Egypt's April 6 Movement Marks Another April 6

Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement, created in 2008 as a movement in solidarity with striking workers in the textile plants in al-Mahalla, eventually became one of the core protest movements that created the Revolution of 2011. Like other opposition groups it has seen splits within its ranks and has watched the heady enthusiasm of 2011 fade.

Yesterday, April 6,  it marked the anniversary of its founding with a press conference. Writing at Mada Masr, Sarah Carr sees it as emblematic of the Egyptian opposition generally:

April 6 sums up what is wrong, and what is right, with Egypt's political opposition. They are a group of highly motivated young people working towards a vaguely defined goal. They are plagued by in-fighting, and have split into two fronts as a result. Their presence has been amplified by both social media and state vilification, the latter of which has worked both for and against them.

In six years, their activism has not matured, and largely still revolves around street action organized in reaction to the latest outrage committed by the state. Yesterday, when the organizers (very sensibly) called off the march they had planned to avert the inevitable blood and arrests, the kids did a bit of chanting on the steps of the Journalists Syndicate and then (God help us) some street theatre entitled, "The verdict after the phone call.” In an act of painful symbolism they released some doves, half of which could not fly and dropped down back to earth. And then everyone went home.

A Few Words on the Mahalla Declaration of Autonomy

Last Friday, as most attention was focused on the demonstrations in Cairo, workers in the big Egyptian textile city of al-Mahallat al-Kubra (Mahalla for short) took over the City Council offices, ousted the council, declared themselves a Revolutionary Committee, and declared that Mahalla was announcing its autonomy from the "Ikhwani (Brotherhood) State."

There were predictable jokes on Twitter about Mahalla joining the United Nations and laments that it was just one more item making Egypt look ridiculous in foreign eyes.

Of course Mahalla is not about to become an independent republic, but I suspect this incident deserves more attention, and I suspect less giggling, than it has received. If you haven't heard about it, that's because all the Western reporters are in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

Most Westerners have probably never heard of Mahalla, or al-Mahallat al-Kubra, but it's of the most important industrial cities in Egypt, the center of the country's huge textile industry. You probably own some shirts or sheets or bathrobes made in Egypt; odds are,they were made in Mahalla.

It's a big place. (In fact, that's pretty much what "al-Mahallat al-Kubra" means: the Big Place. That may contribute to its anonymity.) Perhaps half a million people today. And for all those people who are arguing over whether the Egyptian Revolution is a revolution of Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood or a Revolution of liberal intellectuals led by a bunch of young folk with Facebook and Twitter accounts, the workers in the textile mills of Mahalla are convinced it's a revolution of an oppressed proletariat. And what's more, they think it started in 2006. And they sure don't think it's over.

Indeed from 2006 onward, and really picking up momentum in 2008, Mahalla has been wracked by labor activism, general strikes, and worker-management and worker-security forces clashes, and some of the inspiration for the later Egyptian Revolution took spark from the Mahalla strikes, most notably the April 6 movement.

Throughout the post-fall-of-Mubarak era, Islamists and liberals have fought constantly over politics and religion, while the economy has drifted steadily downward. Many political forces give lip service to the plight of Egyptian industrial workers, but no one has done anything effective. The real revolution may be yet to come, and the powers in office whether Muslim Brothers or liberals, will be held responsible,

Not wanting to sound like a Marxist here, but the day may yet come when last Friday's odd little declaration of an autonomous workers' soviet in Mahalla may not seem quite so humorous,

Mahalla's Big Textile Plant

It's Also April 6

It's Good Friday, and Pesach begins at sundown, but it's also April 6, the date chosen by one of Egypt's most visible revolutionary movements as their iconic date. Originally, it was the date of a General Strike called on April , 2008. It should not be forgotten amid so many other observances: arguably the labor movement in Egypt, not the youthful April 6 movement, is really the most important player involved with the date.

Related: Ari Ratner on "A Passover to Remember — for Egypt."

Sufis, Copts, Liberals Plan Big Rally for Secular State on Friday

Seeking to counter the big Islamist rally a week ago last Friday, egypt's influential but formerly political quiescent Sufi orders are planning a big rally Friday in favor of  secular state. Subsequently they've been joined by Copts and liberal parties and most recently by the April 6 Movement. They're calling it a Million Man march (as usual), and it will be held in Tahrir Square (where else?).

