Tag: adly

The Dictator behind bars

Posted on By 3arabawy

How do I feel about today’s trial? I wrote this in July 2008:

Some people are wishing for the ailing Mubarak to die tomorrow. I don’t wish that at all (though the thought is tempting). I want him to live a little bit longer, because the revolution is coming, and he will be tried and executed in a public square for all the crimes he committed against our people and against the Palestinians. I repeat, Mubarak is a traitor and should be executed in Tahrir Sq, together with his State Security pigs who have enjoyed torturing and sexually abusing us for 27 years now.. Enough is Enough..

No words can describe my feelings honestly as I watched, together with millions of Egyptians, our former dictator, with his two corrupt sons including the man he was grooming for succession, his torturer-in-chief Adly and co, in a court cage today, as accused criminals in a live aired trial.

I became politically active in 1996, as a university sophomore, and went on later to join the Revolutionary Socialists in 1998. Mubarak has always been a big taboo. You could not talk about him in public without looking around lest someone was ear dropping, you couldn’t chant against him in protests or else you’d disappear, couldn’t crack jokes about him over the phone coz they were tapped, and could not even write a mild criticism of him in any newspaper. I recall times when I chanted against Mubarak, only to find protesters behind me had started running for their lives out fear. Each demo we organized in the 1990s against Mubarak and the first years of this millennium, usually meant we did not sleep in our homes after, went into hiding for a week or two to avoid arrest.

Baba Mubarak was everywhere. His State Security gestapo listened to your breathing. His ugly cow-looking portraits decorated all our squares, streets, public institutions, schools, and even parking lots!

For years activists have been trying to break the Mubarak taboo, and this set off a ten year chain reaction that led to the January uprising.

For people like me who saw the 1990s, what happened today made us speechless, even when we have been involved for years in trying to make this day happen, with many of us losing hope at some point or another that they would live to see it. As for me, with all honesty, I never doubted I would see it. I’ve always felt somehow I will see the revolution in my lifetime, and desperately wanted Mubarak to live and see it too. I wanted to see the man who have ruled us with torture chambers for three decades humiliated, exposed (and executed).

And how ironic… Mubarak is being tried in the Police Academy he built, formerly known as “Mubarak’s Security Academy.” And to complete the irony, the court room is nothing but the conference hall he and Adly addressed senior security leaders two days before the revolution, celebrating Police Day.

Today’s public trial was the result of the wave of protests that has been engulfing the country, and no credit should be given to SCAF, Mubarak’s own army general. They were pressured into it.