I can't actually believe this. Have they really done this? From whatever perspective you look at this from, it makes no sense whatsoever?
Honestly, I first have to ask, have they rehabilitated Mubarak over there? Does the government no longer consider him to have been a dictator and autocrat? If not, then why on earth would breaking out of a jail-
as the 2011 Revolution was underway- in which one was put for political reasons by the authoritarian regime, constitute any sort of crime? It's like a person in West Germany, after the war, being tried for escaping from a concentration camp.
Also, how does "breaking out of prison" manage to merit
the death penalty? I mean, yes, if they had convicted him of killing some people this would make sense. Apparently he's already been given 20 years for "ordering the arrest and torture of protesters". By what logic does "escaping from prison", regardless of circumstance, somehow merit execution while torture doesn't? And all this while
Mubarak is already half-free?
As a political move it makes the least sense of all. You overthrow a person who won your country's first free and fair election in history with just over half the vote. Yes, he was a nasty Islamist who, "deep state" or not, did a rather slapdash job of running the country, while trying to exempt himself from the confines of the law. But then you then re-ban his political party, re-imprison their leaders, and, when
you run, struggle to get people to vote for you so badly that you have to leave the polls open for three days to attain a level of turnout that is just barely respectable. One
might take this a sign that you probably have something of a legitimacy problem with a non-negligible segment of the population and ought to avoid inflaming tensions. But instead you have him sentenced to death. Hopefully the Grand Mufti does the right thing and blocks the sentence- I'd have no problem with Morsi staying behind bars for decades, because he'd actually deserve it.
I find it ironic that the Egyptians raised hell over having Hosni Mubarak as their president and ultimately wound up with the Egyptian version of Than Shwe.
Although that might be a bit harsh.
The problem is that the Egyptians managed to give themselves a truly
awful in the 2012 runoff- Mubarak's last PM, Shafik or Morsi. Neither one of those was going to end well- Shafik basically ran on a platform of "Mubarak with less corruption and more military", which is essentially what they ended up getting with El Sisi.
