Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Former Egyptian president Morsi most probably died because of neglect

This is a picture of Mohamed Morsi, the tragic, democratically elected former president of Egypt, who died two days ago in a Cairo courtroom. The way he died give room to the suspicion that his death was de cause of medical nneglect. During his uninterrupted stay in prison since his demise, he has been in solitary confinement and has seen his family only a few times. The former president suffered from diabetes, hypertension, and liver disease and human rights organizations (and British parliamentarians among others), complained several times that he did not get medical attention and that because of that his life was in danger.
On top of that he British newspapaer The Independent, reveals that it took at least 20 minutes after other detainees alarmed the guards that Morsi had collapsed, before he was taken out of the cage in the court house, and another half hour before an ambulance took him to a hospital.
Morsi has been buried yesterday in the Cairo suburb of Nasr City, against the wishes of his family, who wanted him to be buried in the family grave in the governorate of Sharqiyya. Only ten people were allowed to attend. The newsmedia in Egypt did not even mention that he has been the president.
It was the coldest possible farewell by a government that is still very weary of the Moslim Brotherhood to which Morsi belonged, and that in the past six years has acquired the reputation of one of the worst regimes in the field of human rights. Morsi is far from the only one who died during  detention by neglect, or, for that matter, by rough police performances.
 Morsi has been Egypt's president during only one year. He narrowely beat Mubaraks last prme minister, Ahmad Shafiq,. in the elections of the summer of 2012 and was ousted almost exactly a year later by his minister of Defense, Adel Fattah al-Sisi. He was never a popular president and  many Egyptians turned away from him because of a number of decisions which he took, supposedly in consultation with other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Among them were the acceptance of a flawed constitution, governing with a partly inconstitutional parliament, dismissals of leaders of cultural insitutions, and last but not least the appointment of new provincial governmors of which 7 out of 17 were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. His dismissal was a barely disguised military coup, which was followed by a bloodbath in which over a 1.000 were killed when the army broke up a sit-in of Muslim Brotherhood members at the Raba' al Adawiyya square in Cairo.
At present Egypt detains roughly 60.000 people in prisons and camps, fights a longstanding guerrilla war in the Sinai and suffers from a very bad economy with inflation rates that defy the imagination.

No comments: