Daily Times

Egypt’s ousted president, Mohamed Morsi was sentenced to life imprisonment on Saturday by a court in an espionage trial in which six co-defendants were handed death penalties. The Cairo Criminal Court upheld the death sentences of six members of the Muslim Brotherhood members, and awarded life imprisonment to two others. Life imprisonment in Egypt is 25 years, but Morsi, who received life imprisonment for leading an unlawful organisation, was given an additional 15 years for stealing documents related to national security. Morsi as well as other defendants have been convicted for leaking classified documents to Qatar, and selling them to the Al-Jazeera channel. Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie and 35 other members of the proscribed Islamist group were sentenced to life last month for committing violent acts after the ouster of country’s first democratically elected president in 2013.

Earlier, according to the March 24, 2014 verdict, 529 people were sentenced to death in a blanket decision; however, the judge later commuted 492 of those sentences to life imprisonment. The prosecutions were brought over the killings of policemen in the southern province of Minya on August 14, 2013. Many countries had raised questions on the Egyptian judicial process and on the military junta, which overthrew the elected president Morsi in July 2013. In September 2013, an Egyptian court had banned the Muslim Brotherhood, and the ban was extended to the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing. The junta had charged the ousted president Morsi as a “terrorist” for meeting with Hamas leaders during his term in office, even though the meetings were in the context of long-standing Egyptian attempts to broker a Palestinian rapprochement.

Egypt’s military junta had declared the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation on account of a deadly bomb attack on the police establishment in the country’s Mansoura city. But the responsibility of that bombing had been claimed by an al-Qaeda-aligned outfit known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, a group that was indeed hostilely disposed towards the Brotherhood for renouncing violence and joining the political mainstream. The first sign of trouble for Morsi had come when he had attempted to incorporate a clause into a draft constitution to grant him sweeping powers, but he later retracted it in the face of protests. Morsi’s government neglected the economy, and unemployed youth along with other sections of society had come out in droves to protest against the government. One can infer that for democratic government to be meaningful, it should deliver and always be sensitive to the aspirations of the people.

Military junta and judiciary were hand in gloves, and Egypt’s draft constitution — which had been approved for referendum — had consolidated military’s power, and that did not augur well for the country. Later, Al-Sisi was elected as the president of Egypt in what was nothing more than mock elections. In fact, there is long history of ban on the Muslim Brotherhood; it had been banned in Egypt in 1948. It was accused of attacks on prime ministers, government functionaries and judges. Reportedly, in 1954 the Brotherhood made an attempt on Gamal Abdel Nasser, the then prime minister of Egypt for a while after the coup. But the Brotherhood had renounced violence and chose democratic path to achieve its objectives. In the 1970s, the then president Anwar Sadat had allowed the Brotherhood and Islamists to regroup in an effort to use them against Nasserists and socialists. In 2005, the Brotherhood was a banned organisation and fielded its candidates as independents.

The Brotherhood had managed to get around 20 percent of the seats. One could see that the Brotherhood changed stripes coming out of clandestine activities and treading the democratic path. It could mobilise the people to get rid of Hosnie Mubarak’s dictatorship. After the January 2011 revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to form a political party, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). In June 2012, elections were held under the Supreme Council of Armed forces formed after the ouster of Mubarak. The FJP managed to get 46 percent of the parliament’s seats, and their presidential candidate Morsi bagged 25 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential election and 52 percent in the run-off. In fact, the Brotherhood had renounced violence, and that was the reason it was allowed to participate in the elections. It had won every election, be it to the legislature or to the president’s post since the ouster of the country’s longtime autocrat, Mubarak.

As a matter of fact, the FJP had thrown a formidable electoral challenge to Mubarak when he was strongly entrenched in power. Ostensibly, the deep state comprising civil and military bureaucracy and judiciary was after the Brotherhood, as it had been under Mubarak and his predecessors for decades too. After ousting Morsi from president’s office, the deep state had gone after organisation’s leaders and activists. Hundreds of its members were killed and many more wounded by the security forces. Thousands of its leaders had been put behind the bars, and many were awarded shocking punishments and sentences.

More worrisomely, however, if the vengeful campaign against the Brotherhood doesn’t come to an end, the organisation is sure to go underground at one time or the other, and peace and tranquility will then surely elude Egypt for a long time to come.

Of course, the deep state had found many a cheerleader abroad to extol its merciless hounding of the organisation and even to fuel its campaign. Several Gulf monarchies and sheikhdoms had come crowding to back up the campaign, albeit self-servingly. They perceived a potent threat in the Brotherhood to their own conformist clerical establishment, which they manipulate and exploit with abandon to perpetuate their authoritative rules. They had chipped in with massive doles to the new regime to make up for suspension of American aid following the ouster of Morsi from the presidency of Egypt and to keep it afloat. In fact, the Obama administration was not quite supportive of the putsch, but to appease Saudi Arabia and to counter Russia — which had embraced a new power-wielder — the US also became accommodative of the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi government. Opponents of Brotherhood’s dream came down crashing when they found in al-Sisi another Mubarak.

The writer is a freelance columnist. He can be reached at mjamil1938@hotmail.com