Messages From Tahrir

Former President Mursi of Egypt died in court yesterday as he stood trial facing yet more trumped up charges.  His treatment in prison during the last six years since his overthrow has been described as state torture - no medicine for serious health conditions, solitary confinement for 23 hours per day and only three family visits in all those years.

In Egypt's Parade of Presidents since 1952, no-one, like Sisi, has so turned on his predecessor, mainly because he was always a fellow soldier and not a democratically-elected president - the country's first.

Mursi did not preside well in the single year he had in power. I was there and witnessed his impact first hand. His narrow election win, only saw him rule narrowly for his Islamist base and he also passed a decree putting him above judicial review.

Here is my eye witness account of his last public appearance on national television on 27th June 2013, followed by a piece written today by Declan Walsh, the New York Times Cairo Bureau Chief, with whom I am in contact with a view to meeting during my next trip to Cairo.   He gives a chilling account of events over the years.

Me - 27th June 2013

Mursi gave a televised address last night which lasted nearly three hours.   He cut a solitatry figure as he stood behind the podium in the centre of a low stage some distance from his seated audience in the modern auditorium.     

Long national addresses seem to be the way of dictators.   I remember watching Sadat speak for hours on TV every night to his people when I was in Assyut, a focal point of unrest in Middle Egypt, a week before he was assassinated.   ‘His people’ in the sense that a jailer has his people behind bars.

Mursi issued self-deprecating mea culpas and called for the opposition to work with him in the national interest.   His credibility is open to question: there haven’t been any substantive talks with the opposition in the past year and sexual torture remains the staple diet of his information gatherers in his prisons; ‘Pass me the broom handle,’ is the imperative in this day and age of iPhones and Galaxies.  

When the broadcast ended, I noticed that the applause from the member of parliament audience was strongest among those wearing beards, likely to be his own party members, and merely polite from others.  Those wearing uniforms looked non-plussed. 

At the end, Mursi stepped from behind his podium taking one or two hesitant steps forward and raised his arms a few times in salute.  He resembled a mechanical wind-up toy with none of the natural swagger or confidence of a man in charge.  This impression emphasised that he acts as the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide.   Mursi was unknown before being thrust into the presidential election spotlight and tonight he appeared forlorn and adrift.

The camera tracked back to show a wide-angle view of the auditorium from the rear.    As the applause petered out those seated in the front row picked up their briefcases and made for the exit pretty smartish.   Mursi noticed, abruptly turned to his right and followed suit.   The technicians came on stage, unplugged the microphones from the podium and began to coil their cables for storage.   I wonder if Mursi will remain unplugged. 

And Declan's long but very worthwhile read, if you want the fullest of pictures . . . available in public in the NYT website.

Declan Walsh and David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, 18th June 2019

Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's First Democratically Elected President Dies

KHARTOUM, Sudan — Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, collapsed and died while on trial in a Cairo courtroom on Monday, six years after the military ousted him in tumultuous circumstances that pushed Egypt back to autocratic rule.

Egyptian authorities gave no official cause of death, but critics blamed the poor conditions in the prison where Mr. Morsi had spent the past six years. They said the authorities had deprived him of vital medicine for diabetes, high blood pressure and liver disease; held him in solitary confinement for long periods; and ignored repeated public warnings that the lack of proper medical care could be fatal.

“I think there is a very strong case to be made that this was criminal negligence, deliberate malfeasance in providing Morsi basic prisoner rights,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director for the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, said Monday. “He was very obviously singled out for mistreatment.”

His death was a somber milestone in Egypt’s ill-fated democratic transition after the Arab Spring in 2011. Mr. Morsi, 67, won Egypt’s first free presidential election in 2012 as a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, but was removed from power a year later in a military takeover. Since then he has faced a raft of charges including terrorism, spying and breaking out of prison in trials that human rights groups say are deeply flawed.

He was in court to face espionage charges on Monday afternoon when he fell unconscious and died, Nabil Sadek, Egypt’s prosecutor general, said in a statement.

Mr. Morsi had spoken for five minutes from the glass cage where prisoners are kept before the hearing was adjourned, Mr. Sadek said. Moments later Mr. Morsi collapsed and was rushed to a hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

In his final comments, Mr. Morsi continued to insist that he was Egypt’s legitimate president, one of his lawyers told The Associated Press.

The first freely elected president in Arab history, and the first Islamist to occupy that role, Mr. Morsi was elected on June 17, 2012, seven years to the day before he died. His election was the apex of the Arab Spring uprising, and a high point for the Muslim Brotherhood, a 91-year-old Islamist movement founded in Egypt and whose influence extends across the Arab world.

For many Egyptians, Mr. Morsi’s election was their greatest hope for a definitive break with the country’s long history of autocracy after decades of harsh and corrupt rule under President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted in the 2011 uprising.

Some Egyptians worried he might impose strict Islamic moral codes, while critics in Washington and around the region raised alarms that he might even seek to establish a form of theocratic rule.

