The assassination of Hisham Barakat, a top public prosecutor and the highest-ranking official to be killed in Egypt in recent years is an indication of a virulent hatred against the harsh sentences dealt out to former president Morsi and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Though the Egyptian judiciary claims that it functions independently, sentencing more than a hundred people with life imprisonment and death sentences in one go hardly qualifies as due process. According to reports, 40,000 or more Egyptians are being held in prison for their political beliefs, and some may well be put to death soon. Sources report that the media is controlled by the military and news is filtered accordingly. Other reports indicate that over ten thousand people are in jail only because of sympathies for the Muslim Brotherhood and without having committed any crime. Sisi’s military regime is advocating ruthlessness and punishing people even for dissident thoughts. Can an Egyptian citizen not dream of democracy? With Morsi’s death sentence it seems democracy would have to wait indefinitely. The military has shown a complete intolerance of dissident or oppositional opinion. Except the one year of democracy seen during Morsi’s brief and truncated tenure, Egypt has only known dictatorship since 1952. One of the main criticisms of Morsi’s short-lived democratic government was the decline in the economic sector. Obviously, democracy needed time to break free from the tightly screwed chains of dictatorship and instead of letting the process play out, the military stamped it out in the bud. Killings such as that of Barakat are a reaction to the suppression of society by the military regime. The military seems to want to control every aspect of the citizens’ life and not even leave room for them to think independently. In the wake of all this, el-Sisi is seen making claims that such incidents will not deter him from his chosen path. Does he think his course of action would stop such occurrences or would they provoke the elements responsible to react even more dangerously?
This car bomb killing, however sad, is an indication of worse storms to arise. It is a reaction to the invisible steel bars restraining the people of Egypt from evolving as a society. By sentencing democracy to death, the military cannot kill the liberal democratic vision that lives in the hearts of millions of Egyptians. *