The Guardian view on the sentence just passed on Mohamed Morsi
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Version 0 of 1. Egypt’s former president Mohamed Morsi was sentenced this week, along with other Muslim Brotherhood officials, to 20 years in prison over the killing of demonstrators outside the presidential palace in 2012. He now faces other charges that could lead to further prison time or to the death penalty. What happened at that demonstration, called to protest against a decree that his decisions would be immune to judicial oversight until a new constitutional charter was in place, has always been unclear and remains so after a trial from which the press was largely excluded. The probability is that there was both provocation and a loss of control on both sides, compounded by the refusal of the security forces to intervene. It is perhaps telling that the majority of those who died were supporters of the Brotherhood. What is clear, however, is that the case is part of the relentless judicial pursuit of Mr Morsi and his colleagues by the new regime in Egypt, a pursuit quite unmatched by an equivalent determination to hold to account those guilty of serious offences on the anti-Morsi side. Their sins are excused or obfuscated, and the trial of Mr Morsi is only one of many in which due process appears to have been cast aside, the overall objective appearing to be to criminalise an entire political movement. A blanket terrorist label has thus been slapped on the Brotherhood, and nearly all its leaders are in detention. But they are not the only victims. Civil society organisations have been closed, the press is controlled, and journalists have been jailed. Secular opponents of the government, including figures who initially supported the coup against Mr Morsi by General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in 2013, also find themselves harassed and persecuted. That Egypt under Mr Sisi is now a worse dictatorship than it was under Hosni Mubarak is acknowledged to be one of the unhappiest outcomes of an Arab spring that became an Arab nightmare. Egypt’s political regression is a different sort of disaster than Syria’s terrible civil war or the chaos in Libya, but it is a disaster nonetheless. Yet the steady rehabilitation of the Sisi regime continues apace. Faint lip service is paid by the United States and other western countries to democratic issues. But the American military aid that sustains the Egyptian military establishment flows almost as freely as it did before, conditionality having been all but abandoned. Economic relations are pursued, as shown last month when the US secretary of state, John Kerry, was guest of honour at an investors conference. And Egypt is sought as an ally against Islamic State and in the coalition opposing the Houthis in Yemen. It is true that many Egyptians were deeply worried about the direction they believed President Morsi was taking the country, and true, too, that the Brotherhood did not have overwhelming popular support. Yet the fact remains that a democratically elected government was removed by force and that the regime that has come in its stead has many repellent features. It does not deserve the easy acquiescence that the United States and some European countries are now extending to it. |