The Land of Life and Death

"I say it again that I have lived for the sake of this nation, protecting the nation and carrying my responsibilities and Egypt will remain above any individual and above everybody." President Hosni Mubarak

Well then, the young and the restive in Cairo's Tahrir Square can now empty the square, which having physically ruined, they assiduously clean up after themselves, lest they be accused of creating a squalid camp site in the middle of Cairo. They have made world news by their intransigent insistence that they have the right and the human need to be governed fairly and justly.

Their message was heard around the world, and the world accorded them the respect that their government sought to deny them.

They will not recognize that in the geography that they inhabit their government was as good as it gets. A government that kept them free from violent strife, and free from an astringent Islamism that would proscribe their lives in ways unimagined. In battling the Muslim Brotherhood struggling to impose their values on the country, the government imposed restrictions on the judiciary, the news media and the new electronic media, chafing the sensibilities of the young.

The young, the educated, the unemployed, the idealists whose wide and widening circle of contacts kept them informed through the new electronic media of what it was they could and perhaps should be striving to achieve. For themselves and for their country. The speech of their reluctantly departing president who did for his country what he felt was needful, was heart wrenching in its sincerity and tone of puzzled regret.

For he did effectively give his life for his nation, in war and in peace. He achieved much in brokering his country back into the Arab League after it was expelled valuing peace with a neighbour over war, then ensuring that Egypt was once again installed as the Arab League's elder statesman-nation. He attempted to achieve what international powers could not; peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but that eluded him, too.

He opened the country to a new economic reality, but he could not create the job numbers that would employ the ever-expanding youth demographic. And, in the most populous Arab country of the world he was unable to conquer poverty and ignorance. His failing was an inability to envision Egypt as a nascent democracy, feeling that only he, his colleagues and the national defence forces were capable of governing and maintaining order.

Now that the ultimate demand of the anti-regime protesters has been met, the world remains witness to another suspense; how the larger theatre on display will play itself out.

"Egypt is the land of life and death ... I and Egypt will not part until I am buried in its soil."