Madding Crowd, Part 4:
The Egyptian Civil War by Chris Oakley
Summary: In the first three chapters of this series we reviewed the
circumstances that led to the outbreak of civil war in Egypt in 2011,
the bitter battles which raged during the conflict, and the collapse
of the Mubarak regime in the war's final days. In this installment,
we'll look at Hosni Mubarak's trial and execution and the post-civil
war Egyptian government's struggles to rebuild the country's damaged
economy.
******
It was, ironically, after their rebellion against the Mubarak
regime was over that the new Egyptian government's struggles truly
began. The civil war had left Egypt's economy and infrastructure in
ruins and there was a great deal of work to be done in repairing them;
additionally, the turmoil generated by the civil war in general and
the Mubarak regime's final collapse in particular had left the country
isolated from the rest of the world at a time when foreign trade was
urgently needed to re-energize its finances. Last but not least, there
was the question of what to with Mubarak himself. There was widespread
support for putting the deposed Egyptian president on trial, but doing
so was easier said than done given how the civil war had all but wiped
out the Egyptian civilian court system.
The first idea proposed for Mubarak's trial was to prosecute him
at a special military tribunal, but this suggestion was quickly vetoed
for many reasons-- the most significant of which was the simple truth
there weren't enough experienced officers left within the ranks of the
Egyptian military to make such a tribunal possible. The next proposed
solution to the problem was to try Mubarak before a three-man civilian
panel composed of former attorneys, but lack of manpower derailed this
idea too. The problem seemed utterly insoluble, and at one point there
were even rumors the new government might just throw in the towel and
release Mubarak into the custody of his family, now living in exile in
London.
That prospect enraged many former rebel fighters, who saw it as
letting the deposed Egyptian ruler get away with his crimes scot-free.
It also aroused the fury of Egyptian civilians who'd lost family and
friends in the carnage of the civil war. On September 13th, 2011 their
anger was channeled into action as hundreds of people gathered at the
prison where Mubarak was incarcerated to hold a protest rally calling
for the former Egyptian president to be put on trial, even if it meant
bringing in foreigners to administer the proceedings. What was left of
the country's security forces immediately assembled a defensive cordon
around the prison complex; for more than three days, the demonstrators
and the security troops were locked in a tense standoff that more than
once threatened to erupt into rioting.
The standoff finally ended late on the afternoon of September
17th, when word came from a prominent Egyptian-born barrister who had
emigrated to Britain that he would volunteer to return to Cairo with
a group of fellow attorneys to establish a special court whose sole
responsibility would be to hear the charges against Mubarak and then
prosecute the former Egyptian president. True to his word, he arrived
in the Egyptian capital on September 19th with ten other barristers in
tow; two of these people would serve as Mubarak's defense counsel and
two others act as prosecutors, while the rest of the group would make
up the judge and jury. In theory it was a superb plan given the state
Egypt's judiciary had fallen into by that point.
In practice, it turned out to be a different story. Rage against
Mubarak and his cronies overwhelmed the tribunal almost from the first
moment of opening arguments in Mubarak's trial. At least twice in the
trial's first week the chief defense counsel was physically assaulted
by relatives of Mubarak's victims; the second assault inflicted a host
of injuries serious enough to nearly hospitalize the defense counsel.
The lone foreign journalist in attendance at the opening phase of the
Mubarak tribunal said in an online post after the second assault that
the atmosphere inside the courtroom was in some ways reminiscent of the
mob scene that had attended the 1945 execution of Benito Mussolini.
And that wouldn’t be the only time comparisons were drawn between
the trial of the deposed Egyptian president and the demise of the Duce.
During the Mubarak tribunal those symbols of the old regime that hadn’t
already been blasted to pieces by artillery fire or torn down by people
enraged at the regime’s abuses were vandalized or destroyed in a final
burst of fury by the victims of the regime’s tyranny-- and one of those
symbols just happened to be located in the courtroom where the tribunal
was prosecuting Mubarak. A former Egyptian army lieutenant who had been
cashiered out of the service after writing a letter to his family which
mildly rebuked the government’s censorship laws burst into the court in
the midst of the defense team’s cross-examination of a key prosecution
witness and fired three shots into a portrait of the former president.
While thankfully nobody was killed or wounded by the gunfire, the glass
in the portrait frame was shattered and the portrait itself ripped to
pieces. It was reminiscent, one Italian newspaper said, of the toppling
of busts and defacing of posters that had accompanied Mussolini’s ouster
in 1943.
