26 Jan 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
As Egyptian anti-government protesters battled security forces for a second day, the fight over the flow of information was becoming a fascinating side battle. On Tuesday, when a 10,000 strong protest overwhelmed police forces and took control of Tahrir Square in central Cairo, the Twitter social network abruptly stopped working. Telecom company representatives here have confirmed that the site was being blocked by the government.
Activists immediately began swapping recommendations for programs and applications that would evade the government’s Twitter block. I’ve been using VPN Express on my iPhone, and it has proven effective so far.
Today came another government move to restrict cyber-activism. The Facebook social network has apparently been blocked as of about 3 pm Cairo time.
25 Jan 2011 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
A few memorable snapshots from today’s “Day of Rage” protests in Egypt:
• A group of about 100 protesters is marching along the Nile corniche chanting anti-government slogans. From the other direction comes a much larger group of demonstrators. The two sides embraced in the street amid raucous cheering and began marching together.
• About 1000 protesters march through the lower class district of Boulaq Aboul Ela. Many of the protesters appeal to sidewalk gawkers and local merchants to join them. I spot a matronly woman in her 40s holding a young girl and enthusiastically giving the marchers a thumbs up. Next to her, an elderly woman with about four teeth beams with pleasure and happily chants anti-government slogans as the demonstrators march past.
• With more than 1000 protesters jostling with riot police outside the Supreme Court downtown, I take a walk away from the war zone to look for side protests. On a deserted stretch of 26 July street, a young family — middle aged man and woman with a boy who looks about nine years old — walk arm-in-arm down the middle of the street chanting “down with Hosni Mubarak!”
Today was a day for witnessing scenes that most Egyptians never imagined would be possible. But with the echoes of the Tunisian uprising still rippling through the region, the Arab World’s most populous country is entering into uncharted waters. Inspired by the waves of civil unrest that drove Tunisian dictator Zine al Abideen Bin Ali from power earlier this month, Egyptians produced a public response unprecedented in at least 30 years.
Thousands of protesters took control of downtown Cairo’s central Tahrir square this afternoon as a series of nationwide demonstrations demanded an end to President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign. A massive deployment of black-clad riot police used water cannons, tear gas and batons to repel the protesters, who pushed through police cordons and established dominance over the entire square, just one block away from the Egyptian Parliament.
As of late afternoon, the situation downtown was tense and uncertain, with the police alternatively advancing behind a hail of tear gas canisters, then giving ground once the crowd regrouped. The air in Tahrir square was thick with the acrid stench of tear gas as police struggled to cope with the sheer size of the demonstration. Only time will tell if today’s events will produce something long-lasting that builds into an actual threat to President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign. But at the very least, this was the first time in 13 years of covering protests in Egypt that the protesters potentially outnumbered the police.
At one point, more than a thousand people stood outside a building on along the Nile belonging to Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party and chanted “illegitimate” and “Oh Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you” — a reference to Bin Ali’s abrupt flight into exile 10 days ago. Independent estimates on crowd size were sketchy, but the protest I witnessed in Tahrir Square numbered at least 5,000 strong, with reports of similarly sized crowds of demonstrators marching toward the city center to join the main protest.
Today’s events — timed to coincide with the National Police Day holiday — started as a series of scattered protests in at least six different parts of Cairo. Organizers had originally announced they would gather outside the Interior Ministry near Tahrir Square. But that proved to be a bluff, as word went out via Twitter and Facebook about a series of alternate gathering points. Throughout the day Twitter proved to be a crucial platform for both organisation and real-time reports from the street. But the service abruptly stopped working for most people around 4:30 pm, prompting speculation that it had been blocked.
By nightfall, calls were going out on Twitter for anyone living in the downtown area to bring supplies in preparation for an all-night sit-in. There was also a call for local residents to remove the password protection from their wireless networks so that protesters could use them to get online.
1 Dec 2010 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
For months in advance of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Egyptian officials waged a rather strident campaign to fend off calls to allow international election monitors to observe the vote. The issue, they said, was out of the question and an insult to Egypt’s national sovereignty.
Instead, numerous officials said, an army of locally licensed election monitors and the combined focus of the international media would be more than enough to ensure that no electoral irregularities took place.
Journalists planning to cover the elections dutifully submitted to a tedious and bureaucratic process of applying for special Ministry of Information badges which, we were told, would allow us easy access into any of the country’s approximately 44,000 polling stations. In a parallel process, an estimated 6,000 prospective monitors from local non-governmental organizations received very impressive looking badges from the Higher Electoral Commission.
When election day came, it became very quickly apparent that there were no guarantees for anyone. Journalists across the country reported being turned away from polling stations by the police officers guarding the door. Licensed monitors reported the same phenomenon.
