Egyptian democracy died yesterday in a prison cage alongside Morsi
Robert Fisk
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The West is silent over the death of a man it once called the great hope of Arab democracy
Ye Gods, how brave was our response to the outrageous death-in-a-cage of Mohamed Morsi. It is perhaps a little tiresome to repeat all the words of regret and mourning, of revulsion and horror, of eardrum-busting condemnation pouring forth about the death of Egypt’s only elected president in his Cairo courtroom this week. From Downing Street and from the White House, from the German Chancellery to the Elysee – and let us not forget the Berlaymont – our statesmen and women did us proud. Wearying it would be indeed to dwell upon their remorse and protests at Morsi’s death.For it was absolutely non-existent: zilch; silence; not a mutter; not a bird’s twitter – or a mad president’s Twitter, for that matter – or even the most casual, offhand word of regret. Those who claim to represent us were mute, speechless, as sound-proofed as Morsi was in his courtroom cage and as silent as he is now in his Cairo grave.It was as if Morsi never lived, as if his few months in power never existed – which is pretty much what Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, his nemesis and ex-gaoler, wants the history books to say.So three cheers again for our parliamentary democracies, which always speak with one voice about tyranny. Save for the old UN donkey and a few well-known bastions of freedom – Turkey, Malaysia, Qatar, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-in-exile and all the usual suspects – Morsi’s memory and his final moments were as if they had never been. Crispin Blunt alone has tried to keep Britain’s conscience alive. So has brave little Tunisia. Much good will it do.Yes, it’s true that Morsi was a second-choice president – the man the Brotherhood originally chose was barred from standing on a technicality – and it’s correct to say that Morsi’s near-year in power was also second-rate, uninspiring, disappointing, occasionally violent and tinged by a little dictatorial ambition of his own. Trotting out of cabinet meetings to phone his chums in the Brotherhood for advice was not exactly running a government through primus inter pares.But he was not a bad man. He was not a terrorist and he did not lock up 60,000 political prisoners like his successor – who is, of course, regarded as “a great guy” by the other great guy in the White House.It’s instructive to note how differently Morsi was treated after the coup d’etat that destroyed him. Banged up in solitary, unable to talk to his own family, deprived of medical help; just compare that to the comfort in which his predecessor Hosni Mubarak lived after his own dethronement – the constant hospital treatment, family visits, public expressions of sympathy and even a press interview. Morsi’s last words, defending his status as the still existing president of Egypt, were mechanically muffled by the sound-proof cage.Our pusillanimous, disgraceful silence is not just proof of the pathetic nature of our public servants in the west. It is positive encouragement to every leader in the Middle East that their misdeeds will go unpunished, unthought of, that justice will remain unredeemed and history books unread. Our silence – let us be frank about it – is not going to have the Bin Salmans or Assads or the princes of the Gulf or the militias of Libya, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq shaking in their boots. Nor, of course, Sisi.But yes, for many millions of Arab Muslims, Morsi was a martyr – if you imagine that martyrs have a cause. The trials and executions and mass imprisonments of the Brotherhood, “a terrorist organisation” in the eyes of Sisi (and almost in David Cameron’s until his security flunkeys told him it was a non-starter) will not destroy it. But are there any other Morsis around, willing to risk death in a prison cell as a price of their overthrow? Morsi himself told one of his senior advisers, Egyptian-Canadian physician and academic Wael Haddara, that if he could navigate Egypt towards democracy, he expected to be assassinated. Which, I suppose – given his ill treatment, isolation and unfair trials – was his ultimate fate.The only western newspaper to give a friend of Morsi a chance to speak about him appears to be the Washington Post – all praise to it – which allowed Haddara the room to demand that Egypt must answer for the ex-president’s death. At a last meeting before he became president in June of 2012, Haddara asked Morsi to autograph an Egyptian flag.And this is what Morsi wrote: “The Egypt that lives in my imagination: an Egypt of values and civilisation; an Egypt of growth and stability and love. And its flag, ever soaring above us.”Would that a crackpot president or our own ignorant Tory masters were capable of such eloquence – or such honour.
Mohamed Morsi's death was utterly predictable, truly outrageous and, in my view, arguably a case of murder.
To me, when you die in a dictator's prison – even if you are not Egypt's only elected president – then you are in some sense, murdered. It doesn't matter if it's the solitary confinement, the lack of medical treatment or the isolation. It is of no relevance that the court is unfair, the charges frivolous, the sentence mortifying. A prisoner residing in such circumstances awaits death every day, unless the gates open, which they were never going to do for President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt.
I use his official title because a president overthrown in a military coup remains an elected president. Just as the man who staged the coup must now also be called President Abdul-Fattah al-Sisi. The first title represents honour. The second title represents reality.
Morsi won the second round of his presidential vote with just over 51 per cent. Sisi last year scored just over 97 per cent. The figures speak for themselves, do they not? The first represents democracy. The second represents what I can only describe as the infantilisation of Egypt.
In one sense, Egyptian democracy finally died in that Cairo prison cage. No wonder Morsi's burial was swift and largely secret.
Not that poor old Morsi was himself a romantic figure. His elected presidency – which lasted less than a year – was shambolic, itself corrupted, increasingly brutal and very, very arrogant. The Muslim Brotherhood has always suffered from vanity, which is why it stayed out of the 2011 Egyptan revolution until Mubarak's fall was certain – and why Morsi himself began talking to the army (his future nemesis) before the violence had ended.
But symbolism counts when the last elected president of a country dies in front of his own judges, in a cage used for felons, denied, according to his son, even a public funera
We can imagine the reaction to the family's request: Morsi was on trial for his life on charges for espionage because he was in contact with Hamas. The fact that it was one of his presidential tasks to organise ceasefires between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, a function which his successor has also dutifully undertaken, is neither here nor there. Field Marshal President Sisi (to give him his two legal titles) will not be tried for espionage because his military policies include the safety of Israel's southern border.
One can only imagine the reaction of the judges at Morsi's latest trial when the man elected president in 2012 suddenly collapsed on the floor. To be prepared to sentence the man to the gallows, only to witness the defendant go to meet his maker earlier than planned, must have provoked a unique concentration of judicial minds.
But could they have been surprised? Morsi’s family had long protested his lack of medical treatment. Human rights groups had done the same. He had suffered 23-hours-a-day solitary confinement.
The world's media and the world's statesmen, however, largely ignored these denunciations. Morsi was a has-been, his court reappearances a bore. All that was surprising was that he managed to talk – or try to talk – to his judges for five minutes before he departed their jurisdiction forever.
Three family visits in almost six years of solitary, no access to his lawyers, even to a doctor – the evidence suggests that his death must have been hoped for by his jailers, his judges and the one man in Egypt who cannot be contradicted.
Long has Sisi attempted to conflate the Muslim Brotherhood with al-Qaeda, with Isis, with the assailants of Christian churches and Christian lives. If Isis and Hamas and the Brotherhood are all now blamed together for the Islamist uprising in Sinai and the atrocities in Cairo, do we really think there were any expressions of regret among Sisi's colleagues when word came that the 67-year-old diabetic had conveniently saved the government a hangman's fees?
And of course there was no public funeral. It's one thing to use the word “terrorist” about the Brotherhood, quite another to call every man and woman shot down in a funeral terrorists.
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