Where is Mohamed Morsi? A few weeks ago, he was the President of Egypt; then came a coup, and he hasn’t been seen since. The military has said he is in “a safe place,” though they haven’t said where; guesses by crowds of his supporters have led to violent confrontations. On Monday, Morsi’s grown children held a press conference during which, according to the Washington Post, when a reporter asked “whether his father was dead or alive, Morsi’s son said, ‘I don’t know any more than you do.’ ” Their father, they said, had been “kidnapped.” One doesn’t need to accept that locution, or approve of Morsi at all, to be disturbed that he’s gone missing. It is not healthy for a country, or for any model of democracy, when an elected head of state just vanishes.
Egypt is in a precarious situation: half a dozen people died in protests on the streets today. They were looking for Morsi. A great majority of Egyptians may have no patience for the demands of the pro-Morsi crowds that he be restored to power, but that is different from being returned to view. The military has also said that Morsi is under investigation for alleged crimes, including that foreign terrorists were behind the mass jail break, during the revolution that overthrew Mubarak, that freed Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood members, as well as ordinary criminals. That gives one pause—he is being held without charges by the heirs to the Arab Spring for not staying in his prison cell?—but, even if one accepts the premise, where is the arrest warrant, where is his lawyer, when does he appear in a court?
There have been arrest warrants for a good number of other Muslim Brotherhood leaders, several of whom have also seen their assets frozen. They have been accused of inciting violence; the idea seems to be that, once they realize it’s hopeless, everything will be quiet again, the economy will improve, Egypt will be Egypt. But wasn’t this idea—that you can just shut the political divisions in a box—something the Arab Spring demonstrated was unsustainable? The pro-coup crowds, including self-described liberals, have relied heavily on the argument that the Brotherhood is fundamentally undemocratic. And yet it is hard to see where their blithe exclusion from the political process will lead. Many Egyptians found Morsi’s long speeches tiresome, and yet a boring Brotherhood might be preferable to one driven, once again, underground, or into a dark room in an undisclosed place.
The international community has been cautious about this. The European Union has said that it would like to see Morsi. The Obama Administration, largely for legal and financial reasons, can’t even bring itself to say that a coup took place. (Naunihal Singh explains why what happened was, indeed, a fairly ordinary coup.) Obama is also trying to manage anger at the United States Ambassador and rumors of foreign plots. It may also go over less well when you complain about indefinite, extrajudicial detentions and run a place called Guantánamo. But in both cases, one needs to keep asking basic questions. When do we get to see the prisoner?
Posted by Amy Davidson
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