Activism Online and Off Confronts the Police: the Brutal Road to January 25

Christopher Haynes

06/5/12

Various causes have been cited for the uprising of January 25, 2011 in Egypt. Economic and

demographic reasons loom large in analyses. It is likely that these factors did play major roles in

bringing people out on January 25 and before. However, analyses that overlook the role of

authoritarianism are incomplete. Specifically, the role of the police, the agents of the regime,

needs to be considered among the major causes of the uprising.

Police brutality angered Egyptians sufficiently that they took to the streets in protest several

times before 2011. In many or most cases, they protested economic conditions such as low

wages and rising food prices. In most or all cases, whether or not their calls were eventually

answered and to what degree, police brutality materialised. The police prevented what could

have been the safety valve, protest, of popular indignation from opening. Moreover, those

protests that were specifically against police brutality met the same fate, frustrating those seeking

justice. Many observers say police brutality was the main reason for the protests of January 25,

2011. (Ross; Ali)

When online social media such as Facebook gave young Egyptians an outlet for their fury, the

number of people understanding and believing in the need for change swelled. Social media

alone cannot cause revolutions, but they can spread awareness of common problems, focus anger

on a target and rally people around an event. Among the common problems were police

repression, the target focused on was the regime of Hosni Mubarak, and the event promoted was

the protest of January 25.

This paper places the January 25 protests in a line of demonstrations against the state in Egypt. It

proposes two arguments. First, that police brutality was one of the main causes of the uprising,

and second, that while the use of social media may not have been the single or main causal factor

in the downfall of Mubarak, it was instrumental in making January 25, 2011 the beginning of a

successful movement.

To make these points, this paper considers the significance of the protests of the decade

preceding the Day of Rage, some of the movements that made them happen, how the police

inflamed public sentiment, how the April 6, 2008 Mahalla strike and the death of Khaled Said set

the country on the road to revolution, and how social media such as blogs and Facebook brought

all the key factors together.

The politics of the street

Opposition to the Mubarak regime became widespread in Egypt at the end of 2000, when its

apparent complicity with (or at least, consent to) the repression of Palestinians during the second

intifada led to a campaign against the Egyptian government characterised by tens of thousands of

protesters in Cairo and daily protests and sit-ins by university students. (El Amine) The US-led

invasion of Iraq prompted more mass demonstrations in 2003 and 2004. During one, some

30,000 protesters fought with police and even burned down a billboard of Mubarak. (Ibid.) Many

of the veteran protesters from these and earlier movements formed Kefaya, the Egyptian

Movement for Change, in 2004. Though Kefaya never became a mass movement, their

protesting and civil disobedience campaigns earned them considerable media attention. (Ibid.)

Kefaya became an organisation where activists could not only network but gain experience.

Ahmed Maher of the April 6th Youth Movement, the main youth group behind the January 25 th

protest, along with other leaders, started in Kefaya. (Ibid.)

But these protests were hardly regime-shaking. In fact, the government barely flinched. Mubarak

managed, rather than brutally repressed, the action against him. Mona El Ghobashy describes his

regime’s resilience as not due to “brute force or Orwellian propaganda, but because it had

shrewdly constructed a simulacrum of politics.” (El Ghobashy) Parties and civic organisations,

along with reasonably-free media, though controlled nonetheless gave an outlet to popular

discontent. Citizens could participate in politics without threatening the dominance of Mubarak

and his clique. Thus, Mubarak seemed unshakeable.

But for the vibrant civil society growing in Egypt. Dozens of protests took place in Egypt every

year; by 2008, there were hundreds. (Ibid.) Angela Joya of York University said 222 industrial

actions took place in 2006, 580 in 2007 by blue- and white-collar workers in a variety of sectors

and over a thousand in 2008. (Joya) The lid was shaking long before the pot boiled over in 2011.

Protests were not limited to the hardcore activists; they cut across social lines. El Ghobashy

names three categories of protests since 2000. The first is workplace action, where labourers,

civil servants, students and a variety of groups of tradespeople protested in a number of ways.