In Alexandria, I found a small group of monitors from a local NGO forced to observe a polling station from across the street after their cards were dismissed as insufficient.
“It has no value,” Mohammed Fawzi said of his monitoring badge. “They banned us from entering.”
Asked whether the officer had given any reason for dismissing the monitor ID, Fawzi, an architecture student at Alexandria University, smiled and shrugged. “It’s Egypt,” he said.
Instead Fawzi contented himself with observing the polling station from across the street, where he said he witnessed a pack of ranking officers establish control of the area and detain anyone taking pictures. To stay out of custody, Fawzi was forced to pretend he was talking on his cell phone, then sneakily take a picture using the built-in camera.
In a post-election day review of events, a coalition of local and international watchdog groups said examples like this were endemic across the country.
“The rather total lack of transparency about these elections puts the burden on Egyptian authorities to show others how these elections were not fatally compromised,” said Joe Stork, an official with Human Rights Watch who was briefly detained Sunday by police while documenting polling place violations.
It would be unfair to state that barring journalists and licensed monitors on election day was an official Egyptian government policy. After all, some journalists and some monitors were allowed in to some stations.
What’s probably more accurate is that there was no government policy at all. No matter what the Ministry of Information or the Higher Electoral Commission issued us, true power lay in the hands of each polling station’s supervisor and the police officers who controlled the entrance.
As one western television journalist told me, “It was all about the mood of the polling place supervisor and whether I could talk my way into the place. I don’t think my badge got me any (access) that I couldn’t have gotten without it.”
23 Nov 2010 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
It started out as a routine night on the Egyptian parliamentary campaign trail, and ended as a clear lesson in the methods that a police state uses to control, intimidate and generally confuse journalists.
Along with several colleagues, I traveled to Shubra Al-Kheima — a grim industrial Cairo suburb — on Sunday night at the invitation of Dr Mohamed Beltagui, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated parliamentarian, seeking to defend his seat.
The Brotherhood is illegal in Egypt and officially banned from forming a political party. Nevertheless in 2005 parliamentary elections, Beltagui and 87 other Brotherhood members won seats running as nominal independents — instantly establishing the Brotherhood as the country largest opposition bloc.
This time around the government seems determined to cut the Islamist group down to size. Hundreds of Brotherhood supporters have been arrested in the past week, often after police moved in to break up Brotherhood rallies.
At first there was no sign of such a crackdown on Sunday night. My colleagues and I walked along with Beltagui’s sign-carrying supporters, recording their chants and watching the candidate give several brief campaign speeches over a portable loudspeaker.
After about two hours, I got into a taxi along with Ursula Lindsey, a correspondent for the BBC radio program The World, and prepared to head home. Suddenly the taxi was stopped by a crowd of plain-clothed men, obviously officers of Egypt’s ubiquitous State Security Investigations force.
They removed us from the taxi, and demanded our IDs and credentials. They aggressively asked us where was our tasreeh (permission) to work as journalists in this neighborhood. I explained several times that my press card issued by the Ministry of Information WAS my permission. It became very quickly apparent that our official state press cards were worth almost nothing.
What followed was a half-hour of surreal tedium — standing on a darkened street with 10 plain-clothed officers who apparently thought they were protecting the country from us. The officers kept explaining that they were “following orders” but refused to explain just what those orders were.
There were several comments implying that as foreign journalists, we were hopelessly biased against the Egyptian government and only gave attention to opposition groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. At one point, one of them laughed at said, “Welcome to Shubra al-Kheima. Now don’t ever come back. Shubra al-Kheima is hazardous to your health.”
Finally I was handed a mobile phone. One the other end was a man identifying himself only as “General Ahmed.” He came off as the nicest guy in the world, and told me I was welcome to return to this neighborhood any time I wanted. But there was a catch. “To prevent problems like this in the future,” he told me, it would be best if I first stopped by the local police station to inform them of my presence. That way, he said, they could arrange a police escort, “for your protection.”
Fortunately, I restrained the urge to point out that the only protection I needed was from his men.
Finally we were allowed to leave. In the end, it was more annoying than intimidating, more bureaucratic than bullying. But it was a clear window into the type of petty harassment the regime routinely employs in order to shrink the local political playing field and limit the activities of foreign journalists.
On Monday morning came a surreal post-script. The government held a press conference to discuss their electoral preparations. The head of the state-sponsored National Council for Human Rights issued several assurances that this electoral round would be clean, transparent and free of the violations that have marred previous votes.
I mentioned that several journalists, including myself, were detained the previous night simply for doing our jobs. The responses were genuinely shocking.
Several government officials told me that it was my fault for being there. If I want to interview a candidate, I was told, I should meet them in their office. To walk alongside a campaign rally constitutes “political activity,” they said — which apparently makes me and other journalists fair game in the eyes of the state.