Cairo Streets Erupt

What didn't happen on April 6 seems to have happened on at least a small scale in Cairo yesterday. A few hundred demonstrators from the opposition Kifaya Movement (joined, some Twitter posts claim, by the general public) clashed openly with police in downtown Cairo. YouTube videos from Sarah Carr at Daily News Egypt and other posters to YouTube give samples:





Videos can distort and exaggerate since from within a small crowd the crowd seems to go on forever, but yesterday's demonstration seems to have been more effective (in terms of visibility, not of producing tangible results) than those April 6.

Yesterday's Cairo Protests: The Videos

From the 6 April protests yesterday, some YouTube videos:

First, if you didn't read the article in Daily News Egypt I linked to yesterday, you probably should start with that as a good eyewitness account, written by journalist and blogger Sarah Carr

Next, an English-language narrated video from Daily News Egypt:



Some other YouTube videos, this from Midan Talaat Harb:



Outside the Shura Council (Upper House of Parliament):

Reports from the Cairo Protests

A grab bag of reports on today's 6 April protests and the government's heavy handed, but apparently successful, attempts to neutralize them:

• Sallie Pisch at Bikya Misr offers roundup of the day's events;
• #6april at Twitter (mix of English and Arabic);
• #6APRIL at Twitter;
  
• #anhri at Twitter (Arabic)
  
• A report at Daily News Egypt;

On the whole, like last year, those attempting to protest were met with a show of state force, and as some of the reports note, the absence of ElBaradei is apparently leading to criticism by many. As for Ayman Nour, he was reported holed up in the Al-Ghad Party HQ, which was surrounded by police.

Cairo is not Tehran, and while the April 6, 2008 labor protests were spontaneous, the 2009 and 2010 efforts to repeat them have fizzled in the face of determined state power.

6 April Movement Protests, Crackdowns

Today is April 6, the symbolic protest date of Egypt's 6 April Movement and the date again for protests, marches on Parliament, etc. Like last year there are reportedly scattered protests but also massive presence of security forces in the streets, and some of the opposition websites, including the 6 April Movement's own, have been hacked. So far the reports are hard to sift through and the claims hard to evaluate, but as facts emerge I'll post links, videos, or whztever is available.

Egypt, The Day After

The day after the big day in which not very much happened, the fizzled protest and nonexistent general strike set for yesterday (see yesterday's postings) is a topic of discussion in Egypt. The Arabist offers a review of how the main newspapers handled the story (ranging from glee on the part of the government papers to dismay on the part of the opposition). And here is a good analysis of what went wrong with the much-ballyhooed Facebook approach to revolution. But as The Arabist notes, the most talked-about story of the day is the Ayman Nour divorce story I posted about last night. The Al-Masry Al-Youm story breaking the news finally showed up last night (Arabic version here; English version here). My initial suspicion that this was a publicity stunt seems to have been wrong, though there are still some mysteries about it and Nour's public denials.

Egypt's Weird Day Gets Weirder, National Enquirer Style

Okay, this is my third post on Egypt today, and well past my normal close-of-business time, but things are getting weird. Ayman Nour, who has been the subject of earlier posts, played a part in the earlier protests, meager as they were. But now there are reports that Nour and his celebrity wife, Gamila Isma‘il, are divorcing after 20 years of marriage. On the day of the big protest movement? It gets stranger: Nour denies the story. His wife's cell phone is turned off and she can't be reached for comment. Al-Masry al-Youm is supposed to be breaking the story tomorrow morning, but there's nothing on their website yet. Perhaps their web folks went home on the "day of anger" and decided not to post their big story till morning?

Now some Egyptian bloggers are expressing shock and a few are expressing suspicion that there's a publicity stunt afoot here. My own suspicions tend in the latter direction. If two of the stars of the opposition: the Al-Ghad Party leader and his wife, a former TV reporter, are getting divorced after 20 years, why does it come out on the day of the big protest fizzle? Why does he deny it? Why can't she be reached?

This blog is not going to do National Enquirer or Gawker type gossip (at least unless I get desperate for readership), but the timing of this is not just odd, it's downright suspicious. Ayman Nour was on the national stage today, getting more publicity than he has gotten since just after his release from prison. Gamila Isma‘il supported him through his time in prison and was his chief advocate and an ally in trying to keep the party loyal to him. So their divorce is going to leak on the "day of anger"? Forgive me if I react to this story with the same attitude I tend to reserve for the latest financial deal offered me by the widows of retired Nigerian political figures.

It could be untrue, or true but unrelated to the 6 April demonstrations, or even a sign of disagreement over the future stategy of protest. Watch this space. This is either a publicity stunt worthy of a Hollywood starlet's publicist or a regrettable event with an odd synchronicity, a reminder of the relationship between tragedy and farce.

More on the April 6 Fizzle

Okay, I guess the age of Facebook as a fomenter of revolution isn't here yet, after all. The 6 April Movement is going to have trouble explaining the results of the day after all the preliminary hype.

Reading various accounts of today's demonstrations in Egypt, it seems clear that the earlier impression was correct: the 6 April Movement failed to even score major demonstrations, let alone a general strike. A few reports from various places: here, in which the total number arrested throughout Egypt is estimated at only 45, and it is noted that at the demonstration outside the Journalists' syndicate, the State Security Investigations and other police outnumbered the demonstrators; this article entitled "Some University Students Protest as Others Play Ping-Pong," and, given the fact that the organizers urged the demonstrators to wear black as a symbol of their protest, I have to look at this photo and ask, does riot police body armor count?

I'm not making fun of the protestors: there's plenty worth protesting, and they did take risks in organizing their movement, but their ability to rally supporters has proved to be virtually nil. They had a good virtual presence, as I noted in my earlier backgrounder, but 73,000 Facebrook friends using pseudonyms is not quite the same as protestors willing to stand up to the billy-clubs of the security police. The Muslim Brotherhood "supported" the demonstrators but had few people actually on the streets; it may be that this Al-Ahram assessment ("Too Old School to Strike") is on target. Ayman Nour showed up to rally demonstrators at one point and apparently became the center of attention for photographers, but there seem to have been only tiny clumps of people at the main targets of the demonstrations (trade union headquarters, the Journalists' Union, etc.).

UPDATE AND VOCABULARY NOTE: I've been surfing English-language Egyptian blogs, websites etc. tonight, and one word keeps cropping up in a range of blogs from the Trotskyite left through the Nasserists and Islamists and on out to the fairly pro-government folks. The most common word in the frequency cloud, at least in my unscientific opinion, is the one I've seen in almost every posting: pathetic. When left, rightl and center all agree on the same dismissive word, your revolution needs a bit of fine tuning.

The 6 April Egyptian Strike: a Fizzle?

The early reports seem to be suggesting that the big strike protest in Egypt scheduled for today is fizzling out as some other such attempts have: an overwhelming police presence, combined with a relatively small turnout of protesters and prompt arrests, rather like the protests on Mubarak's 80th birthday last May. There's a Twitter feed called #6 April, and the 6 April Facebook page, but the reports seem rather uninspiring: some arrests, some protests, a lot of online statements of solidarity, but no masses in the streets.

There's clearly no general strike. The trade unions did not buy into a general strike, merely some symbolic protests, so this is more of a youth-and-student protest day rather than a real attempt to bring the country to a halt. Being a product of the 1960s myself, I know how those in the streets may imagine themselves as real revolutionaries storming the Bastille, or junior Che Guevaras, but at the end of the day this particular Bastille is still standing and Che died horribly in Bolivia.

I know some Egyptians, especially on the fashionable left, are frustrated by the traditional Egyptian stoicism: it takes a lot to get the masses into the streets and really angry. In the salons of Maadi or Heliopolis, or the new gated communities in the desert, among doctors and lawyers and professors, there are plenty of revolutionary idealists, it's just the workers and peasants who never seem to get the message.

The country's history books talk about two "revolutions": those of 1919 and 1952. That of 1919 did have elements of a real popular uprising, but the "revolution" of 1952 was a classic military coup. ("Black Saturday" and the burning of Cairo earlier that year had more of a popular uprising to it, but it remained under fairly tight control as an anti-British protest.) The bread riots of 1977 certainly scared the government, which quickly rescinded the price increase which had provoked them — and the rioting stopped.

Perhaps it is the long history of the country that leads to a certain amount of fatalism: Egypt has a history that goes back to the First Dynasty, and arguably the periods of good government have been few and far between. Revolutionary violence often just brings in another set of faces and soon the new boss is just like the old boss: so why rock the boat?

Perhaps I'm misreading this: even in the age of social media and Twitter, I'm sitting in Washington DC and not in Cairo. But it's early evening there now, and nothing I've seen yet suggests that the impact of the strike efforts is much greater than a lot of student protests and probably expenditure of a lot of police overtime. Even the Mahalla textile plants, which were the center of the first April 6 protests a year ago, are apparently not on strike. There are scattered reports of arrests, but not in huge numbers.

UPDATE: The Arabist, who is there (unlike me), says essentially the same thing, and notes that others are reporting similarly. Only 40 arrests? That suggests a real fizzle indeed.

