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Jonathan Cheung's List: Egytian Revolution 2011
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The call was first launched by pro-democracy youth group the April 6 movement, to coincide with a national holiday to celebrate Police Day.
Among demands are the ouster of Interior Minster Habib al-Adly, whose police and security forces have been accused of heavy-handedness; the removal of the decades-old emergency law and a rise in minimum wages.
The controversial law, which gives police wide powers of arrest, suspends constitutional rights and curbs non-governmental political activity, was renewed in 2010 for a further two years.
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Highlighting the events of Egyptian Revolution 2011, various massmedia tried to explain what had caused the riots. Most explanations followed the same pattern, blaming economic stagnation, poverty, inequality, corruption and unemployment. A typical explanation is that “Egyptians have the same complaints that drove Tunisians onto the streets: surging food prices, poverty, unemployment and authoritarian rule that smothers public protests quickly and often brutally”. Such unanimity incited us to investigate to what extent those accusations reflected the Egyptian reality.
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Jun 24, 13
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Did social media like Facebook and Twitter cause the revolution? No. But these tools did speed up the process by helping to organize the revolutionaries, transmit their message to the world and galvanize international support.
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It is a truism in political science that successful revolutions are born in the streets — from the Boston Massacre of March 1770 and the storming of the Bastille in Paris in July 1789, to the streets of Cairo in January and February 2011. What has shocked most observers of the current Egyptian scene is the sheer speed with which the regime fell — 18 days.
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In the latest TweetNadwa, the topic was citizen journalism, and in the warm evening in Cairo, seasoned tweeps and bloggers shared tips for efficient use of mobile phones for footage and pictures. Among the participants was an influential group of Egyptian bloggers — many who write under pseudonyms and are largely known solely by their Twitter handles.
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Some among the digital elite are concerned about the small amount of Egyptians following Twitter and Facebook. An estimated 10 percent of 80 million Egyptians are on Facebook. “The link between citizen journalism and mainstream media is crucial,” said Gigi Ibrahim, one of the prominent revolutionaries at the TweetNadwa, also known as a blogger called the Angry Egyptian.
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More than 70,000 Egyptians signed up on Facebook to attend the protest. On Twitter, Egyptian activists, and then people around the world, began using the hashtag #Jan25 to help spread information about the protests.
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The page called for protests on January 25th. That became known as the "Day of Wrath" as thousands poured onto the streets.
Ghonim's arrest on January 28th by Egyptian authorities and release 12 days later only added to his legend.
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Ghonim, a marketing manager for Google, played a key role in organizing the January 25 protest by reaching out to Egyptian youths on Facebook. Shortly after that first protest, Ghonim was arrested in Cairo and imprisoned for 12 days.
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This is hardly the stuff of revolution, but from his base in Dubai Mr. Ghonim was on the lookout to become politically active behind the scenes in his home country. He found a way in June, when a young Egyptian businessman, Khaled Said, died after being beaten by the police. Witnesses described how Said was taken from an Internet café, had his head smashed into marble stairs, and was left dead on a street in Alexandria.
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Mr. Ghonim created a Facebook page called "We Are All Khaled Said." It featured horrific photos, shot with a cellphone in the morgue, of Said's face. That visual evidence undermined the official explanations for his death. The Facebook page attracted some 500,000 members. After 30 years of emergency rule, abuses by police and state security officials are so common that the case was a ready rallying point for a diverse network of outraged Egyptians.
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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down Friday and handed over power to the military, his nearly three decades of iron rule ended by a groundswell of popular protests that began January 25.
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Compared to United States and Europe, social media has little penetration in the Arab world. In fact, there are only 21 million Facebook users across the Arab world. So how did social media play such a significant role in fueling a popular revolution? Let me explain by way of an example.
As many commentators have noted, one of the early catalysts for the January 25th revolution in Egypt was a Facebook page created in honor of Khaled Said, a young man who had been brutally beaten and killed by the police. This page became a focal point around which 470,000 “fans” organized their dissidence while a YouTube video about his murder was viewed by more than 500,000 people fueling further public outrage.
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