Second, neighbourhoods protested, in groups of farmers, Coptic neighbourhoods, Bedouins, and

sometimes entire towns. The third group of protesters are associations, from syndicates of

doctors and lawyers to social movements such as Kefaya to the youth wings of political parties

such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ghad party. (El Ghobashy) Egyptians honed their skills

and their knowledge of the politics of the street.

Kefaya perhaps embodied the protests of the decade as well as any other group. It was a

decentralised, cross-ideological group of citizens concerned with the actions of the government

and brave enough to risk state violence to address them. It promoted the politics of protest, the

public denouncing of authoritarian government, and the publicising of its crimes. According to

Manar Shorbagy of the American University in Cairo, Kefaya redefined Egyptian politics by

leaving behind the legally-neutered political parties and the parliamentary talking shop and

focusing on the street. “With its blunt slogans and creative street action, Kefaya in fact has dealt

with the most acute of Egypt’s political problems, namely, political apathy on the part of the vast

majority of Egyptians.” (Shorbagy, 191)

The government fought back. In October 2007, public dissent was widely repressed. Journalists,

labour activists and Muslim Brothers were detained in one of the largest crackdowns on dissent

in a decade. (Murphy) Governments may find it useful to lash out unusually harshly from time to

time, in order to scare those thinking they could dissent publicly without fear of repression.

Accusations that the police used torture against detainees were well publicised. The Christian

Science Monitor quoted Aida Seif al-Dawla, a psychologist who founded and runs the Nadim

Center for the Psychological Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence in Cairo, on why this

crackdown, and the brutality that was to accompany it, was so harsh. "It's hard to explain why,

except that torture becomes a habit. But there's no question that police abuse has gone through

the roof. For the past month, we've been getting one or two cases every day. For every case that's

reported to us, there's bound to be many more we never hear about." (Ibid.) The more such

abuses occurred, the more the public knew and was supposed to want to avoid the risk. But all

this may have served to sharpen the call for justice and its ultimate success against an oppressive

regime and its agents.

The police

The police are essential to the security of any state, particularly one under continual popular

pressure to change. But the police in Egypt were more than just guards for the elites. Every

group that had experience with protesting, along with virtually everyone else, had experience

with police venality and violence. Police issued passports, drivers’ licenses, birth and death

certificates. They fixed elections. They vetted graduate school candidates and academic

appointments. They observed football matches and Friday prayers. They maintained networks of

informants in poor neighbourhoods to insure against unauthorised organisation. They extracted

money from taxi and microbus drivers, shopkeepers and businesspeople. They had their hands

out to collect money from the drug trade. (El Ghobashy) “The national police were widely

reviled long before their brutal crackdowns at the inception of the January 25 revolt because they

represented, in essence, a nationwide protection racket. Ordinary citizens had to bribe police

officers all too ready to confiscate licenses and invent violations.” (Anderson) They were, in

short, “the chief administrative arm of the state” (El Ghobashy), with the power to use violence

against anyone not well connected to the elites.

The leaking of US diplomatic cables on Egypt revealed to the world what Egyptians already

knew. “Police brutality in Egypt against common criminals is routine and pervasive,” began one.

(Guardian) “Torture and police brutality in Egypt are endemic and widespread.” (Ibid.) It listed

suspected criminals, political prisoners, demonstrators, Muslim Brothers, and “unfortunate

bystanders” as victims of torture. It provided a variety of examples. Women detainees were no

more fortunate than men, having faced sexual abuse. (Ibid.) Egyptians had been hearing of

incidents on the news repeatedly before Wikileaks made them public. A popular television soap

opera had even featured a police detective who beats up suspects to gather evidence.

Unsurprisingly, US embassy interviewees spoke of a culture of impunity, where the police are

free to use whatever harsh methods they like.

In late 2007, two controversial movies played in theatres to raucous applause. The first was Heya

Fawda, about an iron-fisted police officer who controls the Cairo neighbourhood of Shubra. The

second was Heena Maysara, about the plight of street children. “The movies depicted the

brutality of the Egyptian state and the failure of its policies”. (Joya) As art, they reflected the life

of the dispossessed Egyptian majority. Egyptians had been suffering under a kleptocratic state

against which they had no recourse.

