of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Death in slow-mo
Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s only elected president died last week after collapsing in a courtroom, the place where his face has been seen most often, behind metal bars, since he was removed from power in 2013.
The old tyrant Hosni Mubarak whom Morsi had replaced in 2011 in the wake of the Tahrir Square protests, died in pampered confinement. Not so his successor, held in solitary confinement for six years – thanks to the hard hearted Pharaoh who followed him.
Morsi’s fall led to a military regime more brutal and corrupt than any that preceded it, and with full support from the US and it’s European allies, and of the Egyptian elites, has consolidated the rise and rise of Egypt’s new rais and of the Arab autocrats who have transformed an already volatile Middle East into a powder keg.
Veteran journalists Robert Fisk and David Hearst are among the few to have called out the deafening silence of the world when Morsi died in the dock (see their tributes below). It’s was like as if a tree falls in the forest – does anybody hear? Certainly not the pusillanimous, obsequious rulers of the so-called “free world”. “How useful it is”, Hearst wrote, “for Western leaders to shrug their shoulders and say, in true Orientalist fashion, that a regime such as Sisi’s is business as usual in a “rough neighbourhood”.”
It was if he had never lived. And death in the dock was perhaps the only way he could escape – he had in a fashion been rescued and gone home to his family and to those who had supported him through his long travail.
Sixty seven year old Morsi was imprisoned in 2013 after being toppled in a military coup by Egypt’s current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He was back in court facing a retrial on charges including espionage – part of a swag of cases that had initially seen him sentenced to death.
Egypt had only known a handful of military rulers until Mubarak was ousted in February 2011, following weeks of protests centred around Cairo’s Tahrir Square. These were the heady days of the brief “Arab Spring” and the fall of longtime dictators Zine el Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak. It was precipitated by the yearning of their oppressed and impoverished people, and particularly the young, for freedom, justice, dignity and employment, and an end to endemic corruption, nepotism and brutality.
When elections were held a year later, Morsi, standing for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, emerged as president. After decades of repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Egypt’s military rulers, Morsi promised a moderate agenda that would deliver an “Egyptian renaissance with an Islamic foundation”.
A year later, he was gone, replaced by And al Fatah al Sisi, his own defense minister, who threw him in jail and cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, putting hundreds of its members in front of courts that sentenced them to death in mass trials.
His year in office was turbulent, however, as Egypt’s competing forces struggled over the direction the country should go in. Opponents had accused him of trying to impose an Islamist agenda on the country and mass protests began on the anniversary of his election. After more than a week of spreading protests and violence and talks with Sisi in which Morsi reportedly was prepared to make concessions to the opposition, the army announced it had removed Morsi and taken control on 3rd July 2013.
Morsi’s supporters had gathered in Cairo’s Rabaa Square before he was toppled, and there they remained, demanding he be reinstated. On 13th August, the army moved in, clearing the square by force. More than a thousand people are believed to have been killed in the worst massacre of peaceful demonstrators since China’s Tienanmen Square in 1999.
Morsi faced a number of trials, including on charges of spying for Qatar and of participating in prison breaks and violence against policemen during the 2011 uprising against Mubarak and was sentenced to death and multiple decades-long prison sentences. However, the death sentence and others were overturned by Egypt’s appeals court in 2015, prompting the retrial proceedings.
The conditions in which Morsi and tens of thousands of jailed dissidents were being held, as well as concerns raised by his family and supporters about his state of health, had long attracted the attention of activists and international human rights organisations. British MPs warned in March 2018 that Morsi was facing an “early death” because of the conditions he was being held in, which included 23 hours a day of solitary confinement, sleeping on a cement floor and being fed only canned food. He was reportedly suffering from diabetic comas and was losing his eyesight.
Morsi collapsed on Monday inside the infamous cages in which defendants are held in Egypt’s courts, and was pronounced dead soon after. Egypt’s public prosecutor declared that a medical report showed no signs of recent injury.
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Morsi’s mixed legacy
Safeguard the revolution. Safeguard the revolution, which we have acquired with our sweat and with the blood of our martyrs, as well as with our two and a half year march. You should all safeguard it, whether you are supporters or opponents. Beware, lest the revolution is stolen from you. Mohamed Morsi’s last speech as president
David Hearst writes that for all his faults, Morsi was an honest man and a true democrat, but (that) for much of the year he was in power, he was not in control, caught up in a maelstrom that became too big for him.
Fisk adds: “ … 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”.
The world today appears to be the play-pen of the ‘big man’, and of it’s Arab equivalent, az-zaim, the boss: the autocrat with the big mouth and the large persona, with the power of patronage and the heft of the security services behind him – Tony Soprano bereft of all his redeeming features.
