 Hello and welcome to New York. Yesterday, June the 17th, the former president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, died after collapsing in the courtroom during a hearing of a case of espionage against him. To talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Burqas. Hello, Prabir. Prabir, so we know the story of Morsi. He was the first democratically elected president of Egypt in 2012. And in 2013, exactly one year after he took office, he was overthrown in a mass protest which broke out in the country. And immediately after that, the military used that opportunity to come back to power again. So, how do you see his legacy especially in the aftermath of yesterday's incident, during which he was in a case? You see, of course, it's also true that how he has died, that is still not clear, because was he, was it a possibly a case where he was poisoned? Was it a case that to say he really died because, well, you know, people do tend to die under certain circumstances? Those are still something that we will, we do not know and we may not, may never find out the way, the way the military government is, would be dealing with all of this. What you said is he was the first, shall we say, elected president for a long time in an election which is relatively fair. I wouldn't call it a democratic elections or a democratic politically elected president because in that election also, the point was that it was done at very quick notice, the political processes were still unfolding and apart from the Muslim brotherhood, there was no other organized political parties in the frame and the ancient regime as it were, which also puts up, which put up its own candidate. So, apart from that all the other forces are really disorganized, coming together and therefore it was, shall we say, an uneven playing field in which the Muslim brotherhood emerged as the, as the dominant force, both at the level of the president, but also the level of the parliament assembly, whatever that was there. Now, the point when you talk about Mursi's legacy. Now, it is also true that the leading candidates of the Muslim brotherhood were disqualified. So, effectively Mursi was not the best candidate for the brotherhood, who got catapulted to the position of the president and with all the things that were happening, one thing was clear that Muslim brotherhood particularly Mursi did not really handle, shall we say, the post electoral scenario with any maturity. They decided and this is something which is either institutional in the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt or it was more the Muslim presidency. Again, this is something only history will tell, but it is not germane to this discussion. Both of them decided that having won the election, they had total, shall we say, mandate, do anything they pleased. They did not look at the fact that what is the percentage of votes they had. They did not look at the fact that what does democracy really mean. Democracy does not mean that whoever has won the election has a mandate to do anything that they want. They really thought that they had the mandate to introduce Sharia. They had the mandate to Islamize society. Lot of those measures which needed, shall we say, a much larger political sanction from the people, which had not been given to them. They had come in a position where military dictatorship was rejected by the people and that was what the Tahrir Square mass upsurge was all about. Assuming that that mandate was for a completely and Islamized society is something which I think was a huge miscalculation and this is the reason why all sections, shall we say, both those who fought the Tahrir Square upsurge had fought against the military regime to those who had been, in some sense, dispossessed from the positions of power, including the military regime. All of them came together then against Muslim Brotherhood, including the old, shall we say, Nasserite forces. All of this came together against Muslim Brotherhood and that paved the way for the Sisi's emergence and the military dictatorship to come back again with a kind of so-called electoral mandate. So, all of this I think shows also that, you know, if you don't for a long number of years have a democratic polity, institutions, shall we say of even, I would say, electoral democracy. I won't even call it democracy in totality, but basically electoral democracy means parties, politics of certain kinds, alliances of different kinds, give and take. All of it is something that happens in the kind of electoral democracies that we are talking about and these kind of changes take time. They don't happen overnight and therefore people who come into this scenario in a long, from a long period of military dictatorship, and we saw that in Pakistan as well, that they then come into it unprepared for the kind of concessions they have to make with each other so that they don't get the old military dictatorship come back. And I think that's where Mursi and his, shall we say, his cabinet, his party, Muslim Brotherhood, all of them made very serious mistakes. Not that they're not mistakes on the other side because a whole set of forces which combined with the military, in fact, they appealed to the military to take over and having paved the way for a military take over. Now, they're also in prison. They also have no access to the levers of, shall we say, public opinion that for a brief period about a couple of years that was there in Egypt and they're also paying a very heavy price for that miscalculation. So it's not that miscalculation didn't take place in both sides. Both the, shall we say, the progressive forces in Egypt, the democratic forces in Egypt, and even the liberal forces in Egypt, all of them actually, in some sense, in their fight against the Muslim Brotherhood, the appeal to the military to displace Mursi was a huge, shall we say, mistake. And that's what they're paying the price now as well. So Egypt is a tragedy that they were the ones who lit some, in some sense, the fire of liberal, shall we say, democracy in the Arab world. And they are the ones who have invited military back. And then that is also the place where the Muslim Brotherhood has come out in a way that shows that how sectarian they were and how they're unprepared to negotiate, shall we say, pluralist electoral democracy. Forget about the deeper democracy which we need in the societies. And it's also interesting to maybe compare the case with Tunisia, for instance, where a different dynamic worked out. Although there have been a lot of tensions and unrest. Nonetheless, a space was created and is still available for democratic forces to continue that kind of struggle, even though the Muslim Brotherhood is also active there. Well, again, it's interesting that you're making that comparison, because Nahada is essentially Muslim Brotherhood. So it's not a different formation. I think Tunis, both the forces which were in favor of liberal democracy, including a section of the left, we have the workers party, an