What were the effects of this unassailable power of the state? Humiliation. A humiliated

population, as Mohamed Delkatesh explains, is both a tool and an effect of power. (Delkatesh,

58) He cites humiliation as a cause of both the Iranian Revolution and the Arab Spring. Iranians

were humiliated to be ruled by a corrupt, foreign-backed dictatorship. (Delkatesh, 57) Egyptians

were subject to the same humiliations, ruled by an aging, US-supported dictator and his thuggish

police, economically backward due to two decades of neoliberal policies, subject to violence

whenever they protested their condition. Egyptian youth knew they would face beatings,

imprisonment and even death on January 25, but their cause was to regain their pride.

Freedom, pride, dignity and so on are not usually stolen in one fell swoop. Indeed, Egyptians had

lived under forms of autocracy for thousands of years. But the increased civil society action

against the state testified to the rising intolerance for its ruinous economic policies, the stark

inequalities of wealth in society and the repressive state apparatus. One day in April 2008 was a

turning point that set Egypt down the path to revolution.

April 6

Textile workers have a long history of industrial action in Egypt. In 2006, they went on strike for

higher wages and won. This victory led to a wave of strikes in textiles and other industries. (El

Amine) It may also have emboldened workers at the largest textile mill in the Middle East, in the

city of Mahalla, to call for a general strike. The strike was to be in protest of inflation, corruption

and police brutality. (El Ghobashy) While a full-on general strike did not materialise, the textile

workers resorted to mass action that took the government two days to put down. (El Amine)

These strikes began on April 6, 2008. A group of young people calling themselves the April 6

Youth Movement attracted 70,000 people to their Facebook group in support of the protesters.

(Reese, 1) The result of these strikes were further strikes, sit ins and protests for months in other

parts of Egypt, leading to the first independent trade unions in Egypt. (El Amine) A further result

was the permanence of the April 6 Youth Movement.

Since the 2008 demonstrations, April 6 has continued the struggle for Egyptians’ rights. One of

the group’s founders, Mohamed Adel, says that it has gone through three phases. First, it lobbied

for political reforms; next, it became, in his words, a “youth resistance movement with a street

presence”; now, it promotes direct confrontation with the regime. (Carr) Its presence both on

Facebook and on the street kept the spirit of the strikes alive. According to journalist Mona El

Tahawy, “[i]n the absence of any viable opposition to the Mubarak regime, April 6 became that

place where young people could go. More importantly, it was able to take them off the virtual

space and into the real world.” (PBS) April 6 produced only small protests during 2008 and 2009

(Carr), but doing so kept the fire under the regime burning, enabling the events of 2010, to which

we will return later in this essay, to turn up the flame.

In December 2008, as Israel rained down fire on Gaza, April 6 organised a protest against it.

Protests against Israel are often tolerated in Arab autocracies, but this one hit closer to home.

Many of the thousands of demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak for his role in the

blockade of Gaza. (Shapiro) In doing so, demonstrators were breaking the taboo on calling out

Mubarak by name, just as Kefaya had broken the taboo on frank talk about Egypt’s real

problems. Since newspapers would have been censored if they had engaged in honest and

penetrating journalism, the taboo could only have been broken on the street. Activism on the

street was necessary to show the regime the people were not afraid. Activism online meant that

the message could get to hundreds of thousands of young Egyptian opinion makers without being

filtered through censored newsprint.

Social media

News and opinions are transmitted through social networks. Social media became the space to

disseminate across networks instantaneously, thus uniting these networks. In the absence of

reliable print media, social media are created by one’s peers and hence may be considered more

trustworthy (or at least an alternative potential truth).

The April 6, 2008 demonstrations put pressure on the regime because they were live and on the

street. However, they would not have gathered such numbers of people, nor would the events of

that day have been so well publicised, had Egyptians not made such use of social media.