Morsi’s demise demonstrates to every ‘big man’ in the Middle East and beyond that their misdeeds will go unpunished and unthought of, that justice will remain unredeemed and history books unread. On the bleeding edges of the Middle East, the bin Salmans and Assads, the emirs of the Gulf, and the militias of Libya, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Sudan and Congo, will not be losing sleep. Nor, of course, will Abd al Fattah al Sisi.
Hearst writes: “The Egyptian president stands above the law – beyond elections and parliament, out of any legal reach, or indeed that of the constitution. All of these are his playthings; soft wax in his hands. He will rule for as long as he lives, as absolutely as anyone in Egypt or the Middle East. Asked if he backed the efforts to allow Sisi to stay in power for another 15 years, Trump said: “I think he’s doing a great job. I don’t know about the effort, I can just tell you he is doing a great job … great president.”
But whilst the caged Morsi died alone and unsung, he will be remembered.
He is mourned by many millions of Muslim Arabs the world over, a martyr for the faith and a symbol of what might have been. The grief is more a remembrance of what he stood for more and the brief flickering of happiness and hope that accompanied his ascension than for what he accomplished during his tenure. His presidency was brief and bewildered, caught between many rocks and hard places in th turbulent tides of the short-lived Aran Spring, between the seemingly irreconcilable demands of democracy and the deity, between what the Egyptian people wanted and needed, and between what his Ikhwan believed they needed, even if their conception of what was good for themselves and Allah was not what the youths of Tahrir Square, men and woman both, had fought and bled for.
Critics have argued that Morsi opened the door to the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood – and indeed, he appeared to dance to their tune – but it is his successor and el Sisi’s allies, financiers and armourers, west and east, who by their actions and indeed, inaction, who are stoking the fires of radical fundamentalism.
To borrow from Bruce Cockburn, keep millions of people down down takes more than a strong arm up your sleeve.
There will be a reckoning.
There will be hell to pay.
A thundercloud
And they’re going to hear from me
The KIng of the Hill
The West is silent over the death of a man it once called the great hope of Arab democracy
Robert Fisk, The Independent, 21st June 2019
The lack of comment from our heads of state is positive encouragement to every Middle Eastern leader who now knows their own misdeeds will go unpunished
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.
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.
Egypt’s first democratically elected president met an end as dramatic as his one and only year in power. The man feted on social media as Egypt’s ‘martyr president’ will enjoy a status in death that he never achieved in life. The date alone on which it happened is significant. Mohamed Morsi died on 17 June, seven years to the day from the second round of his presidential election.
For all of his time in prison, Morsi was held in solitary confinement. He was allowed only three visits from his family in nearly six years. The state had ample opportunity to kill off a diabetic who suffered from high blood pressure in private, but if they wanted to convince the Egyptian people that their former president was dead, the job would have to be done in public, which is what Monday’s events were all about.
The cruellest pharaoh
We will never know the truth. Morsi’s nemesis, the man he handpicked to lead the army and who went on to depose him, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, will never allow for an international investigation. Egypt is ruled by a pharaoh as absolute and cruel as any in its long history.
But even if Morsi died of natural causes, who are the people responsible before the court of history?
How easy and convenient it would be to place all the blame for Morsi’s death on Sisi himself. How useful it is for Western leaders to shrug their shoulders and say, in true Orientalist fashion, that a regime such as Sisi’s is business as usual in a “rough neighbourhood”.
Another variation on the same theme was former US President Barack Obama’s private reaction to the massacre at Rabaa Square in the weeks following the military coup. He reportedly told aides that the US could not help Egypt if Egyptians kill each other. That comment alone explains why the West is in decay: Obama’s reaction to the worst massacre since Tienanmen Square was to go back to his game of golf.
Morsi was held in solitary confinement for nearly six years. How many times in that period did Western leaders put pressure on Sisi to get access to him? None.
When State Department aides attempted to convince the former secretary of state, John Kerry, of the need to pressure Sisi to allow the Red Cross access to detainees in prison, Kerry rounded on him: “Give me a policy the Egyptians will not scream at me for,” a source with knowledge of the incident later told me.
Above the law
How many high-profile visits was Sisi allowed to make during the period of Morsi’s detention? He was feted on the international stage all over the world. France flogged him Mistral class warships. Germany flogged him submarines.
In Sharm el-Sheikh this year, Sisi was allowed to play host to world leaders from the EU and Arab League, purporting to uphold the world order. Far from taking lectures on human rights at the summit, Sisi gave them. Talking of the spike this year in executions, he told European leaders that executing detainees was part of “our humanity”, which is different from “your [European] humanity”.
“The global rules-based order is clearly under threat,” opined European Council President Donald Tusk. “We have agreed here in Sharm el-Sheikh that both sides will work together to defend it. Multilateral solutions remain the best way to address threats to international peace and security.”
