23 Mar 11 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
Digital activism has long been a way of life in Egypt; from monitoring political corruption to protesting against police brutality
Egypt has always been one of the fastest and most enthusiastic cultures in the Middle East to embrace technology. Activist Egyptian bloggers such as Wael Abbas made their reputation by posting incendiary videos showing endemic police brutality and the use of torture in interrogation. In at least two cases, evidence of torture was circulated online and led to the prosecution of police officers.
“Now everyone can see what’s happening in the police stations. That’s something that touches a nerve in ordinary citizens who are not political activists,” Abbas says. One Egyptian online activist created the ‘piggipedia’, a Flickr account showing a gallery of senior Egyptian police officers photographed at demonstrations.
The murder of Khaled Said in Alexandria last June became a new rallying point for protest, after he was beaten to death in public, in front of witnesses, by plain-clothes police officers. Autopsy photographs of his badly battered face circulated immediately on the internet, sparking a month-long round of demonstrations and vigils – many of which were organized and announced on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook group ‘We are all Khalid Said’ later became a hub for the January uprising.
The internet was already well established as a virtual meeting point for evading the country’s harsh laws against political activism under President Hosni Mubarak. In 2008, a 30-year-old civil engineer named Ahmed Maher created a Facebook group called the 6 April Movement to commemorate the date of a violent clash between police forces and a group of striking textile factory workers in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla al Kubra. The page then took on a life of its own, gathering more than 70,000 members and expanding beyond labour activism to encompass all manner of political activity. “We can’t have a proper headquarters. It’s not like we can just rent an office,” Maher says. “But on the net there are groups like ours meeting 24 hours a day.”
Last March, employees at the popular online news site Islam Online went on a mass strike to protest against editorial interference by the site’s management. The strike was broadcast over the internet thanks to a live feed on Bambuser, the video-streaming website. In addition to documenting the chants and vigils, many strikers used the streaming video feed to give testimonials directly to viewers.
Before the uprising in January, active bloggers such as Ahmed Maher and Wael Abbas were shifting their energies to Twitter and other online platforms. The appeal, they say, is a new level of interactivity and the creation of a virtual community. Abbas, in particular, has employed his Twitter account in a novel way. After years of posting videos that embarrassed the government, he would be detained, questioned and searched while leaving or arriving in Egypt. On at least one occasion, the authorities confiscated his laptop. As a result, whenever Abbas headed to the airport, he would tweet the news to his 5,000 followers. If he was detained or questioned, he would tweet that as well and the Egyptian online community would immediately rally behind him. In early February, as the Tahrir Square uprising was entering its second week, Abbas was arrested, questioned and released.
The parliamentary elections last year were the first to receive digital scrutiny. Anyone following #egyelections on Twitter was deluged with information from the estimated 44,000 polling stations spread across 29 governorates. Activists, journalists and election monitors all posted and forwarded the latest updates and pictures from around the country. If a monitor or a journalist was turned away from a polling station by police, the incident was instantly posted or tweeted. When Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated MP, was attacked in Alexandria, the news circulated through Twitter so fast that journalists and human rights workers were able to interview him in hospital.
“When a new report came in from our reporters in the field, the first thing I would do is put up feeds on our Twitter account, before I even posted the news on the website,” says Lina Attalah, co-managing editor of the English edition of al Masry al Youm , Egypt’s largest independent daily newspaper.
President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic party won more than 90 per cent of the vote in a victory that generated widespread condemnation and allegations of voter intimidation, strong-arm tactics and old-fashioned ballot box stuffing. The electronic evidence posted on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube amounted to a damning and comprehensive dossier of the day’s injustices.
Until the uprising in January, activists like Maher and Abbas would express frustration at the inability of Egypt’s robust internet political scene to translate into mass demonstrations. Most Egyptian protests would still amount to the same group of people invariably surrounded by central security riot police. But that’s all history now.
This article is taken from the current issue of Index on Censorship magazine, The Net Effect. Click here to subscribe
14 Feb 11 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
The cars started flowing through downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square again on Sunday. Most of the protesters, who had made the massive public space their revolutionary home since 28 January, departed willingly. They meticulously cleaned it before they left, and many already spoke of a growing sense of nostalgia for the utopian ethos that embodied the Republic of Tahrir.
