The consensus among commentators this week was that the regime of ex-president Hosni Mubarak was murderous, tyrannous and corrupt. Cynical operators ran the country. Mubarak had been cocooned by the privileges and ceremonial powers of the presidency by the high party functionaries who profited from the rampant corruption that eventually led to its demise. The papers relished the battle over outdoing each other in uncovering the corruption scandals of the past. And never before has the Mubarak regime and the person of the ex-president himself been reviled with such venom. The wide spectrum of ideological orientation and political affiliation of the various editorials concurred that the Egyptian people who Mubarak and his henchmen ruled with an iron fist ultimately lost what trust and fear they had for him and his party. Dark side's upside is the resurrection of ghosts from the past. The curious question of the assassination of Egypt's former president has risen to the fore. This particular explosive issue was detonated when Ruqaya El-Sadat, the restless and stentorian daughter of the former president Anwar El-Sadat, announced that Mubarak was implicated in the assassination of her father. She presented a petition to the attorney-general charging Mubarak with plotting the assassination. She claims to have seen her father's assassin in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, after his presumed execution. "I saw El-Islambouli with my own eyes in Mecca despite the belief that he was executed in Egypt," El-Sadat was quoted as saying in the mouthpiece of Wafd Party, the daily Al-Wafd. No less vociferous Islamist preacher Sheikh Mohamed Hassan was quoted in Al-Wafd as saying that Copts have no reason to fear Islam or Islamists. "We do not care about semantics. We do not care if the new state is civil or religious. These are empty labels. What we care about is that the state is run along the lines of Islamic Sharia laws. We insist on Article 2 of the constitution which stipulates that Islam is the official state religion and that Arabic is the official language of the state," Hassan said. Charges of a secret counter-revolutionary plot abound. Counter-revolutionary hysteria in any post-revolution country is nothing new, but never has Egypt been so viciously convulsed by such commotion. The papers were replete with the tales of tortured souls, would-be liberators and the yearning of the nation for a new beginning. 'No to counter-revolution' bellowed the daily Al-Ahram. 'General Fouad Allam (former head of the defunct state security apparatus) charges Muslim Brotherhood with arson and premeditated burning of police stations around the country in the wake of the 25 January Revolution,' read a front-page headline of the paper. 'The army discovers a counter-revolutionary conspiracy,' ran the headline of the daily Al-Akhbar. The paper revealed that sources within the army noted that a sinister network of businessmen collaborating in tandem with remnants of the battered former ruling clique are behind the pandemonium and chaotic current state of affairs. According to Al-Akhbar this is the evil machination of the spoilers who secretly plot the counter- revolution. "A group of wealthy and powerful figures with a vested interest in creating chaos are intentionally sowing the seeds of discord," the paper quoted presidential hopeful Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, as saying. "There is a dire need to identify those responsible for creating chaos. There is also the imperative to stop them in their tracks," Moussa added. It seems that there is no end to the tribulations and humiliations of former high-profile members of the National Democratic Party (NDP). The Egyptian papers were replete with stories about their hardship and reversal of fortunes as inmates of the infamous Tora Prison. "The walls of Tora Prison divulge the sordid secrets of the fallen mighty," Al-Akhbar trumpeted on its inside pages. The paper featured an entire page in its Sunday edition posing the ironic question of how the cells of Tora Prison, that had in the past housed militant Islamists, now host former ministers. The paper spotlighted a photograph of Ahmed Ezz, former secretary of organisational affairs for the NDP, Zoheir Garana, the former minister of tourism, and Ahmed El-Maghrabi, the former housing minister, all in jail, wearing prison uniforms. Al-Akhbar also conducted interviews with prominent personalities, not necessarily political, such as Tawfik Abdu Ismail, the former minister of tourism and aviation and a member of the Free Officers and a colleague of ex- president Mubarak. The paper also featured a full-page interview with distinguished academician and scientist Hamed Ammar. "We need to understand the reasons behind the phenomenon of corruption in order to know where the shortcomings of the system are. The youth revolution outlined the roadmap for us to establish a democratic and civil society," Ammar was quoted as saying. "Much has been written about the phenomenon of corruption and the last that was written was a seminal work that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina declined to publish," he added. "The Mubarak regime disintegrated because the ex- president was starved of information. He was put in a cage and was denied access to any relevant information by the sycophants who surrounded him," Ismail told Al-Akhbar. "What we are told about corruption during Mubarak's terms in office is just the tip of the iceberg. All will be revealed in due course," he concluded . The paper also quoted a nephew of ex-president Mubarak and his namesake as bitterly denouncing his uncle. "Mubarak was a pharaoh. His own family was victimised during his time in office. The ex-president never visited his hometown of Kafr Museilha even once during his presidency. He didn't care about his own relatives, his kith and kin. I was against the despotic rule of my uncle and it is not my fault that I happen to be his nephew." He blamed the greediness of the close political associates of the ex-president and the former first lady and her son Gamal for being behind the disgraceful demise of the Mubarak regime primarily because of their avaricious political ambitions. It is against this grim background of the ex-president's family who were banned from travelling abroad that political commentators probe the implications of a Cairo criminal court's decision to endorse the freezing of the assets of Mubarak and his family members. The ex-president had appealed against an order by the country's top prosecutor to seize their funds. Al-Ahram, among others, lamented the British government's decision claiming that it has no legal power to seize the transferred funds of Mubarak and his family in Britain. 'London accuses Cairo of procrastinating on the question of requesting foreign governments to freeze Mubarak's fortune.' Last but not least, Al-Masry Al-Yom 's banner reiterated the plea by the ruling Higher Council of the Armed Forces: "We are neither Muslim Brothers nor Salafists". It added, "Mubarak has not fled to Saudi Arabia. He is under house arrest."
