A Momentous Day for Egyptian Nation

Upright Opinion

February 11, 2011

BY Saeed Qureshi

It is a momentous day for the people of Egypt. This unforgettable day of deliverance, dawned with the emancipation of the Egyptian nation from an oppressive regime, would be remembered as an epic and folklore to be sung by their future generations. With their blood and sacrifices, the traumatized people of Egypt have got themselves liberated from the tyranny and enslavement of a modern day Pharaoh.

With the torrential zeal and an unyielding spirit, the people of Egypt led by the youth have inscribed a luminous page of national liberation from the yoke of a tyrant who brooked no mercy or honor for their own countrymen. He had set the abominable record of cronyism, greed and repression that equate him with the monstrous lot of Hitler, Pol Pot, Pinochet and medieval merciless dynastic potentates.

Under the mask of democracy, Hosni Mubarak ruled his nation with an iron hand and with a diabolic ferocity that was worse than a naked dictatorship. His democracy was so glaringly fraudulent as to pale the worst of autocracy. He governed his country with farce, fraud and forgery and maintained his grip on power with absolute ruthlessness. The army, the, intelligence network, the secret Service, the rich plutocrats, the rapacious oligarchs, the filthily corrupt bureaucrats and avaricious aristocracy were all in league and behind the arch villain in an unabashed loot and plunder and enslavement of their great nation.

The Egyptian society during three decades of Mubarak’s stifling lordship scaled down from a glorified self respecting country to the one surviving on charity and foreign aid for a loathsome subservience to the foreign dictates and ambitions. With the dependence on foreign alms, aid and mismanagement, while the people became more impoverished, the elitist classes including the army generals amassed tons of wealth. The ill-gotten fortune of the deposed president alone is estimated to be as high as 70 billion dollars.

A new resplendent era of openness and emancipation seems to be in sight due to the breathtaking heroism and supreme sacrifices and a relentless struggle waged by all section of Egyptian society. This glowing example for indigenous liberty and national salvation would serve as a glorious model worth emulating for such societies where alienated autocracies and totalitarianism still prevail.

The people of Egypt has imparted a phenomenal lesson to the world at large that once a fettered nation determines to take off its fetters and shake off its fear, it can topple and defeat even the most diabolic rulers. Leaving aside the Bolshevik and Iranian revolutions, the Egyptian uprising against a deceitful, mercenary head of state and to defy his brutal apparatus for harassing and subduing the people is a magnificent epitome that was unimaginable until the upheaval of the Tunisian Seismic cataclysm. This is how the torch of freedom and flame of national emancipation and employment moves from one oppressed nation to another.

Hosni Mubarak has been swept away by the torrent of change that is ingrained in the scheme of things and in the immutable principle of change in nature. He has been thrown into the dustbin of history with a backlog of treachery and disgrace. He has gone with the wind never to harass a nation again that has the glorious legacy of civilization and amazing culture.

Such tyrants whether tin pot or overbearing have appeared in various societies but ultimately disappeared with loathsome memories of their dark legacies and treasonous conduct. Only those are charitably, fondly and respectfully remembered who were kind and caring and patriotic and who served their communities and nations with selflessness, honesty and dedication.

Mubarak will not find any kind words in the history books. He would be loathed as an illegitimate, corrupt, brutal, treasonous dictator, a heartless aggressor and a stooge who served other nations than his own people. He was a puppet, a crony, a barbaric autocrat, a kind of quisling promoting foreign interests.

Admirably the United States has firmly stood on the right side of the history. That is also a defining moment for America as it is now disowning the dictators and owing the people. It is highly commendable that America under president Obama has supported the rightful crusade of the oppressed and disempowered people of Egypt against a barbarous and nauseating system run by a heartless crook whose atrocities against his people were voluminous and endless. There is no gainsaying that if it were not due to United States emphatic calls to the Egyptian army and unrelenting pressure on the Egyptian strongman, the change for a transition would still have remained elusive.

With the exit of Mubarak from the political landscape of Egypt, a country so daringly and rapaciously governed by him, the march towards the establishment of a truly pluralistic democratic order must continue and resolutely supported by United States and the world at large. If the stupendous change in Egypt wrought with an unprecedented movement, brings about mere change of faces then it would be a betrayal and a fraud that must be prevented to happen.

The writer is a Dallas-based journalist and a former diplomat. Email: qureshisa2003@ yahoo.com
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