Hosni Mubarak: the dictator who got away with murder
Hosni Mubarak's exoneration by a Cairo court shows how little has changed since Arab spring
In February 2011, delirious and near-disbelieving Egyptians in the capital's Tahrir Square danced and sang as they welcomed the fall of a dictator who had maintained iron control of this ancient land for the entire life span of many in the crowd.
But in a place where the past is always vividly present - if only as a glimpse of the pyramids on the horizon - what seems consigned to history sometimes rebounds.
On Saturday, Hosni Mubarak, frail but still defiant at 86, permitted himself a small, tight smile of satisfaction as a Cairo judge pronounced invalid, on largely technical grounds, the charges that he had been complicit in the killings of hundreds of demonstrators who had fought to oust him. Egypt's autocratic ruler of three decades' standing was poised to perhaps soon walk free.
The verdict sparked a deadly clash in Tahrir Square between security forces and about 2,000 outraged protesters, which killed two people and wounded nine.
Egypt was not the first of the countries whose long-oppressed peoples threw in their lot with the so-called Arab spring - the uprisings that swept a Middle East long beset by hidebound and repressive regimes.
Syria has descended into a savage civil war. Oil-rich Libya is riven by competing militias. Tiny Bahrain's Shiite majority, hoping to win consummate rights, still simmers. In Yemen, the US lends semi-covert military muscle - as in a raid days ago - on behalf of a central government that maintains only a modicum of control.