Mr. Morsi surprised many by seeking cordial relations with the United States and maintaining diplomatic ties with Israel. He developed a warm working relationship with President Barack Obama, and the two men worked together to help stop a bout of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the fall of 2012.

But at home, Mr. Morsi’s rule was troubled from the start. He governed clumsily, at one point issuing a decree that critics said put him above the rule of law. Supporters said the decree was part of his efforts to grapple with a hostile security establishment that was actively maneuvering to undermine his authority.

In the early summer of 2013 giant protests against Mr. Morsi filled Tahrir Square, the crucible of the 2011 uprising, providing the military with an excuse to oust him. His defense minister, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, seized power on July 3, 2013. Six weeks later, Egyptian security forces shot dead at least 817 protesters, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, in what human rights groups called the largest mass shooting of demonstrators in recent history.

Mr. el-Sisi was elected president in 2014 and he still rules the country with an iron grip, with Egypt’s democratic hopes largely extinguished. A referendum in April to allow Mr. el-Sisi to remain in power until 2030 was passed overwhelmingly in a flawed vote that allowed no opposition voices.

Egyptian television channels, which are tightly controlled by the security services, offered equivocal coverage of Mr. Morsi’s death. Some did not interrupt their usual programming to report the demise of a former president.

Other channels aired footage portraying the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. “Lies are an integral part of the Muslim Brotherhood,” said a voice on CBC Extra, a private station, after a segment that showed Islamic State fighters threatening to attack Egyptian soldiers. There was no immediate comment from President el-Sisi’s office.

The handful of people in Egypt willing to speak sympathetically about Mr. Morsi avoided his politics and focused on the conditions of his detention. “He was a victim of brutal prison conditions,” Gamal Eid, a lawyer and human rights advocate, said by phone from Cairo.

Mr. Morsi had been charged with various crimes in politicized trials that have dragged through Egypt’s slow-moving courts. In 2016 his son, Abdullah, told The New York Times that the family feared the former president might fall into a diabetic coma.

Unlike most prisoners in Egyptian prisons, Mr. Morsi was barred from receiving deliveries of food and medicine from his family, said Ms. Whitson of Human Rights Watch. In addition to being held in solitary confinement, he was denied access to news media, letters or other communication with the outside world. His wife and other family members were allowed visit just three times in the six years he was imprisoned.

In March of last year, a panel of British politicians and lawyers reviewing his treatment concluded that Mr. Morsi received “inadequate medical care, particularly inadequate management of his diabetes and inadequate management of his liver disease.”

Failure to address his care, the group warned, could put Mr. Morsi’s life in danger. In a statement on Monday, Crispin Blunt, a member of Parliament who led the panel, said: “Sadly, we have been proved right.”

Mr. Sadek, the Egyptian prosecutor, ordered an immediate investigation into the cause of death. In a statement he said he would seek Mr. Morsi’s medical file and order a committee to prepare a report on the cause of death. Investigators will use surveillance footage from the courtroom and question witnesses who were with Mr. Morsi when he died, the statement said.

After overthrowing Mr. Morsi, Mr. el-Sisi sought to banish the Muslim Brotherhood, calling it a terrorist group and sparing little effort to discredit it among the Egyptian public. Most Brotherhood leaders are in jail or exile, and thousands of its members languish in Egypt’s crowded prisons.

In April, President Trump pushed to designate the Brotherhood a terrorist organization under pressure from Mr. el-Sisi, a close ally. The Pentagon and State Department objected, saying the group did not meet the definition of a terrorist entity.

Mr. Morsi was born into a family of modest means in Sharqiya, in the Nile Delta. He earned a Ph.D. in material science from the University of Southern California and later taught at Zagazig University, near Sharqiya. He was almost unknown to the Egyptian public, and most Islamists, before he ran for president in 2012.

The Brotherhood initially chose a more dynamic and well-known figure as its candidate. Mr. Morsi, the understudy, only got the nomination only when the first choice was disqualified. Speaking privately, many Brotherhood members now fault Mr. Morsi for his failures during the year he spent in office, in particular his failure to build broader public support and to outmanoeuvre the hostile security services and Mr. el-Sisi.

Mr. Morsi never led the Brotherhood, a position held by its Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, since 2010. Mr. Badie was also imprisoned in 2013 and has been sentenced to seven terms of life imprisonment and a death sentence in various trials since then.

Mr. Morsi’s death is unlikely to have much effect on the current direction of the group, already driven deep underground by the crackdown that followed his ouster. Peter Mandaville, a professor at George Mason University and a former adviser to the State Department on political Islam, argued that Mr. Morsi’s death was resonating beyond the Brotherhood with other Egyptians who voted for him or “have concerns about the current government’s human rights record.”

“You already see it on Egyptian social media,” Professor Mandaville said. “Everybody is qualifying it with ‘this guy was a flawed politician and president’ but saying that what happened here today tells us something about the current state of the rule of law and respect for rights in Egypt.”

Mr. Morsi’s son Ahmed mourned his father on Facebook, writing: “Father, we will meet again, with God.”