spoken of democracy on occasion, but has done nothing to suggest he understands the concept to include the possibility of retiring or losing power through elections.
He prefers to talk of security and stability, portraying himself as a benign patriarch protecting Egypt from its enemies.
Even economic development was slow and patchy until his son Gamal, a former investment banker, persuaded Mubarak to bring businessmen and neo-liberal economists into the cabinet. Growth picked up, hitting 7.2 per cent in financial year 2007-08, but wealth disparities increased, inflation stayed high, and the poor complain they have seen none of the benefits.
Political cronies
On the political front, little changed. Businessmen friends and associates of Gamal Mubarak moved into the upper reaches of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), one of the prime targets of the current uprising.
Growing more complacent and unimaginative with age, Mubarak has condoned or ignored the erosion of the rule of law, making a smooth, broadly accepted transition of power ever more elusive.
Police have tortured with impunity anyone who challenges authority, and corrupt politicians have rigged elections and fixed the rules to exclude all rivals, human rights and transparency watchdogs say. Officials say voting is fair and that they investigate any cases of torture.
Most of Egypt’s youthful population of 80 million, a fifth of whom live on less than US$1 (RM3) a day, have never known another leader.
Mubarak has seemed oblivious to the dangers. Asked last year who would lead Egypt next, he said: “Only God knows who will be my successor. Whomever God prefers, I prefer.”
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