What, Mr Tusk, has Sisi to do with the “rules-based” order? Who are you kidding?
The Egyptian president stands above the law – beyond elections and parliament, out of any legal reach, or indeed that of the constitution. All of these are his playthings; soft wax in his hands. He will rule for as long as he lives, as absolutely as anyone in Egypt or the Middle East.
Morsi rotted in jail, forgotten by all but a handful of human rights advocates, who found themselves screaming into an empty room. The world moved on and forgot all about the man to whom they had briefly flocked.
With the arrival of US President Donald Trump, Sisi’s suppression of his political opponents was not simply sidelined; it was lauded. Asked if he backed the efforts to allow Sisi to stay in power for another 15 years, Trump said: “I think he’s doing a great job. I don’t know about the effort, I can just tell you he is doing a great job … great president.”
So who is responsible for Morsi’s death? Look around you. They call themselves the leaders of the free world.
Morsi’s legacy
Morsi did not die in vain, although it may seem like that today. I and my fellow journalist Patrick Kingsley were the last journalists to interview him, just a week before his ouster. Morsi struck me as a good man in the middle of events that were rapidly sliding out of his control. Even the palace in which we filmed him was not his main seat of power, from which he and his staff had been moved earlier. Power was slipping from his grasp, even as he proclaimed to me that he had absolute faith in the army.
He was better one-on-one than in public. He could communicate privately far better than he did publicly.
His speeches often failed to be understood, but he made two important ones during his time as president. The first was the day he was sworn in as president. Morsi wanted to be sworn in, in Tahrir Square, in front of the revolution that had brought him to power. He was told that it had to be in front of the Constitutional Court, packed full of the deep state, with members who vowed by hook or by crook to oppose him.
In the end, in true Morsi fashion, he was sworn in twice – once before the court and the deep state, the other before the Egyptian people in Tahrir Square.
What he said in Tahrir Square is worth repeating. “People of Egypt, you are the source of the authority. You give it to whoever you want and deny it from whoever you want,” Morsi said.
And he meant it. This is closely based on a verse in the Quran, which says that God gives glory to whomever he wants, and he takes it away from whomever he wants. But here was an Islamist telling the people that they were sovereign.
‘Safeguard the revolution’
His last speech as president bore an equally resonant democratic message. He addressed future generations.
“I want to safeguard the girls. They will be future mothers who will teach their children that their fathers and forefathers were truly men who do not succumb to injustice and who never go along with the opinions of the corrupt and who would never give up on their homeland or their legitimacy.
“Safeguard the revolution. Safeguard the revolution, which we have acquired with our sweat and with the blood of our martyrs, as well as with our 2.5-year march. You should all safeguard it, whether you are supporters or opponents. Beware, lest the revolution is stolen from you.”
Which is exactly what happened. The revolution was stolen by more than just the army, which was never going to allow a Muslim Brotherhood president to continue. It was stolen by Cairo’s elite class of liberals, who decried Morsi as an Islamist dictator. It was stolen by the politicians who lied that Morsi had seized all power for himself and was incapable of sharing it.
As we know now, both journalist Hamdeen Sabahi and politician Ayman Nour were offered high posts by Morsi. Nour was told to form his cabinet as he wanted. It’s ironic that Morsi told Nour he had to include one post – that of Sisi as minister of defense. They did not say it then. They admit it now.
We also know now, from the participants themselves, that Tamarod, the grassroots movement founded to register opposition to Morsi, was a creation of military intelligence.
This is not to absolve the Brotherhood of responsibility for what happened. A Muslim Brotherhood president was in all probability doomed from the start. There were many points in which the Brotherhood abandoned Tahrir Square for the warm, treacherous embrace of the army. They made huge misjudgments, but those misjudgments were not, in and of themselves, the cause of what was to follow.
A democratic hero
Morsi himself was an honest man and a true democrat. For much of the year he was in power, he was not in control, caught up in a maelstrom that became too big for him.
Who is responsible for Morsi’s death? We all are. There will only be two forces that profit from his death: Sisi and the military regime around him, and the Islamic State (IS) group, which “wished him hell and the worst of states”.
Morsi devoted his life to a people who abandoned him. If Sayyid Qutb before him became a hero for Islamists, both the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, Morsi’s legacy will be a democratic one.
Morsi quoted a poem before his collapse :
“My country will still be dear to me no matter how much oppressed I’ve been treated, and my people will still be honourable in my eyes no matter how mean to me they have been.”
The man now feted on social media as the “martyr president” will enjoy a status in death that he never achieved in life. He vowed to his end never to recognise the military coup that overthrew him, and he stayed true to his word. That is Morsi’s legacy, and it is an important one.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
In That Howling Infinite 