Courtney Radsch explains that the mass action of April 6, 2008 “exemplifies the convergence of

new media platforms and political activism but also the necessity of linking online movements to

offline organizing.” (Radsch, 10) The media that most influenced the new political wave in

Egypt were blogs, Youtube and Facebook. (We will consider Facebook in the next section.)

Thomas Barnett predicted in 2006, “[t]his revolution will be blogged from below”. (Isherwood,

2) Blogging in Egypt was limited to a small core before 2005, with Egyptians publishing an

estimated 40 blogs; by 2006, the number was over a thousand. (Radsch, 3-4) A reasonable fear in

the early days of blogging was that it would have little more significance than the controlled

press, providing a vent for popular discontent but substituting words for action. (Khamis, 2) That

was not the case with Egyptians, however. It may be that street politics continued because it had

begun years before without the aid of online media. Whatever the reason, blogging meant online

organisation for offline action.

“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.” (Radsch, 5) During

these protests, state security forces and hired thugs assaulted women and arrested several

bloggers. (Ibid., 5) The blogosphere buzzed with the news, highlighting police violence against

innocent people. Rania al Malky, editor of Daily News Egypt, said at the time that activists “now

have the tools to tell the real story of how their peaceful protests are ‘controlled’.” (Ibid., 8)

Telling the stories was about to get harder, but it would not slow down.

In 2006, the Egyptian state began its “War on Bloggers”. Bloggers were arrested for what they

posted online. Like the police brutality that characterised the war on protests, the war on

bloggers did not cow enough people to halt the practice, but further inflamed it. The discussion

shifted from the discourse on democracy and human rights to the concrete issue of the beating

and torture of Egyptians. Stories on police brutality became routine in the Egyptian blogosphere.

(Lim, 239) Some Egyptian bloggers were becoming famous as they published whatever photos

and videos they could find (and they were abundant) of police crackdowns, torture and other

violence, along with demonstrations against it.

Youtube is complementary to blogging and Facebook, because it enables people to embed videos

in whatever they post. In 2007, a 13-year-old boy named Mamduh Abdel Aziz died in hospital

after being beaten while in police custody in the town of Mansoura. Before he died, someone

posted a video of him with extensive burn wounds on his genitals. (Murphy) In 2006, police

officers tortured a microbus driver and filmed the incident in order to intimidate the driver’s

family. The blogosphere picked up the video in November of that year, and widely-read blogger

Wael Abbas published it. Once enough people knew about the story, newspapers El Fagr and El

Masry El Youm wrote about the episode and the wider public learned what happened. Two police

officers were eventually sentenced for the crime. (Isherwood, 1) Before “We Are All Khaled

Said” came along, Wael Abbas’s blog was a repository for information on police abuses. He had

posted other videos, such as of a man begging for mercy in a police station and a woman hanging

upside down and moaning. (Ross) Egyptians became aware of all of these incidents because of

social media.

The Emergency Law disallowed large assemblies, and as such making offline public

announcements of the demonstrations was not possible. As the protests took place from 2005

onward, online activists knew where to look. Word of upcoming protests spread virally, blog to

blog, informing all the concerned organisers. (Isherwood, 7) They covered the actions of Kefaya,

April 6 and others, when the traditional newspapers were doing their best to ignore them.

(Isherwood, 5)

Grievances alone do not, by themselves, explain revolts. If a young person was going to work to

take down a powerful regime, he or she needed to know that many others shared his or her

grievances and goals. (Lim, 234) Under the ever-present threat of violence and the barrage of

misinformation of a police state, it is difficult to know if one’s problems and state of mind are

shared. Daron Acemoglu argues that those who oppose dictators will do so only if they know

others hold the same views, and would be willing to join a movement for change. Satellite

television and social networking made it clear to the ever-growing number of Egyptians who

followed these media that they were not alone. (Khamis, 4) They may have known already, due

to the number of protests and strikes that had occurred, that Egyptians were angry. But the

catalyst for revolution would need to be “the missing link between public anger and resentment

of the ruling regime on the one hand, and actual public mobilization to bring about real change

on the other hand. Political activism in the real world, aided by cyberactivism in the virtual

world, succeeded to find this missing link.” (Ibid., 10)

Challenges to the ruling elites and the status quo are sometimes cast as challenges to technology.

