We don't need another pharaoh

As we hope for the Egyptians who have mobilised peacefully against their political and economic suffocation, we must not overlook the Egyptian army officer Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli. His legacy has reverberated across the Arab world for almost 30 years.

On October 6, 1981, Islambouli, a 26-year-old graduate of the Egyptian Military Academy, and officer in the bombardment forces, was chosen, at late notice, to replace another officer in the annual military parade before the President of Egypt. Elaborate security precautions had been taken to protect President Anwar Sadat. He was surrounded by bodyguards. Soldiers participating in the parade were not allowed ammunition for their weapons.

The caution was prudent. An organisation called the Egyptian Islamic Jihad had infiltrated the military and prepared a violent coup. The trigger for the group's desire to decapitate the government was Sadat's decision to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. This had enraged the Islamists. The chief strategist of the coup was deep inside Egypt's security apparatus, Colonel Abbud al-Zumar, an officer in military intelligence. Using numerous armed cells within the military and beyond, he planned to assassinate the president and other leaders in the government, and take control of the headquarters of the army, state security, state television, state radio and the Cairo telephone exchange and announce an Islamic revolution. This was expected to mobilise the streets in support.

After the plot was uncovered in February 1981, Sadat ordered a sweep of 1500 people, amid much negative publicity. All the coup's ringleaders were arrested but one cell inside the military was missed. Its leader was Lieutenant Islambouli. On the day of the October 6 military parade, he and three other soldiers who were members of his cell secreted ammunition into their automatic weapons. Islambouli also armed himself with grenades before they boarded a troop truck taking part in the parade. As the truck passed the VIP viewing stand Islambouli jumped down onto the parade ground and walked towards Sadat, who was standing, saluting, in his general's uniform.

As air force jets roared over in formation, creating an unintended distraction, Islambouli lobbed three grenades into the grandstand (only one exploded) then began firing his automatic rifle at the president. His three fellow assassins rose in the truck and also began firing. Sadat was the primary target but not the only target. In an attack lasting about 100 seconds, 12 people were murdered and another 28 wounded.

Islambouli kept firing until his assault rifle was empty. He made no attempt to flee. People had started throwing chairs in front of the president to protect him from the attack, but by the time stunned security police began firing back, killing two of the assassins, Sadat was already dying. Egypt's vice-president, the former air chief marshal, Hosni Mubarak, was wounded.

While Mubarak took control of the government, Islambouli was tried and sentenced to death along with three co-conspirators. He was executed by public firing squad in 1982. Numerous Islamic groups proclaimed him a martyr. The Iranian government, which by then had severed relations with Egypt, named a street after Islambouli in Tehran (now named Intifada Street.)

Egypt, and the entire Arab world, is still paying a heavy price for the actions of Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli. Under corrupt military rule, half of Egypt's population lives on subsistence income. Economic growth has been stagnant for a decade. Government debt has ballooned. Income inequality is extreme. Government control of the economy is excessive. State bureaucracy is incoherent. A quarter of young men are unemployed. Sixty per cent of women are unemployed. The police and internal security are heavy-handed, as was seen openly in Cairo last week.

Egypt's government justified this heavy hand - which includes the President's personal enrichment of billions of dollars - as the price for security against violent revolution and repressive theocracy.

Mubarak's near-death experience on the parade ground was followed by other assassination attempts against him by Islamic fundamentalists over the years. His paranoia was always well-founded. The Middle East's only previous experience of a grassroots revolt was in Iran, where what began as a pluralist revolution quickly became subjugated by Islamist terror. Leftists and feminists were murdered in their thousands as the Islamist militants took control. After 32 years in power, the Iranian theocracy remains a repressive occupying force.

Because Egypt sits at the centre of the Arab world as the largest, oldest and deepest culture in Arab civilisation its government's repression and economic and political stasis have been a benchmark for politics in the Arab world. Of the 16 Arab nations, not one is an open democracy. The words ''Arab'' and ''democracy'' have never coexisted in the same sentence as a political reality because of a third word, ''Islam'', which is not merely a religion, it is a system ordering the entirety of society, from government to law to social mores.

If the Egyptian people can break the shackles that Arab Islam, and the threats from the minority of violent Muslim fundamentalists, have directly or indirectly placed on democracy and individual freedom, especially for women, they will have gone where no Arab society has gone before. While the army remains strong, and protects the democrats, Egypt can follow the Turkish model, and avoid the Iranian disaster.

This is the burden the people on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria are carrying, in addition to the burden of Mubarak, the 82-year-old plutocrat, with his multi-billions, his corrupt government, his 30 years of ''emergency rule'', and his grandiose notion that his son, Gamal, 47, could replace him as president. Another pharaoh was the last thing Egypt needed.