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Nathaniel Daudrich | 12 April 2010 On 06 April 2010, Egyptian state security forces arrested a group of nearly 100 activists during demonstrations in downtown Cairo outside the Shura Council and the People’s Assembly, the upper and lower houses of Egypt's parliament. What began as a peaceful protest for constitutional reform soon ended in violence - the calls and chants of the activists rang through Kasr Al-Aini Street and across Tahrir Square but were suddenly silenced by plain-clothed police officers and armed state security forces who arrested demonstrators and used non-lethal force in an attempt to disperse the protest.
According to reliable sources inside Egypt, 92 activists were arrested during the protest, two of whom were women later released without charge. English-language Egyptian media reported "police brutality in the form of beatings and violent pushing" and that police officers "grabbed cameras, phones and camcorders and ran off with them down the street". The wider trend © Edinburgh Middle East Report 2010 There is no single answer: Gaza, demands for political rights, calls for social change, sit-ins for wage increases, anti-corruption rallies - the list goes on. Egypt has remained in a state of emergency following the re-enactment of the so-called "Emergency Law" (Law 1958/162) on 06 October 1981 in the wake of the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. In the context of this strict state of emergency, it seems hard to believe that more than 320 popular protests since 2007 could somehow be unrelated. There may be many causes, but who is behind the unrest? Leading Middle Eastern news outlets claim that the most recent demonstrations in Cairo were instigated by the April 6 Youth Movement, while Global Voices, a Netherlands-based non-profit collective aggregating and reporting on the blogosphere, has received eye-witness reports which confirm that activists arrested in an apparent proxy protest in Alexandria, Egypt's second city, were members of the Kefaya movement and the National Association for Change (NAC), a new opposition movement under the leadership of Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog. Egypt suffers from a social multiple-personality disorder. It is filled with disembodied groups of trade and student unions, farming co-operatives and opposition groups, not to mention the main opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood. Dissatisfaction has taken a stranglehold of Egypt’s masses, who are slowly becoming more of a riff-raff of associations than a pyramid of power. Locked away in the basement and mostly ignored by the mainstream media, these mostly secular groups have made a huge splash on the social media scene inside Egypt. By using new media mechanisms such as the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, they have amassed an underground following that previously only established political parties could hope for. What was once a series of loosely-connected protests across various social classes - from the bedouin to factory workers and the middle class - is now a grassroots movement, and chief among all these groups is surely the April 6 Youth Movement. The April 6 Youth Movement Egypt · 2008 protest © Edinburgh Middle East Report 2010 In an effort to keep the mayhem at bay, the government began to offer subsidised bread counters for the country’s poorest. In Egypt, bread is known as a’ish, literally life, and for most of the country’s 77 million, it is just that. As expected, the system quickly gave rise to corruption rackets as government bread was bought in bulk and sold for profit by black-market street vendors. The nation seemed destined for chaos.
It was perhaps a combination of these circumstances, on the back of national disgruntlement in the face of social stasis, that provided the fertile grounds for the April 6 Youth Movement to take its first step on March 2008, when Ahmed Maher launched a Facebook group to organize a protest planned for 06 April 2008. His message was as follows:
In late March 2008, as the Facebook group grew in membership, the atmosphere in Cairo grew sour as supporters began to question the validity of a strike in a country where protests are banned. Would they lose their jobs? Would they be arrested? What was going to happen? Ahmed Maher published a manifesto and the April 6 Youth Movement was born:
A group of followers in the small Nile Delta factory-town of Mahallah Al-Kubra took the message seriously - the same 20,000-strong group that in 2007 had held strikes and earned a 7% wage increase. On 06 April 2008, police officers and state security forces were forced to take control of a textile factory in Mahallah Al-Kubra as workers threatened to strike. The two opposing forces clashed as workers threw stones and set fire to shops and the police retaliated with tear-gas.
Ahmed Maher surely could not have expected this outcome, as another 2,000 protestors, gathering in Mahallah Al-Kubra’s main square, sparked off further clashes with police. According to the Associated Press, at least 50 people were arrested during the 2008 Mahallah Al-Kubra clashes, while Cairo came to a standstill as state security forces covered every corner of the Downtown area with riot police armed with tear-gas and water cannons.
By January 2009, the April 6 Youth Movement had 70,000 Facebook members. Since then, it has grown towards becoming the first unified movement in Egypt's recent history to build up enough impetus for real social change. Their most recent foray, on 06 April 2010, as part of their continued call for national change, has the hallmark of a historic moment.
Future unity?The April 6 Youth Movement has not been an unbridled success, and problems with the Egyptian authorities, together with its poor organisational structure, have only added weight to the call for a single unified movement under the banner of social change and civil liberties. The April 6 Youth Movement has most recently got behind ElBaradei’s NAC and we await their next move in the run-up to the November 2010 parliamentary elections, before the crucial September 2011 presidential election.
The events of 06 April 2010 could easily be called another stab in the dark by the disjointed Egyptian movement for social change - once Kefaya, now the April 6 Youth Movement - nevertheless, they have unquestionably added pressure on the 29-year presidency of Hosni Mubarak, who is currently recovering from gall bladder surgery.
A nation that once found its right to free speech severely restricted now relishes in the age of blogging and Facebook. Freedom of expression has reached the forefront of a movement, the objectives of which have always been more economic and political than social. Now is the time for a rapid reassessment of its foundations.
Beyond the issues of poverty, the controversial policies implemented under the Emergency Law, alleged corruption and religious unrest bustles a molten core of citizen activists ready to risk everything for social change... a change perhaps more elusive than the history of Egypt itself. |
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April 6, far from Sixth of October |
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