Hosni Mubarak

Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak (4 May 1928 – 25 February 2020) was an Egyptian officer and politician who ruled Egypt as president from 14 October 1981 to 11 February 2011, the longest-serving ruler of Egypt in the modern era. He took office after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat and remained for almost thirty years, until the revolution of 25 January 2011 forced him out. ^{1 2}

Mubarak was born in Kafr el-Meselha in Monufia Governorate in the Nile Delta on 4 May 1928, and completed his secondary education in Shibin El Kom. He entered the Egyptian Military Academy and graduated in 1949, then the Air Force Academy, graduating in 1950, and served as an air force pilot, rising to become commander of the air force (1972–75) and being promoted to air chief marshal in 1973. ¹

President Anwar Sadat appointed Mubarak vice president on 16 April 1975. When Sadat was assassinated on 6 October 1981, the speaker of parliament, Sufi Abu Taleb, served as acting president, and Mubarak became president on 14 October 1981 after a referendum, combining the office with the premiership until 1982. Under him Egypt kept its peace treaty with Israel, returned to the Arab League, whose headquarters moved back to Cairo, and joined the international coalition that liberated Kuwait in 1991. Mubarak also served as secretary-general of the Non-Aligned Movement (2009–11). ¹

Mubarak ruled under emergency law for nearly his whole tenure, renewed through referendums and then, in 2005, Egypt's first multi-candidate presidential election. His era saw market reforms and privatization in the early 1990s and 2000s alongside a widening social gap. Militants tried to assassinate him in Addis Ababa in 1995 and failed. Rights organizations accused his government of systematic torture in prisons and police stations and of pervasive corruption; the English article's criticism section sets out these charges as part of the picture of his regime. ¹

On 25 January 2011 mass protests broke out against Mubarak's rule and lasted eighteen days. On 10 February he announced he would not step down despite the protesters' pressure; on 11 February his vice president Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak had resigned the presidency and handed power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. ¹

Mubarak's trial opened on 3 August 2011 on charges including the killing of protesters and corruption. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012; the verdict was overturned and a retrial ordered; a final corruption conviction came in 2015; and he was acquitted of the protester-killing charges and released in March 2017, returning to his home in Heliopolis, Cairo. ¹

Mubarak died in a Cairo military hospital on 25 February 2020, aged 91. He was given a full-honour military funeral at the Tantawi Mosque in eastern Cairo and buried in a cemetery in Heliopolis. The English article characterizes his rule as an authoritarian system built on emergency law, alleged electoral fraud and the suppression of opposition, while also recording Egypt's regional stability and the continuity of the peace treaty under him; this museum attributes such historical judgements to their sources and does not adopt them. ¹

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