Tom Isherwood points out, however, that the tables have turned. Egyptian bloggers have helped

change power dynamics and end the government monopoly on information. Technology is now

in the hands of those who wish to challenge the state. (Isherwood, 9) Let us proceed with an

account of the clearest example of how publicising police brutality online led to the revolution in

the streets.

Khaled Said

On June 6, 2010, police seized 28-year-old Khaled Said at an internet café in Alexandria and

beat him to death in the street. The police claimed he had been involved in drugs, and died when

he swallowed some to hide evidence. Other accounts, however, told a different story: that Khaled

had posted a video of police sharing the spoils of a drug bust. It was this account that everyone

believed. Khaled’s gruesome death animated public opinion against the police. (El Ghobashy)

The people were angry.

An anonymous Facebook user—later revealed as Google executive Wael Ghoneim—started a

group called “We Are All Khaled Said”. Hundreds of thousands joined the group. (Preston) The

group displayed photos of Khaled smiling juxtaposed with cellphone photos of his bloody face

and disfigured corpse from the morgue. The brutality of Khaled’s death was laid stark, along

with the message in the name of the page: “We” are in the same boat as Khaled, and any of us

could be next. Brutality against the poor was common and well known. The killing of a

businessman brought the power of the untouchable police home to the middle classes. This

realisation, like all the other fearsome images and videos, did not cow the people but electrified

them. “By propagating the message that ‘We’ are all Khaled Said, the group was successful in

identifying who the ‘we’ was who could make change.” (Lim, 242)

Prior to Khaled’s murder, there had been several blogs and Youtube videos exposing police

torture, but they did not have a unified community around them. This latest shocking incident

changed that. (Preston) The bloggers had learned the value of pathos in persuading people, which

is why they showed everyone the grisly, uncensored photos of the dead man. We Are All Khaled

Said became a clearinghouse for information, graphic images and videos, and even published the

names of abusive police. Observers credit this group with animating and popularising the

discussion of police brutality. (Giglio) Wael Ghoneim told group members “This is your country;

a government official is your employee who gets his salary from your tax money, and you have

your rights”. (Khamis, 9)

Khaled Said’s death led to continual protest at police brutality. (Ali) Between June and

September 2010, there were five “silent stands” for Khaled Said, silent vigils aimed squarely at

the police. (Lim, 233) In June 2010, security forces blocked a protest called for by April 6 in

Tahrir Square. (El Marsfawy) Such protests could have helped relieve pressure on the regime,

giving the soothing illusion that the pressure was on, whereas brutal crackdowns galvanise

opposition. Mohamed El Baradei led a march in Alexandria a few days later, also against police

brutality. Demonstrators chanted slogans against Mubarak and Interior Minister Habib El Adly.

They called Khaled a “martyr of the Emergency Law”. “The protests are a message from the

Egyptian people that they don’t accept torture,” said Baradei to reporters. (Abou El Magd)

Street politics and social media worked together. Demonstrations were organised online by

people who were angry at what they had seen online that had taken place offline. Social media

amplified the effect of the protests by publicising the brutal images of police abuse at those

protests and elsewhere. The combination of online and on-street activity made revolution

possible. All that was required was a trigger.

January

The self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi set the whole region alight. Barely three weeks later,

Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had been routed. On the day Ben Ali ran, January 16, police corralled a

demonstration outside the Tunisian embassy, where protesters sang the Tunisian national

anthem. (El Ghobashy) January 25, National Police Day in Egypt, was just over a week away.

One could say Hosni Mubarak himself chose the date, as two years earlier he had set January 25

as the day to appreciate the police, a bitter irony for most Egyptians. But the date of revolt, as

distinct from a day of protest, was chosen by the timing of the Tunisian conflict.