As the foreign media began returning to Cairo in greater numbers
during the second phase of a trial, the world slowly discovered just how
deep the hate towards Mubarak ran among his own people. Effigies of the
deposed former Egyptian president were either hanged or set afire in the
presence of TV cameras and protestors waved anti-Mubarak placards in the
air at every opportunity. Social media became deluged with anti-Mubarak
messages, videos, and tweets-- some of them almost obscene --that called
for Mubarak's head(often as not literally). A technician from al Jazeera
who bore a passing resemblance to Mubarak was seized and assaulted by an
angry mob less than a block from the Mubarak tribunal courtroom, and had
an Egyptian army patrol not intervened on his behalf to disperse the mob
he might well have been lynched on the spot. As it was, he spent most of
the rest of his time in Egypt sporting an eyepatch and a surgical glove;
by an interesting coincidence, the technician quit his job shortly after
returning from Egypt and threw away his passport.
******
The rest of the trial went on under a cloud of tension as witnesses,
judges, attorneys, and spectators waited to see what further eruptions
of violence would erupt in the courtroom and cause the wheels of justice
to screech to a halt. Some of the more pessimistic spirits in the upper
echelons of the new Egyptian government were sure the courtroom would be
attacked by suicide bombers before the verdict came in. No such attacks
ever materialized, but just the same fears of a possible suicide bomber
strike reflected the post-Mubarak government's concern that the internal
political situation in Egypt was still dangerously unstable and could be
so for weeks-- if not months –to come.
On October 14th, 2011 the tribunal rendered its verdict to a packed
courtroom. To Mubarak's dismay, the jury in the tribunal had unanimously
found him guilty on all counts and sentenced him to execution by firing
squad. He pleaded with his defense team to file an immediate appeal, but
before they could even say a word in response a crowd of people who had
lost friends or relatives to Mubarak's security forces broke through the
police cordon guarding the defense and prosecution tables; they dragged
a bitterly protesting Mubarak into the streets outside the courtroom and
thrust him onto an improvised gallows, where they would administer what
could most accurately be described as vigilante justice. As the deposed
Egyptian president tried desperately to convince his captors to let him
go, a crowd of onlookers mercilessly jeered Mubarak and threw everything
from crumpled paper to pieces of brick in his direction.
He was hustled onto the gallows platform like a common criminal and
forced to stick his head into a noose made from rope found at the Cairo
docks. Asked if he had any final words before he was to be executed, the
panicked former Egyptian president reiterated his pleas to be released;
in a rage, the men of the execution party kicked the gallows trap door
open and watched as Mubarak's body dangled from the noose like a fish on
an angling line. Those who had mobile phones or other recording devices
with them hastened to capture the fallen dictator’s final breath in real
time; when the first video footage of his execution was posted online it
went viral within a matter of minutes. Few if any tears were shed by his
fellow Egyptians over his demise-- in fact, in some parts of the country
the news was greeted with outright celebration by family and friends of
some of the victims of his crackdowns on political dissenters during the
years before the civil war.
In Libya, where the Khadafy regime was on its last legs, Muammar
Khadafy saw an alarming and potentially fatal glimpse of his own future
if he continued trying to hold on to power. Two days after Mubarak was
executed Khadafy abruptly announced his resignation as Libya's head of
state in a short, somewhat disjointed televised speech broadcast from
the offices of the Libyan interior ministry. As soon as the broadcast
ended Khadafy surrendered himself to a delgation of U.N. human rights
investigators, concluding with some justification that he would likely
get a better deal from the International Criminal Court than from his
fellow countrymen when he stood trial for his actions during the forty-
three years he had ruled Libya. Certainly in the U.N.'s hands there was
far less chance of gettling lynched in the street like a common thug...
*****
While the International Criminal Court was busy getting ready to
prosecute Khadafy, another UN branch-- the World Bank --took up the job
of helping to restart Egypt's war-stalled economy. In early November of
2011 the World Bank, with the full backing of the United States and many
other major economic powers, extended a multi-million dollar loan to the
Egyptian government for the purpose of rebuilding factories and markets
devastated by the civil war; concurrent with this loan, the World Bank's
top officials went on a media blitz meant to encourage foreign companies
to re-invest in Egypt. Although at first it seemed as if these measures
were simply sticking Band-Aids on a broken leg, eventually the Egyptian
economy began turn around and the country's gross national product would
increase by 20 percent over the next year.
By the summer of 2013 foreign tourists were coming back to Egypt in
numbers close to the original prewar levels and the domestic economy was
regaining some its old vigor. But the surest evidence the country was on
the road to full economic recovery came that autumn, when two major U.S.
Internet companies announced a joint investment in a three-month project
to restore e-mail service in Alexandria; that investment pumped billions
of dollars into Egypt’s economy at exactly the time when that kind of an
infusion was sorely needed....
