Mubarak Behind Bars

News from the Egyptian Street and Media Translated Without Comment from Arabic into English As a Public Service
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Why is Mubarak behind bars? The revolutionaries in Egypt who, through peaceful means, have, with the Armed Forces acquiescence, toppled him from power on February 11, have unanimously demanded it. It was not a desire for retribution; it was a desire to firm up the principle that in the new Egypt, nobody was above the law.

Muhammad Hosni Mubarak has ruled Egypt for 32 years. During that nearly one-third of a century of dictatorial rule, that President has thoroughly converted Egypt into a fully-fledged Security State.

What is a Security State? It is a State where the ruler denies his people the right to freedoms of speech, assembly and conscience (defined as the moral sense of right and wrong). How does such a dictator do that? Well, through a large body of enforcers (police, secret service and informants) whose number, under Mubarak, was greater than the number of the entire Egyptian armed forces.

The security state of Mr. Mubarak spread fear, showed favors for those who cooperated with it, watched what people did or did not do, and acted above the law by denying the Egyptian people the right to due process and equality before the law.

Mubarak's trial and in public has been a primary demand by his aggrieved people whom he took for granted for nearly 32 years of his unrelenting dictatorship. The trial's delays were a cause for Tahrir becoming again and again full of thousands of protesters.

His poor health proved to be no excuse for transferring him from his hospital in Sharm El-Sheikh by the Red Sea to a Cairo prison and a Cairo court. The pleadings of his lawyer about unfitness to stand trial were to no avail. Finally the newly-restructured Cabinet of Issam Sharaf, supported by the Supreme Military Council, declared that Mubarak, in early August, would be in the dock in Cairo to stand a televised trial, the first of its kinds for a former head of state in the Arab world.

Mubarak's example will surly send shock waves in the entire Middle East. It will scare every Arab dictator, president or monarch in the vast Arab world. The banners have already been raised in Yemen and Syria proclaiming one chilling warning, "Who Is Next?"

The Mubarak case has been joined to the cases of his two sons, Alaa and Gamal, and of his former Interior Minister, El-Adly and other symbols of the former Security State. The charges cover the main areas of abuse of authority, theft of public funds, give-aways of national resources, killing of demonstrators, fomenting sectarian violence, and other forms of repression.

Mubarak's journey from absolute power to absolute humiliation has been both dramatic and historic. Its lessons will not be forgotten anytime soon.