Gwynne Dyer: Egyptian democracy is dead

Gwynne Dyer

MOHAMMED Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected president, has now been in prison more than three times as long as he was in the presidential palace, but his death sentence was quashed last week. On Tuesday, the country's highest appeal court also overturned his life sentence on a separate charge -- but that doesn't mean he's going to be free any time soon.

The appeal court not only cancelled Morsi's death and life sentences, but also those of 16 other senior members of his party, the Muslim Brotherhood. "The verdict was full of legal flaws," said Morsi's lawyer, Abdel Moneim Abdel Maksoud. The men will all stay in jail indefinitely, as the military regime can easily get convictions on other charges in the lower courts, but justice is not entirely dead in Egypt.

Democracy IS dead, however. Since General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi's coup destroyed Morsi's elected government in July 2013, at least 1400 Egyptians have been murdered by the regime. (That includes the 1000 people who were killed in the streets in August 2013 while non-violently protesting against the coup -- a massacre at least as bloody as the Tiananmen Square slaughter in Beijing in 1989.)

The army was never going to accept the non-violent revolution that overthrew former general Hosni Mubarak's 29-year-old regime in January of 2011: its officers benefit greatly from its control over at least a quarter of the Egyptian economy. But the military had the wit to bide their time, whereas the young revolutionaries were neither experienced nor united, and they quickly began making mistakes.

Their worst was to fail to unite behind a single candidate in defence of a secular democracy. Instead, the presidential election of July 2012 ended up in a run-off between Air Chief Marshal Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak's last prime minister, and Mohammed Morsi, the representative of the Muslim Brotherhood. Enough secular voters held their noses and backed Morsi to give him a narrow victory in the second round.

The Muslim Brotherhood was a moderate Islamic party that had been tolerated under the Mubarak regime. Its main supporters were conservative rural voters and the pious poor, and it felt obliged to reward them by inserting more Islamic elements into the new constitution. Besides, Islamists really believe that making the country more "Islamic" will solve its problems. That's why they are Islamists.

It was far from wholesale Islamisation, but it was enough to panic the urban and mostly secular young people who had led the revolution. In a stupid attempt to force the new constitution through, Morsi granted himself total executive power and began ruling by decree in November 2012. After 10 days he realised he had made a dreadful mistake and relinquished his special powers, but it was too late.

In an equally foolish reaction, the young revolutionaries concluded that Morsi was a dictator in the making and began agitating for an early election to get rid of him. They simply didn't understand that the democratic solution was to wait the full four years and then vote Morsi out. By then, given the state of Egypt's economy, he would be so unpopular that he would be certain to lose. Some even thought the army was their friend and would help them to get rid of Morsi. So the anti-Morsi demonstrations grew through the first half of 2013, and on the first anniversary of his election on June 30, millions came out in the streets to demand he quit. The army moved at last, and in days Sisi was in power and Morsi in jail.

In due course, many thousands of the young revolutionary generation were also in jail: the latest estimate is 60,000 political prisoners. The Sisi regime is far more brutal and repressive than any of its military predecessors, but its plans to welcome foreign investment, privatise the infrastructure and restrict the right to strike have lots of foreign support.

Last year, the regime held a national coming-out party at the Sharm el-Sheikh resort: the Egyptian Economic Development Conference. It invited 1700 investors, consultants and foreign government officials including the US secretary of state, the British foreign minister, and the head of the International Monetary Fund. They were pleased by what they heard..

Far away from the conference hall, however, tens of thousands of innocent people rotted in jail, and real terrorists affiliated with Islamic State and al-Qaeda ruled over northern Sinai and regularly set off bombs in Cairo.

�Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.