By Abdul Tejan-Cole
Mohamed Morsi al-Ayat died on June 17, 2019. With no fanfare, Egypt’s state television and all its daily newspapers published the same announcement – “Mohammed Morsi died yesterday during his trial in an espionage case. The deceased asked the judge to speak, and the court gave him permission. After the court was adjourned, he fainted and died. The body was transferred to hospital and the necessary procedures are underway.”
The announcement failed to state that Morsi was Egypt’s first and only democratically elected leader. To the current government, he was an ordinary citizen – a nobody. In accordance with Islamic tradition and without the fanfare befitting a former head of state, he was buried the next day in a pre-dawn funeral. His wife was quoted as saying, “we have washed his honorable body in the prison's hospital and we have offered his jazaanah in the prison's mosque, only his family members (2 sons and a lawyer) were allowed to pray on him, and he has been buried in the graveyard.”
Under heavy security, he was buried in a non-descript ceremony in Cairo and not at the family’s cemetery in El-Adwah, Ash Sharqiyah, the third most populous of the governorates of Egypt. The manner of his funeral spoke volumes about the disdain with which he was held by the current government.
Morsi took over the realms of power perchance. He held a master’s degree in engineering from Cairo University and a PhD in material sciences from the University of Southern California and spent most of his early life as a chemical warfare technician in the Egyptian military. He was an uncharismatic bespectacled middle-level apparatchik in Egypt’s much misperceived Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamic religious and social movement that was once the country’s most significant and best-organized political force that offered essential social services and sought to implement sharia under a global caliphate.
In 2011, Morsi was active in establishing the Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). Following the Tahrir Square Movement that forced President Hosni Mubarak out of power, Egypt’s first democratic presidential election was called for May 2012. Mohammed Khairat Saad el-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Deputy Supreme Guide and one of Egypt’s richest men was the FJP’s first choice candidate. He was disqualified from contesting the elections because he had only been released from prison in March 2011 in violation of election rules which provided that a candidate should have been released from prison for six years before the elections.
The FJP then turned to Morsi as its last-minute replacement. Immediately he was chosen as the compromised candidate, he was nicknamed “al-stebn” or “the spare tyre.” Morsi won the elections in a runoff winning 51.7% of the votes defeating former senior commander in the Egyptian Air Force and ex-Prime Minister under former President Hosni Mubarak, Ahmed Mohamed Shafik Zaki who got 48.3%.
As the Egyptian-American social commentator, Mona Eltahaway notes in an article in the New York Times, power was thrust on Morsi and he ”rarely wore it comfortably. He always looked like a man caught up in something much bigger than him. He had no achievements (though to be fair, he was up against powerful opponents), was not particularly wise, and demonstrated little commitment to democracy except in its illiberal, majoritarian form.”
Morsi’s tenure as President was short-lived and controversial. Many wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to fail. The incompetence and lack of political skills of Morsi and the Brotherhood made it easy for their opponents. He was unprepared for his role and was overwhelmed by its demands. He fumbled from the onset. The many forces stacked against him took advantage of every blunder.
As Abdullah Al-Arian, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, points out in an article in Aljazeera titled “Mohamed Morsi: An Egyptian tragedy”, Government bureaucrats loyal to the former Mubarak government refused to implement Morsi’s policies; the oligarch class created artificial energy shortages to stir popular discontent; the political opposition were sour losers and cynically played the role of spoiler. Foreign governments uneasy at the Brotherhood’s ascension to power and worried that Islam was incompatible with democracy and that Morsi was beholden to the Supreme Guide of the Brotherhood bankrolled the counter-revolution, and the Egyptian armed forces continued to hold most of the cards during the contentious revolutionary transition.
In November 2012, Morsi launched a “constitutional coup” by issuing a Presidential decree that granted him temporary powers that would exempt all his decisions from legal challenge until a new parliament was elected. As the New Yorker’s Peter Hessler notes, this proved to be the turning point for the Brotherhood’s political fortunes. It lost the support of most revolutionaries, and opposition grew steadily for the next six months, until many state institutions, including the police, virtually refused to work on behalf of Morsi’s government. For much of the year Morsi was in power, he was not in control, he was caught up in a maelstrom that became too big for him.
On June 30, 2013, an estimated fourteen million people took to the streets in protest against his government. A few days later on July 3, soldiers took Morsi into custody, and Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil El-Sisi, a Mubarak ally appointed by Morsi as his Defence Minister, appeared on television to announce that an “interim” government would rule until Egypt could hold elections and approve a new constitution.
A few months after he was deposed, Morsi and 14 senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood were put on trial. Morsi was bombarded with charges. He was accused of ordering the unlawful detention and torture of opposition protesters during clashes with Muslim Brotherhood supporters outside the Ittihadiya presidential palace in Cairo in December 2012; inciting Brotherhood supporters to murder two protesters and a journalist; “leading a group established against the law” – the Brotherhood; facilitating the leaking of classified documents to Qatari intelligence and the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera TV network that included details on the location of, and weapons held by the Egyptian armed forces and on its foreign and domestic policies; and colluding with foreign militants – from the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and Lebanon's Shia Islamist Hezbollah movement – to organize a mass prison break during the 2011 uprising.
At first, Morsi was held in a high-security prison near Alexandria. He was later transferred to the Tora Maximum Security Prison, also known as Scorpion Prison in Cairo. During a television interview in 2012, Major General Ibrahim Abd al-Ghaffar, a former Scorpion warden, said “(I)t was designed so that those who go in don’t come out again unless dead…It was designed for political prisoners.” Morsi was kept in solitary confinement for six years, and according to Mona Eltahaway writing in the NY Times during this period, he saw his family just three times and was denied sufficient medical attention for his diabetes, high blood pressure and liver disease, which his lawyers had long warned would lead to his death. His humiliation and death were intentional.
As Morsi was left to die in prison, his successor El-Sisi strengthened his grip on power and banned the Brotherhood. It also outlawed all forms of protests, closed the independent media and imprisoned political prisoners most of them from the Muslim Brotherhood. When the Brotherhood supporters decided to fight back by staging demonstrations at al-Nahda and Rab’a al-Adawiya squares, the Egyptian police and army under El-Sisi’s command methodically opened fire with live ammunition on the demonstrators. Human Rights Watch documented 817 people killed in Rab’a alone. According to its Executive Director, “In Rab'a Square, Egyptian security forces carried out one of the world’s largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history…this wasn’t merely a case of excessive force or poor training. It was a violent crackdown planned at the highest levels of the Egyptian government. Many of the same officials are still in power in Egypt, and have a lot to answer for.” To date, no one has been charged for this offence and it unlikely that El-Sisi or anyone else will ever be charged for it.
No one will likely face charges for the murder of Mohamed Morsi, who died almost exactly six years to the day he took up office as president. His death is more than the end of one man. It shattered the hopes and aspirations of activists in Algeria, Sudan and in the Middle East who believed in peaceful uprisings as a path to a democratic future. History may very well remember it as symbolizing the end of the short breath of freedom that was the Arab Spring.
© 2019 Politico Online