When Mubarak’s resignation was announced on Friday — less than 24 hours after his final, disastrously tone-deaf speech to his people — Egyptians basically launched a three-day street party. I heard a lot of people making, “It’s like we won the World Cup” analogies; I even made one myself.
But looking back, this seems even bigger. This was a “Berlin Wall” moment; the euphoria and national pride that accompanies a huge football victory was mixed with a realization that everyone’s life would be different after today.
Even now, as normality largely returns to the city, there’s a valedictory mood. Friends who hadn’t met since before Friday are still greeting each other with “congratulations”.
It’s a time to recover and take stock.
Mubarak is apparently in his presidential palace in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. Unconfirmed rumours abound regarding both his health and his potential exile destinations.
The Supreme Armed Forces Council, which now runs the country, has dissolved the parliament, suspended the constitution, offered new elections in September and pledged an orderly transition to an elected civilian government. They haven’t however lifted or repealed the notorious “emergency laws” and there’s concern that a current wave of post-resignation labour strikes will be banned or forcibly suppressed.
Journalists are shifting from breathless news reports to more investigative and exploratory work. A lot of journalistic effort is being spent meticulously recreating Mubarak’s final hours — leading up to and following his Thursday night non-resignation speech.
Some (including this reporter) are even planning to take long-suffering spouses out for an actual Valentine’s Day dinner.
11 Feb 11 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
I watched President Hosni Mubarak’s speech Thursday night from Tahrir Square, where a live broadcast of Al Jazeera was being projected onto a sheet hanging from some lamp-posts. The sound was terrible, so it was hard to hear too much of what he was actually saying, but really that didn’t matter too much.
Even without hearing every word, the crowds gathered around me could tell within about two minutes that things weren’t going to go the way they had expected.
I had spent the previous hour wandering the square gathering up ecstatic quotes from thronging crowds who honestly believed tonight would be the end of the Mubarak regime. Just why they thought that will emerge in news reports over the coming days. Several credible news organisations ran with the news that he would be resigning and President Barak Obama — in his comments both before and after the speech — certainly seemed like a man who fully expected to hear something different.
Either way, Tahrir was absolutely ecstatic. People were hugging and congratulating each other. Several concerts and poetry readings broke out on the various stages that have been assembled. I’ve never seen so many Egyptian flags outside of a football match, nor heard the national anthem sung with such enthusiasm.
The overall mood was that the people had won, and that Egyptians had accomplished something that would have been unthinkable just two months ago — and something that would serve as a model for a potential domino effect of Middle Eastern democratic revolutions.
As Mubarak continued and it became clear that there was no resignation coming tonight, the crowd’s mood shifted from euphoric anticipation to a sort of grim realisation of what was really taking place. There was a brief sense of deflation that was quickly replaced by fast-rising anger. People in Tahrir are wondering just what they have to do to deliver their message in a form that Mubarak will understand.
I approached one young veiled woman in her early 30s who looked particularly upset and asked her how she felt. She identified herself as a schoolteacher and said simply: “I feel hatred.”
Look for new, possibly more aggressive, tactics to emerge from the protest movement in the coming days as the demonstrators seek new ways to turn up the pressure on Mubarak’s regime. Organisers will continue to emphasise the peaceful ethos that has carried them this far and kept them on good terms with the army.
But as of early Thursday morning, a decision had apparently been made to expand beyond Tahrir Square and occupy more of the city. As of 4 am Cairo time, the Information Ministry was surrounded and a crowd estimated at about 3000 had reached the presidential palace in the Heliopolis district — several miles away from Tahrir — and appeared to be digging in for an extended sit-in.
02 Feb 11 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
The internet suddenly came back up this morning, which means that flood of amateur video uploads I predicted should really start flowing today.
But anybody who thought the return of the net meant some sort of softening of President Hosni Mubarak’s stance was quickly disillusioned.
Angry pro-Mubarak demonstrations have been marching throughout the city since the morning.
Around 2pm, a mass of those protestors managed to rush into Tahrir Square and confront the demonstrators occupying the square. Inconsistent reports that the Army troops supposedly protecting the Tahrir demonstrators either were overwhelmed or just let it happen.
Heading to Tahrir now with a knot in my stomach. This is looking like a real “ugly face of the regime” day. For anybody who’s still wondering, the images you’ll see on television today are the reason the protests happened in the first place.