alliance of left parties, which are there. Both of these sections behaved differently with respect to the kind of electoral democracy that emerged in Tunis. Nahada did not do what Mursi did. They did not do what Muslim Brotherhood did in Egypt. They did not try and shove Sharia down everybody's throat. They did not ask for changes to be made of different kinds. Yes, of course, they were also pushing. But they also knew that they had limits they could push. And if they endangered the coalition, which had brought all of them into the electoral arena and had, in some sense, displaced the kind of dictatorial regime that was existing under Ben Ali. So that they were aware of that there is an ancient regime waiting in the wings. And anything that leads to a fracturing of the shall we say the larger space would lead to them coming back. So both sides did not make the kind of mistakes that was made in Egypt. Even today, these debates are going on in Tunisia that should we all combine to keep out completely the Islamist forces, should we not do that and allow the Islamist forces also to have some space and keep out only the Wahhabiists who are in fact in open insurgency. That should we do that. Those are still the debates in Tunisia. And I'm not going to hold a crystal ball and predict what's going to happen there. But nevertheless, they seem to have behaved with a much greater degree of maturity. What they haven't done is ask the ancient regime to intervene against each other, which unfortunately is what the forces in Egypt did. And neither has Nihada gone to the sectarian limit. Of course, they are they do represent the certain kind of politics. But they have been also restrained to the degree that they have pressed this politics. And they have accepted there has to be a degree of give and take within this kind of liberal democratic framework that winning an election does not mean a mandate to do anything that you want, which is how the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt seem to have taken the mandate. And therefore, that has at least for now has turned out much much better that you still have a functioning liberal democracy in Tunis unlike what has happened in Egypt in where you know Mursi was overthrown. It was a bloody coup that the military did with the sanction of a large section of the people. And the large number of people got killed. There were massacres in different places and also a large number of the Muslim Brotherhood being thrown into jail. And this is created a temporarily a stable military dictatorship, but it is in the long term not a stable configuration. Compared to that, the give and take in Tunisia seems to have actually proceed has gone much better. As I said, fingers crossed how long that persists and how long the forces on both sides negotiate the space that is opened up and not turn against each other to the extent that finally the military or similar forces step in. And of course, as we know, in all these countries, we have shall we say the big brother, the NATO, the United States watching over the shoulders. And at any point of time, they can overthrow, have a regime change operation. And they are much more comfortable working with the military. And we saw that in CC, the minute CC emerged, all this so-called pretensions of supporting democracy was forgotten. And you had the United States welcoming it. And of course, Saudi Arabia, who is also very anti-Muslim Brotherhood because they see it as something which can destabilize the monarchies in the region. And they, of course, openly endorsing Muslim. The other interesting point is United States seems to have an A-Team, B-Team in these games. They have the A-Team is essentially the monarchies or the military dictatorships. And the B-Team is Muslim Brotherhood because they think that if we take it 15, 20, 30 years time frame, then monarchies and military dictatorships may not last forever, in which case for them, the next best option is not this, shall we say, the untamed wild of democracy, but the Muslim Brotherhood, which is definitely if nothing else will be anti-left, anti-progressive and would then will combine Sharia with a find of also comfortable with capital. So this is where, you know, this A-Team, B-Team in the West lies. But of course, for the Saudis, there is only one team. So the axis that is being drawn by many analysts of, say, the monarchies and Egypt on one hand and the more pro-Muslim Brotherhood forces that include Turkey, Qatar, for that matter. And even forces now emerging in Sudan. So you're, you would not entirely buy that dichotomy that is being constructed, right? Well, I would say the things are complex and we, I think we cannot really generalize completely. So as we saw, Tunis is not like Egypt. Egypt is not like Tunis. Sudan is not like Egypt or Tunis either. So each of them have their own regional specific dynamics as well, country dynamics as well. And of course, oil always plays a major role in a lot of these issues. But one thing is very clear. The long-term alliance of the Muslim Brotherhood with the monarchies is broken down. And Muslim Brotherhood sees that while it wants a conservative Islamic society to emerge, but it wants to have that emerge without the monarchies, because they think it is possible to have a popular consent for what they're doing. And Eddogan probably represents the most successful variant of the Muslim Brotherhood in that region. There's no, there's no reason to disbelieve that this is something that cannot be done in even countries where there is a monarchy, that Saudi Arabia could be something which could also emerge like that. And let's face it, how long do we think, do we think we'll have monarchies of the kind which is Saudi Arabia continue in the 21st century is open to question. And let's also be very clear, Saudi Arabia is not a nation. In the conventional sense we call nation, Saudi Arabia does not appeal to Saudi nationalism. It's a kingdom. So therefore, what is primary over there is the king. And what is secondary over there is a religious, shall we say, order. And these are the two which have hereditarily have held Saudi Arabia for the last 60, 70, 80 years. So you have the descendant of Al-Mahab with the descendant of Al-Saud who both of them hold the one is the, shall we say, the religious leader by birth and one is the temporal leader by birth again. So these are the kind of scenarios which I think also countries like the United States think it's not for the long run. So therefore, Muslim Brotherhood is there. There shall be, say, substitute if the monarchies fail as long as the monarchies are there, they will of course play ball with it. And they will be their favorite players because much easier to play with one or two people instead of parties and movements. But Qatar is again a little bit of an outlier in this because you have the Emir of Qatar, the hereditary Lula who has thrown it is lot with the Muslim Brotherhood. Thank you very much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching.