Challenging the Authoritarian Regime through New IT media – Extraordinary lessons from the Ordinary
People of Egypt

Introduction

Marta Harneckar writes,” For today’s political battles are not won with atomic bombs but with ‘media bombs’ “. People of the MEA (Middle East and Africa) have gone a step, indeed a leap, forward and proved that how people can effectively use the media and if necessary create their own media to fight the status quo and the existing pro rich, pro business class and anti-people media. India and Egypt have shared a common platform. India has revolutionized her economy through IT. People of Egypt and Tunisia have mobilized their people for revolution through IT tools such as facebook, twitter et al! One facebook site on the Tunisian revolution had
87,000 adherents!! There were 1,60,000 bloggers in Egypt in 2009 most of them are anti Mubarak and pro democracy. In a country like Egypt where the media is controlled by the state, the personal media, the blogs, is the real source of information about the ‘real’ stories. In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most visited web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo.

A third of Egypt’s population is between 15 and 29, and young Egyptians have for years been
politically disengaged. A 2004 study by the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies found that 67 percent of young people weren’t registered to vote and 84 percent has never participated in a public demonstration. Since 1981, Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party curtailed freedom of speech and right to assemble. The constitution allows the government to ban the political organizations and can make it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government. The youths of Egypt are not natured politically under any political organizations about mass movements and political gatherings. The recent uprising
shackles the chains of the Egyptian mass and millions took part in the political demonstrations for 18 days continuously. Some of the youths who came to the Tharir Square on Jan 25 2011 stayed there till Feb 12 2011.

Role of social Networking in the resent Uprising

Youths of Egypt mobilized the people through social networking sites such as facebook and twitter on economical, social and political grounds, an online activism for offline organization. Too much of wealth concentrated into a few hands and nearly 44% of the population below poverty line created a fertile ground for the recent uprising. The majority is suffering from rampant corruption, police authoritarianism with unlimited power but level of conscious of the people has to be raised to resist the state power. It’s what exactly the social networking sites did it Egypt. Web enthusiasts uploaded videos regarding brutal treatment of the people by police. The men and women were beaten badly and sometime unto the death. The cases were closed without any justice. In one such case which is present in youtube.com depicts that a youth was beaten unto death by the police and the case has been closed that he died because of high usage of drugs. When this video is released the interim ministry took a protective measure not to allow mobile phones inside the police stations. The current offline mobilization can be traced back to Kifaya ( Arabic for ‘enough’) movement in 2003-2004 and April 6 youth movement in 2008. Social networking sites such as facebook and blogspot have influence in mobilizing people during these political developments.

Courtney Radsch discusses about three phases of blogosphere in Egypt. The first phase as ‘Experimentation Phase’ it’s between 2003 and 2005, second phase as ‘The Activist’ phase it’s between 2005 and 2006 and the third as ‘Diversification and Fragmentation Phase’ that is since 2006. Egypt got connected to the Internet in 1993. In 2003 Egypt had 3 million internet users
and nearly double that number of mobile phone subscribers by 2005 the number of internet users had jumped to 5 million and mobile subscribers to more than 13 million In 2004 there were about 400 internet cafes in Cairo and high-speed DSL connections at home could be had for $50 by 2008 internet cafes were prolific and DSL had dropped to between $10 to $22 depending on the speed. Home computers and laptops were common and taken for granted among the middle and upper classes.

Kifaya Movement in 2003 - 2004

During 2003-2004, the Iraq war and George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” created a political context in which pressures for democracy had to be balanced against cooperation on terrorism, the war, and foreign assistance which led to Kifaya movement. Protests against the Iraq war In January and February 2003 ushered in a new era of activism as thousands took to the streets. They culminated in a demonstration in central Cairo on the day of the invasion that resulted in mass arrests and drew 20,000 – numbers not seen since the 1972 studentled
protests. But there was not yet a link between new media technologies and the activists. As the war got underway in Iraq, blogs written by Iraqis describing the situation on the ground drew international attention, inspiring others to start blogs. As one blogger put it: “The blogosphere blew up after the Iraq war, 2003, because we needed to document and express our feelings”. Out of the Iraq war protests grew a new political movement that became known as Kifaya. The Egyptian police, the Interim ministry and the CIA and the American state department saw this as an outlet of the oppressed people and saw this only as a protest against the USA and not
it’s close allay Mubarak in Egypt. The CIA discounted the means of mobilizing people though Internet since it covers only covers six percent of the population. Kifaya movement which started as an anti war movement soon embrace the national character and demanded change in Egypt. The group made street protests and eventually blogging part of its repertoire of contention as it sought political change at the very top. Kifaya first appeared on
the scene in December of 2004 when hundreds of people held a silent protest, their mouths taped with yellow stickers reading “Kifaya” at Cairo’s High Court to demand that President Mubarak step down and hold direct, competitive elections. One of the main demand was that Mubarak should step down and his son Gamal should not be a successor. Kifaya’s manifesto called for civil disobedience and sought to break taboos and establish a right to demonstrate and talk about the country frankly. Over the next two years the movement inspired people to demand change by taking to the streets and speaking out; among them were many of the core bloggers who shared the same desire for change, at national level. Members of Kifaya movement argued that it makes no sense at all for us to have nearly 20 committees and organizations for standing in solidarity with the Palestinian and Iraqi peoples while there are no more than one or two small committees for being in solidarity with the Egyptian people and their causes. It is not logical for dozens of conferences, seminars, lectures, etc. to be organized on an annual basis for standing in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Palestine and Iraq while no efforts worth mentioning are organized to be in solidarity with farmers who suffer under new and unjust laws
formulated to strip them of their land, workers who are fired from their factories, the millions of youth who are unemployed, the thousands who are imprisoned and detained, the hundreds who are tortured in police stations, or those who suffer from rising prices, inflation, economic stagnation, etc. A natural symbiosis between Egypt’s early core bloggers and the emerging protest movement helped popularize the Egyptian blogosphere as a site of
protest as Kifaya grew in popularity during 2005.

Before 2005 there were only a handful of bloggers in Egypt and about 40 total blogs and nearly twenty are in Arabic. They were also open-minded and flexible, committed to individual rights and collaboration across political and social divides. Several were self-described techies or Linux geeks, such as Malek, Alaa, and Ahmad G., while others wanted to try out a new publishing medium. Ahmad, who started blogging in November 2003, created the Wikipedia entry in Arabic for “blog,” describing what it is, how to set one up, and promoted the term modawana as the Arabic term for blog. These bloggers often explain that they write in Arabic because
it is their mother tongue and they are more comfortable writing in Arabic than in English, but also because they want to talk to their fellow citizens. Today one of the very popular facebook page known as ElShaheeed ( Arabic for ‘Martyr’, https://www.facebook.com/ElShaheeed) has members close to 8,00,000 and it’s 4,00,000 members On Jan 25 2011. People mostly prefer to exchange their views in Arabic in ‘ElShaheeed’ rather in English. Today there are 1,60,000 bloggers in Egypt.

May 2005 has seen a landmark political development in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak helped spur
cyberactivism when he announced that in May 2005 there would be a referendum on a constitutional amendment to permit multicandidate elections. The referendum offered citizens the chance to express their dissatisfaction and opened up debate about Mubarak’s presidency, the possible succession of his son Gamal, and critiques of the political system that had kept Mubarak in power longer than any other Egyptian ruler since Muhammad Ali in the 19th century. The catalyst that propelled the Egyptian blogosphere into an active realm of
contention, making activists into bloggers and bloggers into activists, were demonstrations in spring 2005 against the proposed constitutional referendum and in support of judicial independence. Several hundred protesters gathered in Tahrir Square for a demonstration during which women were assaulted by state security forces and hired thugs. The sexual assaults garnered media coverage by the local and international press, as did the arrests of several bloggers. It’s the first time in the world history that the bloggers are arrested in such large
scale who took part in street activism.

Wael Abbas’s http://misrdigital.blogspirit.com/ is one such blog which reports human rights violations, sexual assault on women, exposing Mubrak’s pro imperialistic polices et al. He’s the winner of many national and international award winner which includes Hellman Hammett Award 2008, Knight International Journalism Award 2007 and several other awards. Please visit the above link for more details.

The Muslim Brotherhood, MS, the main opposition, fundamentalist in nature, which has organizational strength to mobilize the people was not able to dominate the blogosphere since blog space has been dominated by liberals, leftists, socialists , Marxists, atheists, secularists and anti imperialists. In 2005, the presence of MB bloggers is almost nonentity; the MB blogs are zilch among a zillion progressive blogs. There were pro MB blogs emerge in 2006 – 2007. The young Egyptians value secularism and democracy imbibed with gender equality. This very nature kept the bloggers and youths away from the MB. It’s worthy to mention one thing in
support of secular character of Kifaya movement. Kifaya's coordinator is a Christian, George Ishaq. When the religious hard liners try to raise this issue the bloggers were quick and sharp to react that “the leadership should be based on qualifications and patriotism, nothing else”. Kifaya movement includes people from all walks of life, the only qualification is that they should be against the status quo and for the change. One analyst writes, It is not strange to find that its members—as is documented on the movement’s website (www.harakamasria.com)
—include many low-level professionals (plumbers, carpenters, launderers, etc.) as well as their middle-class counterparts (journalists, researchers, students, businessmen, accountants, university professors, doctors, professionals, artists, etc.). It also includes members from upper-class groups such as politicians and bank employees. The blogs reported the abuses of human rights, improper treatment of women in the name of Islam, police atrocities in large scale, government apathy towards the workers and the poor and it covers wide range of issues where such information won’t be available in traditional media. Later the traditional media is fed by the
bloggers. In some cases, independent newspapers in Egypt (such as Al-Karama) have reprinted posts written by bloggers without even editing them. The state’s violent reaction to demonstrations in 2005 led U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cancel a visit to Egypt is such point of culmination. Political impact of blogging and its impact on main media can be understood from the pan-Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera’s documentary broadcast about Egyptian bloggers called Bloggers, Opposition and a New Voice, which dramatically increased
awareness among the general public about blogging and its political impact in 2005.

The Kifaya movement declined due to ferocious attack from the state. There are political and social dynamics that cannot be ignored. The political and social dynamics that led to Kefaya’s decline can be grouped into four general categories: first, Kefaya’s struggle against the state over the misuse of power, the manipulation of laws, and the control of the media; second, Kefaya’s relationship with Islamist ; third, the role of the ruling elite in propagating antidemocratic messages; and fourth, Kefaya’s own internal organizational problems. Despite the kifaya movement’s failure the energy of the people in general and youths in particular are not faded
away who participated in the movement. Kifaya may have nurtured the growth of the blogosphere during the activist phase, its decline as a political force did not coincide with the decline of blogging. By then the blogosphere had grown and diversified so that by late 2006, activists were but one community of bloggers among several others that had disengaged from their previously close relationship to the movement. “I start with blogging when Kifaya started existing. Now Kifaya is dead and we continue,” Malek Mustafa told. The spirits of courage and braveness have been sharpened by online group discussions and informal meetings among the
bloggers. It creates a vivid picture among the people what kind of Egyptian society they would like to live in. It established the new way of information flow though social networking which is dominated by secular and democratic masses. The new information age established a novel development thanks to Kifaya movement which has cascading effect on April 6th youth movement and the current uprising in Jan 2011.

April 6 Youth Movement

Starting 2006 the Egyptian people start blogs of all different types which includes culture, art, language , free software and open source technologies and of course that the internal dynamics influenced by the political economic thrusts. The transition from ‘The Activist’ phase to ‘Diversification and Fragmentation Phase’ was propelled not only by the increasing numbers of bloggers and their diversity but also by shifting internal dynamics, especially disenchantment with Kifaya and government repression. External factors also contributed, particularly the abrupt drop in American support for democracy and free expression in Egypt following Hamas’
victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections. By late 2007 the Egyptian state crackdown on Kifaya and the Muslim Brotherhood was accompanied by a crackdown on freedom of expression.One blogger termed the government’s harsh reactions a “War on Bloggers.” The arrest of 24-year-old Kareem Amerl on November 6, 2006 was the first time a blogger was explicitly arrested for content of online writing rather than street activism. Hundreds of bloggers including the core mobilized and came to his defense. In February 2007, Amer was convicted of insulting Islam and President Mubarak on his blog and sentenced to four years in prison. The campaign for his release continues, both in the Egyptian blogosphere and by local and international human rights organizations. Nearly all the bloggers expressed solidarity with Kareem on their blogs and in our discussions, though there was more ambiguity among Muslim Brotherhood and salafi bloggers. The vast majority, however, defended his actions in the terms of the right of free expression. His case became a rallying cry for freedom of expression but
also a line in the sand drawn by Mubarak.

On 23rd March 2008, the working class of El-Mahalla El-Kubra town mainly textile workers from the state run textile industry decided to call for general strike against the state on economical and political grounds. The strike is banned constitutionally in Egypt. For more than a year, workers around Egypt had been striking, periodically, to protest high rates of inflation and unemployment, but they never coordinated their protests. This time the workers of El-Mahalla El-Kubra invited all Egyptians to join and support the general strike. The statement from the organizers appears as follows, “On the 6th of April, stay home, do not go out; Don’t go to
work, don’t go to the university, don’t go to school, don’t open your shop, don’t open your pharmacy, don’t go to the police station, don’t go to the camp; We need salaries allowing us to live, we need to work, we want our children to get education, we need human transportation means, we want hospitals to get treatment, we want medicines for our children, we need just judiciary, we want security, we want freedom and dignity, we want apartments for youth; We don’t want prices increase, we don’t want favoritism, we don’t want police in plain clothes, we don’t want torture in police stations, we don’t want corruption, we don’t want bribes, we don’t want detentions. Tell your friends not to go to work and ask them to join the strike.”

El-Mahalla El-Kubra worker’s invitation for general strike on April 6 reached the people of Egypt well. It triggered blog activists to support the strike. Issues of price rise, costly health, police intimidation, high education fee is common for all the citizens and the population which is 44% below poverty line. One of the main demands is to raise monthly minimum wage to 1,200 Egyptian pounds (USD 210). A young blog activist, Rashid, then 30 years, shared an idea to start a facebook in support of the general strike with her friend Maher. Both became administrators of the April 6 youth movement facebook page. Soon after the page is created 16 people joined, after a few minutes the count raised to 60, the next day it hits 1000, eventually the number
reached 76,000. Active engagements of the youths across Egypt intensified the strike preparation. Youth’s participation and online discussions created a hope among the people that the state can be challenged. The April 6th 2008 general strike was partially successful since the state used all the oppressive and suppressive mechanism to subvert the strike. The military occupied the factory in El-Mahalla El-Kubra before 3 days of the strike. Mass arrests happened and during the strike. Rashid was arrested when she tried to meet her friends near Tharir square.

Conclusion

Jan 25th 2011 gathering on Tharir square is result of undeterred attempt by the people Egypt since 2003 which eventually brought Mubarak down and given a great hope to build the Egypt they wish to build and would like to live. Both Kifaya and April 6 youth movement claimed several hundred lives and innumerous state
suppression and myriad of police tortures. The men and women were brutally beaten. The people of Egypt stood as a solid rock against such odds for the freedom and dignity. As I talked with one of my friends in Egypt who witnessed the Tharir square gathering told, “Initially I have a fear about the crowd and mass gathering but once I get into the square I filled with a confidence. In a day, I’ve tasted the power of the mass”.

Stuart Schaar writes on Economical and political weekly dated Feb 05 2011 that at the end of the 20th century; the sociologist Manual Castells published a powerful work in three volumes on the information age and its implications for contemporary society. He argued that the new information age is as powerful, if not more so, than the transformative power of the first industrial revolution that began in Great Britain in 1750 when the old agricultural economy gave way to industrialization. The digital age has democratized access to information and has empowered the formerly powerless. Masses of people now possess new technology, which even the most adroit censors cannot entirely control.

Youths of Egypt exposed the nature of ruling class using powerful audiovisual instruments which is controlled by the ruling class to serve their interests of as Marta Harneckar quote Noam Chomsky, “What really moulds the way people think, with all the danger that implies, are the powerful audiovisual instruments. Their ownership is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, dominated by big transnationals who manipulate information to serve the interests of the ruling classes”.

Online activism is one of the successful tools in the era of Information technology surely it’s not a
substitute for the traditional mobilization methods. We have to see carefully that call for similar strikes on April 2010 failed miserably.

References

Rebuilding the Left, Marta Harneckar.

Latin American and Twenty First Century Socialism – Inventing to avoid Mistakes, Marta Harneckar, http://www.monthlyreview.org/100701harneckerPart1-1.php

Egypt: People Make History, Prakash Karat, People's Democracy, Vol. XXXV, No. 07 February 13, 2011http://pd.cpim.org/2011/0213_pd/02132011_6.html.

Core to Commonplace: The evolution of Egypt's blogosphere, Courtney C. Radsch,

http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=692

Revolution, Facebook-Style , SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO, New York Times, January 22, 2009

Arab Dictatorships under Fire in the New Information Age, Stuart Schaar, Economic and Political Weekly, vol xlvI no 6, Feb 05 2011

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