Backgrounder: Egypt's 6 April Movement

Now that we've reached the beginning of April, the threat of a major general strike in Egypt on April 6 looms nearer. This gives me an opportunity to mention one of the most vigorous online opposition groups to emerge in the age of Web 2.0, the Facebook group known as the 6 April Movement. Begun last year as a youth movement formed to support the striking workers at the big textile complex in Al-Mahallat al-Kubra, the movement has been harassed and its leaders arrested more than once, but it has blossomed into an opposition group primarily communicating through social networking, particularly its eponymous Facebook group, which currently has some 73,000 members (and is currently reporting a wave of arrests). I've commented previously on Web 2.0 and Authoritarianiam, after Egyptian police were attacked by Armed Forces cadets and video was up quickly even though there was a ban on all reporting of the incident. I've also noted that some young, web-savvy Egyptians have even found ways to make fun of the security police on Twitter.

Despite the fact that Reporters Without Borders recently listed Egypt as one of the top twelve "Internet Enemies" in the world — (my report here, the full Reporters Without Borders report here, with the section on Egypt on pages 11 and 12) — the 6 April movement has continued to grow. From the Reporters Without Borders report (punctuation in original):

"Unlike its Saudi and Syrian neighbours, Egypt is a country in which freedom of speech does still exist. An independent press has developed and criticism is permitted.

"More than a space for expression, the Web has become a space for action, particularly through social networks, which little by little have started taking on the role of trade unions, which were banned under the state of emergency law. In force since 1981, the emergency legislation banned trade unions from political activities. But the most active Internet users call virtual rallies that can give rise to genuine political demands. One group, created on the social networking site Facebook, and boasting more than 65,000 members, [Today it's showing 73,000 — MCD] was used to channel protests in April 2008. Calling on Egyptians to “stay home”, it contributed to a general strike and one of the largest expressions of unrest in several years. Since no law regulated this space, the interior ministry in 2002 set up a department responsible for investigating online offences. As a result, security forces arrested around 100 bloggers in 2008 for “damaging national security”.

"One of the members of the 6 April Facebook group, Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed spent two weeks in prison for being a member of this group. Its creator, Ahmed Maher, a 27-year-old engineer, was detained and beaten for 12 hours by police in Mahalla, north of Cairo, who wanted to identify the rest of the group. Shortly afterwards, another blogger, Kareem El-Beheiri, spent 73 days in custody in connection with articles posted on his blog (http://egyworkers.blogspot.com/), dealing with workers’ rights and official corruption."

And it gained a fair amount of attention worldwide. Among background reports on the movement, see this New York Times Magazine article; a writeup on Wikipedia; a feature story from Wired; and a page on the movement's website explaining themselves in English. Another mostly English website is here, but hasn't been updated since January. Those who read Arabic can consult the Facebook page, this Arabic website and its "About" page, and links from there. The genius of the blogging medium is that I can point my readers to lots of background information without having to repeat the information here: click away.

The efforts to pull off a general strike last year were met with heavy-handed security presence, a sealing off of the textile plants at Mahalla from Cairo to prevent protestors from the capital reaching them, and a heavy presence throughout Cairo as well; but Twitter and YouTube and other such services soon had plenty of firsthand accounts of events. The security forces prevented an explosion, but the social networking sites made sure the opposition knew what was going on.

The 6 April Movement has been calling for a new general strike and "Day of Anger" this April 6. You can even download your anti-Mubarak posters from Flickr. So expect a reasonably tense day of protests next Monday.

The future of social networking sites as hotbeds of protest or even revolution remains to be proven, and certainly the North Koreas and Burmas of the world can shut out the sites by keeping computers and Internet access limited, but countries that are part of the global information system will find it harder and harder to suppress the use of social networking.

The interesting thing is that until quite recently, Facebook did not have an Arabic-language "front end"; there were plenty of Arabic pages and Arabic groups, but one still had to have some knowledge of a Western language to navigate the buttons, etc. Last month it became available in a fully Arabic format. Perhaps to show evenhandedness, a Hebrew front end was launched at the same time. (To switch to either, in Facebook one goes to "Settings," then "My Account," then you have to scroll down as the languages are listed in their own alphabets after the Roman-Alphabet languages. Except for East Asian languages which are in the proper alphabetical place. Consistency is hard in cross-language matters.)

And I just followed some links and discovered this Arabic-language website explaining Web 2.0 step by step and service by service: a sort of introduction for the masses; it seems to have been around since January.