Egypt in the hands of a death-sentence regime

A close run thing to the regularly bad and depressing news coming out of Syria is the regularly bad and depressing news coming out of Egypt.

Many of us, I am sure, still remember those headily optimistic days of the uprisings that broke out in Tunisia and Egypt at the end of 2010 and into January 2011. How much hope for real change was there then? How, in such an inspiring manner, the downtrodden and oppressed of the Arab world took their own destinies into their own hands.

Perhaps even then we should have known it was too good to last. It did not take long for the forces of counter revolution to strike back. For the last few year they have been on the ascendency. Uprisings and protest movements were brutally crushed by totalitarian – and usually western-backed – regimes, and potentially-revolutionaries movements were subverted, divided, brought-off and killed.

In those days, one of the young people taking to Tahrir square with her peers was the Muslim Brotherhood activist and leader Sondos Asem. The daughter of Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary candidates, Asem was part of a team that ran the Brotherhood’s social media presence in English. She later became the foreign press secretary for Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically-elected president.

Where is she now? Living in exile abroad, with a politically-motivated death sentence handing over her head.

Since the July 2013 coup that brought the military back to power, overthrowing President Morsi, the coup regime has been running rampant, drunk on power. The military dictatorship that now runs the country is even worse in many ways than the Mubarak regime. So of course it is fully backed by the US and Israel.

This has meant massacres of protests opposed to the coup, protests that were often led by Muslim Brotherhood supporters. The most infamous of these was the Rabaa Square massacre one month after the coup. Supporters of Morsi had established protest camps in the wake of the president’s kidnapping by the coup regime, but were brutally shot dead and cleared out by security forces. According to Human Rights Watch, “at least 1,150 demonstrators” were massacred in this way between July and August, in probable “crimes against humanity”.

Since then, the coup regime has only felt itself more empowered to entrench its control, imprisoning dissidents and critics on the flimsiest of pretexts. These have included many Muslim Brotherhood leaders, but also secular and leftist critics like Alaa Abd El Fattah, who an Egyptian court outrageously sentenced to five years in jail earlier this year for the crime of organizing protests.

More recently, feeling more and more emboldened by tacit support from its American sponsors, the coup regime has been on a grotesque spree of handing out death sentences to many of its imprisoned critics. Egypt is now in danger of becoming a death sentence regime.

Sondos Asem herself was one of 16 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to be handed – in absentia — a death sentence earlier this month. The politically-motivated court ludicrously alleged she had been involved in “spying” on Egypt by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement.

Writing in the Washington Post, she replied defiantly to the sentence: “Although it breaks my heart to be separated from my family, friends and loved ones, the unjust sentence will not break my will and resolve. On the contrary, it will give me strength to keep defending the principles of the Egyptian revolution and values I and most Egyptians believe in and aspire to: dignity, freedom and justice.”

Morsi too, of course, has also now been sentenced to death. There is supposed to be a final ruling on these death sentences next month, and it is possible they could be commuted. But the fact that the regime even feels strong enough to impose them is extremely worrying in itself.

The charges against Morsi are ridiculous. The death sentence on him was passed on the basis that he supposedly organized a “jail break” from a prison he should never have been in in the first place. On the “Friday of Anger” of 28 January 2011, he along with several other senior Muslim Brotherhood leaders were detained by the forces of the Mubarak regime, which was desperate at that stage to quell the mass popular uprising that had broken out on 25 January.

The whole thing is a farce orchestrated by a kangaroo court system of injustice. It only goes to show that Morsi was right when he tried to root out the seemingly-endemic corruption in the Egyptian court system, with an attempt to fire the prosecutor-general in 2012. In fact he did not go far enough. But the cries at the time about the supposed “Ikhwanisation” of Egypt stymied such modest attempts at reform.

An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.