How global tyrants enable apparently perfect murders

Reality check: Mohamed Morsi is dead. Dr Morsi, the first and only democratically-elected President of Egypt slumped over in court on Monday, and died a few minutes later in hospital. International reactions to his death have ranged from virulent anger and tepid, hypocritical condolences, to absolute, conspiratorial silence.

Naturally, Washington is mute. President Donald Trump could not care less about “one less terrorist”. In fact, not one single US official, even lowly, nameless aides, have said a word about Morsi’s death. The same goes for the European “defenders of democracy”, including Britain, France and Germany. They are lost for words, as they remember vividly the two-faced hypocritical roles that they played in Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi’s military coup, including the massacre of thousands of Morsi supporters and imprisoning of tens of thousands more. There are times when silent concurrence with tyranny is as loud — and guilty — as the shooting, killing and jailing. The Arab monarchs, especially those in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, are probably clinking their glasses together and backslapping each other in congratulations right now. The Morsi mandate has now died with him, and their man in Cairo, the Butcher-in-Chief Al-Sisi, can enjoy a Mubarak-length tenure as absolute ruler of Egypt.

There is, however, an important dimension to this painful loss of yet another icon of democracy in Africa: the manner in which the West helps to facilitate the murder of would-be emancipators across the continent and the Third World, usually in connivance with carefully selected despots who do their absolute bidding, at the cost of suppressing their own people. No better example is necessary during this rather painful period of mourning than that of Chief MKO Abiola, the winner of the 12 June, 1993 Nigerian presidential election. It is noteworthy that President Mohamed Morsi died just five days after Nigeria declared 12 June to be an annual Democracy Day holiday, exactly 7 years after Morsi himself was sworn in as President of Egypt.

READ: Morsi’s death was a political assassination by a vindictive regime

Ardent watchers of Nigerian politics will remember that Abiola slumped over while drinking tea with visiting US diplomats Thomas Pickering, Susan Rice and Bill Twadell, in rather suspicious and unexplained circumstances. Though official autopsy reports indicate that he died of a massive cardiac hypertrophy, the real cause of his death will probably remain shrouded in secrecy and controversy. Popular conjecture is that sharing a secretly segmented jug of tea with the Americans saw the Chief poisoned with Digitalis, a drug that, in the right doses, can easily tip an existing heart problem into instant but untraceable death.

All we know even now is that Pickering and co. came to Nigeria, were confirmed to have met with Chief Abiola in detention, and possibly “supervised” or “ensured” his death, thereby helping to “reset” Nigeria’s democracy away from the possibility of an Abiola presidency, which was sure to steer a path clearly independent of the Western powers. He would definitely have demanded reparations for the African Slave Trade, akin to what Germany currently pays to Israel for the Holocaust.

Now we have seen that it was time to exterminate President Morsi of Egypt, and with him his mandate, which would have remained a threat to Al-Sisi until his dying day. The stage had been set for 7 years, and nobody saw it coming in the midst of several other geopolitical conflicts. Morsi was already being killed gradually for years, by a regime which denied him access to essential medication, caring doctors and his family, thereby ensuring that his diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney disease worsened day by day. According to Human Rights Watch, he had fainted repeatedly due to his ill-health, exacerbated by the criminal medical neglect that the coup regime in Cairo ensured was in place. At practically every court session that Morsi and his fellow political prisoners attended, they were always kept in glass cages; Monday was no exception. They could be seen, but never heard. Egyptian state TV broadcast a terse statement to advise viewers of their former President’s death. Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye, meanwhile, reported that Morsi spoke for 20 minutes (unheard in his cage), became agitated, fainted, collapsed, was rushed to hospital, and died.

No matter how ill he was, a man who spoke for 20 minutes is not supposed to “become agitated” by his speech to the point of collapse and eventual death, especially when he was an experienced university lecturer and politician, whose everyday activity was speaking for lengthy periods.

READ: World reacts to the death of Mohammed Morsi

The world will probably never know the truth about who and what killed Mohamed Morsi, unless the US and its allies decide to “declassify” the facts decades after they have profited from their nefarious actions, as happened with the 1953 Mosaddegh coup in Iran; the Gulf of Tonkin incident which they used to trigger the Vietnam War; and Colin Powell’s fake white “anthrax” powder, which they used to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion and occupation. President Morsi’s death may well have been a perfectly orchestrated assassination, where he was secretly injected or drugged before the trial session, brought into open court for the world to see, and made to slump and faint there, so that everyone would see that he “died of natural causes” and was not shot, strangled or bombed to death, the Al-Sisi henchmen’s usual modus operandi.

In summary, at best, President Mohamed Morsi was killed by slow, criminal medical negligence, while there is also a possibility that this was a high stakes, sophisticated assassination, complete with all the poison and intrigue that the CIA and other agencies usually bequeath to their loyal despots in the Middle East. Yet another apparently perfect murder by global tyrants.

Like MKO Abiola, Morsi has been snatched from us by the self-professed democratic enablers of tyranny, and like MKO, there shall be social media posts and a cacophony of condolences, thoughts and best wishes. Like Nigeria and Africa, the people of the Arab world are starting to tolerate the tyrants that the West has helped to impose on their pained souls for decades; Morsi’s death is yet another example of a sacrificial lamb given up to Western-backed Arab tyranny.

However, contrary to the wishes of the tyrants and their supporters in the West, the sun will shine again; there shall be justice for the martyrs of true popular democracy and the quest for freedom; and, like their victims, all of those despots and their enablers and sponsors will kiss the dust when their inevitable death comes calling. Their stories will be preserved in history so that future generations can learn of their ignominy, tyranny and two-faced hypocrisy.

READ: Egypt slams HRW over ex-president’s death circumstances

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