Hosni Mubarak: the dictator who got away with murder
Hosni Mubarak's exoneration by a Cairo court shows how little has changed since Arab spring
PUBLISHED : Monday, 01 December, 2014, 3:04am
UPDATED : Monday, 01 December, 2014, 3:04am
Tribune News Service in Cairo
Egypt's overthrown ruler Hosni Mubarak greets supporters as he leaves a helicopter ambulance following the verdict. Photo: AP
In February 2011, delirious and near-disbelieving Egyptians in the capital's Tahrir Square danced and sang as they welcomed the fall of a dictator who had maintained iron control of this ancient land for the entire life span of many in the crowd.
But in a place where the past is always vividly present - if only as a glimpse of the pyramids on the horizon - what seems consigned to history sometimes rebounds.
On Saturday, Hosni Mubarak, frail but still defiant at 86, permitted himself a small, tight smile of satisfaction as a Cairo judge pronounced invalid, on largely technical grounds, the charges that he had been complicit in the killings of hundreds of demonstrators who had fought to oust him. Egypt's autocratic ruler of three decades' standing was poised to perhaps soon walk free.
The verdict sparked a deadly clash in Tahrir Square between security forces and about 2,000 outraged protesters, which killed two people and wounded nine.
Egypt was not the first of the countries whose long-oppressed peoples threw in their lot with the so-called Arab spring - the uprisings that swept a Middle East long beset by hidebound and repressive regimes.
Syria has descended into a savage civil war. Oil-rich Libya is riven by competing militias. Tiny Bahrain's Shiite majority, hoping to win consummate rights, still simmers. In Yemen, the US lends semi-covert military muscle - as in a raid days ago - on behalf of a central government that maintains only a modicum of control.
And a former military man again rules Egypt.
Protesters in Cairo react to the dismissal of charges on Saturday. Photo: AP
American pressure to reverse human-rights abuses under ex-general and current President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi - only mild to begin with - has faded almost entirely amid the current push to confront the militants of Islamic State.
For some in Egypt, the throwing out of the charges against Mubarak marked a despairing full circle.
"Thanks to the 'prestigious' court, you have brought life back to our revolution," said a sarcastic Facebook posting by Shady El Ghazaly, an activist in the fight to depose Mubarak.
Anti-Mubarak activists tried to put the best face on Saturday's verdict.
"The price of freedom was paid, and what was before isn't coming back," said Zyad Elalaimy, a founding member of a youth coalition that took part in the revolt against Mubarak.
Rights groups have repeatedly described the current political climate in Egypt as far more repressive than that under Mubarak.
Yet there is little whiff of dissent in the air. Instead, few dare to question Sisi's authority.
The trials of Mubarak have in many ways served as a political barometer in Egypt. Much of the vilification that was directed at him immediately after his ousting now centres instead on the Muslim Brotherhood and its leader, Mohammed Mursi, who took office in June 2012 as Egypt's first democratically elected president but was deposed by the military in July 2013.
The Brotherhood, now the prime target of Sisi's government, is tirelessly depicted by Egyptian authorities and local news outlets as the most dangerous force in Egypt.
And with the jailing or exiling of many prominent in the 2011 uprising, that revolution is now often painted as a Western conspiracy to control Egypt, with the true "revolution" taking place a year-and-a-half later, when Mursi was removed amid nationwide protests demanding his ousting.
Many reacted with relative indifference to the Mubarak verdict. Egyptians are much more focused on current unrest, including an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula that has killed hundreds of Egyptian troops and led to the displacement of thousands living near the border with the Gaza Strip.
