Mubarak was out of touch in his own village

KAFR EL-MOSEILHA, Sunday

When Hosni Mubarak, then an aloof young military officer, returned to his Nile Delta hometown to bury his mother he was so disliked, according to residents, he was told to find another burial site.

“They told him: ‘You have nothing left here’,” said Sabri Nabawi, a local school principal, giving a history lesson from behind his desk.
The residents of Kafr el-Moseilha insist they are as pleased as any other town in Egypt to see Mubarak fall.

Once a small village from where a young Mubarak would set out every morning to attend school several kilometres away, Kafr el-Moseilha is now a large neighbourhood of the sprawling city of Shibin el-Kom.

Youthful, smiling

A picture of a youthful, smiling Mubarak on a sign pointing the way to the school named after him has been defaced.

Close by, someone has scrawled on a wall, “Islam is the solution” — the motto of Mubarak’s foes in the Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement. But Kafr el-Moseilha’s residents say their grievances are not religious.

“This village is a slice of Egypt. All Egypt wants freedom. It all suffered the same,” Nabawi says.

The town, says Mohammed al-Shirbani, an elementary school teacher, perhaps suffered even more because it boasted a large number of college graduates who could not find jobs.

“I won’t lie. Some here felt sadness to see him leave the way they did. They think his dignity was part of theirs. But the youth, they didn’t think: ‘Oh, he’s from here’. They were only thinking of freedom,” Shirbani says.

Mubarak, born in 1928, left the village to go to military academy, from where he ascended to become air force chief and finally president.

He would never return to visit, the residents complain. “He never identified with the village, he had no roots here,” Mr Shirbani says.

Residents say the Mubarak was cold, imposing, like the large fresco of the veteran president that decorates the Hosni Mubarak youth club, next to the Hosni Mubarak school, not far from Hosni Mubarak Street.

“Mubarak always dealt with life like a pilot — always up in the air and distant from the people below. This wouldn’t have happened to him if he weren’t so distant,” said Mr Nabawi.

“Mubarak didn’t like to flatter. As a person, I think he hated corruption, the corruption came with the new generation brought in over the past 10 years,” said Mustapha al-Fikki.