CAIRO/WASHINGTON: Egypt’s military-installed leaders must prove they are serious about bringing democracy to the world’s largest Arab nation, US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted yesterday.
He delivered the stern warning as he met with Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy — the highest level visit to Washington by an Egyptian official since the army ousted elected Islamist leader Mohamed Mursi in July, throwing US policy towards Cairo into disarray.
“We all know there have been disturbing decisions within the judicial process,” Kerry said, highlighting recent mass death sentences against hundreds of alleged supporters of Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood. “Clearly Egypt has been going through a very difficult transitional process,” Kerry said at the start of the two men’s talks in the State Department.
“We want the interim government to be successful. We are hopeful and look for a political process of inclusivity, a constitution implemented which brings people politically to the table and broadens the democratic base.”
But he warned Fahmy he would raise the “serious challenges” posed by the court decisions “very candidly” to ensure the implementation of democracy and “Egypt’s re-emergence’s on the world stage.” The US administration last week partially lifted a six-month freeze on some $1.5bn in mostly military US aid to Cairo — a key regional ally.
Washington has agreed to deliver 10 Apache helicopters for counterterrorism efforts in the unruly Sinai peninsula and some $650m in military aid, but withheld the rest of the funding until democratic progress is made. “We are really looking for certain things to happen that will give people some confidence about this road ahead. It’s actions not words that will make the difference,” Kerry said.
Fahmy replied that Egypt’s courts were independent and the government could not interfere in the judicial process, but he predicted that once the process has played out “we will end up with proper decisions in each of these cases.”
“I come now representing a people that want democracy, that want to be stakeholders in their future,” Fahmy said. But he warned that the transformation in Egypt “was societal, not simply changing one president for another.”
A wave of mass sentences in Egypt, including hundreds sentenced to death this week after a rushed mass trial, has sparked charges that military-installed authorities are using the judiciary as a blunt tool of repression.
The sentences handed out Monday to nearly 700 supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi — after only one hearing — fed international outrage after a similar verdict last month, although most of the previous batch of sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.
On a near-daily basis, new trials open before being swiftly adjourned, with lawyers and human rights activists baffled by the sentencing of dozens or even hundreds of defendants based on evidence that is rarely made public.
Among those sentenced to death on Monday in the southern town of Minya were people who were dead or out of the country on the day of the violent riots they were accused of taking part in.
“If anybody had any doubts that Egypt was eradicating political opposition, those doubts should be put to rest,” Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch’s Middle East director, said. “This is sham justice.”
Since the army ousted Mursi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, in July amid a wave of protests against him, a security crackdown targeting his supporters has left more than 1,400 killed and 15,000 jailed.
Hundreds of Mursi’s supporters have been sentenced to death or life imprisonment, and dozens more have gotten hefty jail terms.
In one case, 14 young women were given 11 years in jail for taking part in a pro-Mursi protest. The sentence was later reduced on appeal to a one-year suspended sentence, however, and seven girls, initially sentenced to juvenile detention, were ordered freed.
In recent months the crackdown has been extended to non-Islamist activists — including many who backed the overthrow of Mursi — following illegal protests against the military-installed authorities.
Even before the sentencing phase, Egyptian court proceedings are frequently marred by shouting matches involving lawyers and journalists, with police conscripts physically separating the two groups. At the opening of one of Mursi’s trials, local journalists chanted “Execution!”
Mursi and his co-defendants have been relegated to soundproof glass docks for recent hearings to prevent them from interrupting the proceedings. “It’s as if we are judged in absentia,” a defendant shouted during one hearing, into a microphone the judge can turn on or off at will.
In the widely covered trial of Al Jazeera journalists accused of supporting Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, prosecutors presented a bizarre array of “evidence,” including garbled audio tapes that only the judge could understand, reports on the price of meat in Egypt and clips from programmes made by other media outlets. The military-installed authorities have stood by the judiciary, insisting it is independent, but top officials have privately admitted to being embarrassed by overzealous judges.
The mass death sentences have nevertheless sparked little outrage within Egypt, where an intensive media campaign has convinced many that the Brotherhood is a foreign-backed terrorist group.
During his year in power, Mursi had sought to sideline judges loyal to strongman Hosni Mubarak, who was toppled by a popular uprising in 2011, and some analysts believe the judges are now settling scores.AFP
