In the nearly three months since the revolution in Egypt, the popular imagination of the Arab world’s largest country has been gripped by a new obsession: how to mete justice to ex-President Hosni Mubarak and high-ranking members of his regime, including his two sons.
Some Egyptians want clean, flat-out revenge, with punishments handed out and heads rolling. At the least, they want the men they blame for Egypt’s woes held accountable and they want something back as compensation for the billions of dollars they allege the regime stole from the public through corruption. “The trial is the most important thing right now — to convict the ex-president and the ex-regime,” says Ali Mokhtar al-Qatan, who spent 14 years behind bars after criticizing Mubarak to his face when both men were on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1993. “If we say it’s a bad house, we need to tear it down to build it again.”
