Today, former President Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak’s (1928 – 2020) funeral prayers was held by Egyptian Armed Forces in Cairo and attended by President Abdul Fatah El Sisi and other dignitaries.
Mubarak was the fourth President of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. He stepped down after 18 days of demonstration called “Arab Spring” at Cairo Tahrir Square on 11 February 2011. He was jailed for years but was freed in 2017 after being acquitted of the charges.
Mubarak was Air Force Officer (Pilot) and trained to fly Bombers in the Soviet Union. He rose to the rank of Air Chief Marshal in 1973. He was made head of Air Force Academy to rebuild air power which was wiped out by Israeli warplanes in the Six-Day War of 1967.
He was one of the leaders of 1973 Arab-Israel War famously called “Yom Kippur War”. The War lasted for 18 days from 6th to 24th October 1973. During this War Arab combined forces got early success but later on lost due to Western powers support for Israel.
But this War changed the fortune of Muslims after their decline in the world from 1876 on wards. When Arabs started losing the War Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto went to Riyadh and advised King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to stop selling oil to the world. And within two days oil price rose to 378 times form $0.15-0.18 to $1.3 per barrel in two days. The War stopped and the Muslim world used oil as a weapon which put a break on Western world development after WWII.
Anwar Sadat, who succeeded President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, saw in Mubarak a loyal subordinate and made him his Vice President in 1975. Mubarak became President after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 following the Arab-Israel Peace deal of 1979 (Camp David Accords signed between Egypt and Israel).
As President, Mubarak sent the army to quell mutineers in the 1980s, and also repaired relations with Arab states after Sadat’s peace of 1978 with Israel.
During his Presidency, Egypt was readmitted to the Arab League in 1989, which was suspended after Sadat Camp David Accords in 1978 and moved its headquarters back to Cairo. In 1995, Mubarak survived one of several assassination attempts when gunmen fired on his car during a visit to Ethiopia.
Mubarak followed the policy of command economy fashioned under the Arab socialist leader Gamal Nasser. Egypt’s population almost doubled under Mubarak, but many remained in deep poverty and lagged behind Turkey and South Korea in development.
He will be remembered as a master of managing “conflict and crisis” in the Middle East. But his biggest drawback was that he never envisaged how Egyptians should be governed in the future. He always refused to indicate a successor.