Nevertheless, there was precedent for civic action on January 25. April 6 had organised protests

on January 25, 2010 as well, in a “Day of Mourning” to protest torture and police brutality, and it

did so through Facebook. (Lim, 242) As Merlyna Lim points out, the 2010 protests, like earlier

action, were not a focused effort to topple the regime. It was not until the next year, when

Egyptians had the Tunisian example to emulate, that they realised real change was possible. “The

Tunisian revolt refocused the Egyptian oppositional movement on the goal of overthrowing

Mubarak and fueled hopes that such a goal was possible.” (Ibid., 242)

Thus the date for revolution was set. It was not one person but an agreement among activists,

operating online, that decided what would happen on that day. A consensus for action came out

of the online conversation. April 6 set the precedent. Moreover, one of April 6’s founders,

Asmaa Mahfouz, posted a video, which rapidly went viral, of her reasons for joining the protests,

on January 18. "Don’t think you can be safe anymore,” she said. “None of us are. Come down

with us and demand your rights, my rights, your family’s rights. I am going down on January

25th and will say no to corruption, no to this regime." (Goodman) But April 6 was not alone. The

National Association for Change used a variety of social media, including Facebook, Twitter and

Youtube, to get the word out about January 25. “Look at what is happening in Tunisia,” their

messages read. “This is how people change their country.” (Khamis, 10). The already-popular

We Are All Khaled Said encouraged people to hit the streets. Others posted Youtube videos with

notorious scenes of police brutality, urging Egyptians to join the protest. (El Ghobashy) Khaled

Said’s mother enjoined Egyptians in an interview to take back their streets. (Ibid.) Though he

had stopped short of full backing of the day of protest, in the week leading up to it, Mohamed El

Baradei tweeted “Fully support call 4 peaceful demonstrations vs. repression.” (Giglio)

Not all activism took place online. After all, tens of millions of Egyptians were not to be found

online but on the street. Waleed Rashed, another founder of April 6, used another kind of social

medium to spread the word about January 25 in the weeks leading up to it.

Every time I was in a cab, I would call Ahmed on my cell phone and talk loudly

about planning a big protest in Tahrir Square for January 25th, because I knew

that they couldn’t stop themselves talking about what they’d overheard.

Eventually, on January 23rd, a cabbie asked if I’d heard about this big

demonstration that was happening in two days. (Lim, 243)

Word spread through coffee shops, mosques and football fields as well. All had begun with a

small group of “social media elites” (Ibid., 243) who used networks to spread the January 25

meme.

Conclusion

Thousands of Egyptians had gained experience in the politics of the street before January 25. The

thousands of isolated strikes, sit ins and protests in the decade before 2011 testified to the

bravery and resilience of Egyptian resistance to the regime and its enforcers. Why they returned

time and again to the street is not simple. In some cases, it may have been that their protests

succeeded, as with the textile workers in 2006. Activists might have felt that, the more people

knew of their actions, the more support there would be for reform. They may have felt that

confronting the police with peaceful demonstrations was their only recourse. Or shouting in

protest may be a natural cry of frustration against authoritarian rule. But if each protest can be

considered connected, due to their similar demands and results, each led to the one that engulfed

Egypt, disposed of its dictator and humbled its police.

The point is not that Kefaya, or April 6, or We Are All Khaled Said somehow broke the back of

the regime. The variety of groups and actors involved in the call to revolt on January 25 is what

enabled the revolution. One group could be arrested or coopted. The organisation by numerous

people of different backgrounds, in keeping with the tradition of the past decade of protest, gave

the demonstrations legitimacy. It showed everyone that they were in the same boat, as they

shared frustrations about corruption, police brutality, food prices, and who was to blame.

Those acting online and off worked together for years to produce a culture of activism that broke

taboos, and with them the fear the regime inspired. The shocking images, the calls to action, the

belief that no one was safe from the police anymore, all spread around Egypt due to social

media. The sign that something could be done about it came from the demonstrations of the past

decade. The combination of tactics led activists to defeat the police and decapitate the regime.

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