The Assassination of Anwar el-Sadat 30 Years On

Thirty years ago today, on October 6, 1981, while observing the Armed Forces Day military parade commemorating the Yom Kippur War, Anwar el-Sadat, Egypt’s leader from 1970, was gunned down by Muslim extremists—just three years after he had concluded the historic Camp David Accords peace with Israel.
He would not be the last Middle East peacemaker to be killed by his own people—14 years later Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin would be assassinated by a Jewish extremist while attending a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
Following Sadat’s assassination, Hosni Mubarak took the reins of power in Egypt and held power until a mass uprising this year resulted in his ouster.  With the events of this year still fresh, to reflect on the long-term effects of Sadat’s assassination on domestic Egyptian politics, and here’s what the views:

Many of the political and economic grievances that brought protesters into the street in January of 2011 trace back to Sadat’s presidency. At the time of his death, Sadat was deeply unpopular in Egypt for his economic liberalization program, his pro-Western foreign policy, and his use of Egypt’s internal security forces as a means of suppressing dissent. Egyptians’ muted response to his death—compared with the outpouring of public grief that accompanied the funeral of his predecessor, Gamal Abd al-Nasser—indicated the extent of popular anger.

Sadat’s assassination left Egypt in the hands of Hosni Mubarak, a cautious leader committed to maintaining the status quo. As a result, many of the problems that Mubarak inherited from Sadat grew worse over his three decades in power. After Sadat’s assassination, Mubarak led aggressive campaigns against Islamist militants and activists, and the internal security forces continued to exercise unrestrained power against the regime’s opponents. Torture and arbitrary detention remained commonplace. Political reforms were mostly cosmetic. The Mubarak presidency also produced an extended period of economic stagnation—his tentative policies failed to reduce inequality, while high unemployment and rampant corruption convinced Egyptians that under Mubarak, the rich and poor played by different rules.

One striking aspect of Sadat’s assassination is that it didn’t produce much change in Egypt. If anything, Sadat’s killers only succeeded in strengthening a form of government that they objected to. So far, the Egyptian protesters appear to have achieved much more through non-violence.