The Morsi death sentence

The Arab spring that started with days of hope and optimism has in many of the countries it touched turned to ashes. For Egypt, the deposing of a dictator who was loved by some and hated by others led to an election, which saw Mohamed Morsi elected as president. His reign was short. He may have been democratically elected but inclusive politics did not seem to be on his agenda and the polarities and schisms in Egyptian society led in its turn to the army overthrowing him, organising another election which to the surprise of nobody saw a general elected as president. Regimes have a tendency to take revenge on whoever ruled before they came to power, and Egypt is no exception. Morsi has now been sentenced to death for his role in a 2011 prison breakout, and along with 105 others, his sentence will be referred to the Grand mufti, the highest religious authority in the country, for confirmation probably on June 2.

Amnesty International has been swift to condemn the sentence, as have a number of other international human rights organisations as well as individual states. Turkey in particular has been critical, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying that the Western nations were being hypocritical, banning the death sentence in their own countries and turning a blind eye to the hundreds of death sentences being handed down in Egypt. Amnesty International has called the trial that found Morsi guilty a “charade” which was “based on void procedures”. Morsi was held incommunicado for two months and did not have a lawyer. The courts appear now to be a tool of government and used to silence political dissent, a return to the dictatorship that the Egyptian people thought they had seen the last of when they overthrew Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. The military is now in complete control; a control which has been legitimised through a fig-leaf of democratic elections that did nothing to resolve the polarity revealed by the election that brought Morsi to power. The Arab spring has taken Egypt full circle, and back to square one.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 20^th, 2015.

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