Morsi verdict

The first democratically elected president in Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, has been sentenced to death. He was already serving a 2-year term on spurious charges of ordering to kill protesters outside the presidential palace when a fresh charge of jailbreak was slapped on him.
Were a democratically elected leader deposed by a military general and sentenced to death in any other country, western leaders and their media would have raised unending furore. In this case, leave alone the west, not a squeak from the Arab world.
As president, Morsi went out of his way to appease the military by protecting its interests. The constitution framed under the Brotherhood granted the armed forces the status of a ‘state within a state’ unaccountable to parliament. Neither did he interfere with the corporate interests of the armed forces.
Egyptian armed forces have had 30-40 percent stakes in the national economy via vast tracts of agriculture land, housing schemes and exclusive clubs. In the commercial and industrial sector, military-owned factories manufacture goods ranging from breakfast cereals to cement. Retired generals, admirals and air marshals head many national corporations.
Yet all good overtures by the first genuinely elected president failed to impress the army generals. Morsi, elected by 53 percent popular vote, had yet to celebrate the first anniversary of his government when General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a former spymaster and serving defence minister overthrew him in July 2013. Although the Morsi government’s brief stint was turbulent and there were street protests against his policies, it’s easy to understand who could have instigated such protests. Clearly, the powerful Egyptian military, addicted to power and its trappings over the decades, was behind the unrest. Military establishments in such countries have ways and means to destabilise the civilian governments.
With Morsi overthrown, courts had new instructions and pronounced the Brotherhood and its affiliate, Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, terrorists. Anyone supporting them amounted to supporting terrorism. Even journalists who reported on events in Egypt were blamed for aiding and abetting terrorists, and incarcerated. Three Al-Jazeera journalists, including an Australian – Peter Greste – had to spend 400 days in jail before his release on the intervention of the Australian foreign office. The Qatar based Al-Jazeera network incurred Sisi’s special wrath for supporting the Morsi regime.
Sentencing Morsi and scores others to death on trumped-up charges, the Egyptian judiciary earned for itself the notoriety of Kangaroo courts subservient to the Egyptian military. The order of the death sentence has been referred to the country’s top clergy, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, for opinion. (Recall Sheikhul Islam Prof Dr Tahirul Qadri during his famous dharnas in Islmabad dressed like the Chief Mufti of Egypt).
Morsi is no bigoted and conservative religious leader – as the west portrays him. A metallurgical engineer by profession, he graduated from Cairo University and went on to earn his PhD in material sciences from the University of Southern California. It’s another matter that the western-educated and enlightened Morsi considered 9/11 an inside job and felt that the Arabs had no role in it. With this mindset, he could have never survived in Israel’s neighbourhood.
However, among Muslim leaders, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the only one who unequivocally condemned Morsi’s death sentence. An official of US state department also criticised the decision – only as part of the diplomatic niceties reserved for such occasions.
We remember how John Kerry was deeply concerned when Gen Sisi overthrew Morsi but the US military aid of $1.3 billion to Egyptian army was restored rather quickly. It only meant: keep marching, general. General Sisi, young as he is, will likely outlast most Egypt watchers. The Egyptian people are in for a long, hot summer
The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore.
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