Middle-east Arab News Opinion | Asharq Al-awsat

Mubarak’s tainted legacy hangs over Egyptian vote | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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CAIRO/LONDON, (Reuters) – Military police idly guard the gates of Egypt’s presidential palace in Heliopolis, built as a 400-room luxury hotel in 1910 and vacant since a popular uprising deposed Hosni Mubarak 15 months ago.

Egyptians, who never stormed in to gawk and plunder their fallen leader’s home as Tunisians and Libyans did last year, vote on May 23 and 24 for a new president, the latest stage of an uncertain transition guided bumpily by the military.

People who live in the wealthy Cairo district around the palace are delighted to be spared the road closures that snarled traffic for hours every time Mubarak went anywhere.

But some, such as 24-year-old Sara Hussein, find it harder to perceive any other changes wrought by the uprising she had so ardently supported. “Like everything, the palace is still not free of the Mubaraks. The palace, and the country, are not for the people,” she says. “His regime is still in power.”

Still, Egypt will soon have a freely elected – and probably civilian – president for the first time in the republic’s 60-year history, assuming the generals who sealed Mubarak’s fate by refusing to shoot at crowds baying for his downfall keep their promise to hand over by July 1.

Little else is clear. Attempts to craft a new constitution have stalled. No one knows how power will be divided between the president and parliament, dominated by Islamists.

The military, wary of Islamists and jealous of its own power, perks and privileges, may step back from day-to-day affairs but is likely to seek an as-yet undefined political role, seeing itself as the paternal guardian of the state.

The generals effectively removed Mubarak to safeguard the system, not to promote revolutionary change. So far reform has not touched that system’s main pillars – the military, the judiciary, the police, security and intelligence agencies.

“We have not had regime change in Egypt, only change within the regime, with a lot of street noise outside,” said Robert Springborg, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a specialist on the Egyptian military.

TARNISHED RECORD

Mubarak may be gone, but his legacy lingers.

Then vice-president, he was catapulted into office in October 1981 after surviving the gunfire from Islamist army soldiers who assassinated his predecessor, Anwar Sadat.

He brought calm and kept Egypt at peace for 30 years, crushing an armed Islamist rebellion in the 1990s, until political and economic frustrations with his stagnant rule boiled over in the cauldron of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where wild rejoicing greeted his departure on Feb. 11, 2011.

Many compare Mubarak to his predecessors – Sadat, who made peace with Israel and forged an alliance with the United States, and Gamal Abdel Nasser, an Arab nationalist who once inspired those fighting colonial powers in the Arab world and beyond.

“Sadat was exceptional in his intelligence, Nasser in his charisma. Mubarak was half-talented at everything and had no exceptional quality,” said Ayman Nour, who ran in a 2005 election against Mubarak and was later jailed for his pains.

“Mubarak had the kind of tyranny that is typical of half-democracies,” the 47-year-old lawyer told Reuters. “He was a tyrant under the umbrella of the law.”

That did not stand in the way of Mubarak’s friendship with the West, which valued him for upholding Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, deeply unpopular with many Egyptians.

He was also a close ally of Saudi Arabia, which was dismayed at Washington’s failure to prevent the fall of a pillar of a U.S. regional political and security order that included Egypt and conservative Arab monarchies from Morocco to the Gulf.

“Without Mubarak, it will be harder for the United States to do the things it has done in the past,” said Steven Cook, a Middle East expert at Washington’s Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S.-Egyptian relations have become tetchier since Mubarak’s ouster, but military aid and cooperation continue, as does the treaty with Israel, although the peace is colder than ever.