April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

As global attention remains focused on events in Egypt, Khadija Sharife
considers the role of the country’s military in the uprising and its political
role in planning for the future.
The lessons for the authorities in Cairo echo those learned too late in
Tunis: cracking down on dissent is not so easy when social network sites
and citizen bloggers can gain a global audience in a matter of days. But
how does Egypt’s low-profile military actually view the changes now
sweeping the country?
There was probably no way for the authorities to prevent the uprising of
millions of citizens in Egypt, a country characterised by staggering
inequality, human rights violations and corruption. This was especially true
after the uprising in neighbouring Tunisia toppled the dictatorship of
President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali with such astonishing speed. In Cairo
alone, there may have been as many as two million protestors at some
recent rallies. A nation of usually non-confrontational people has awoken
to reclaim the streets, their human rights, and their dignity.
In many ways, the sustained resistance of the youth, drawing strength
from their courage and conviction, their rage and despair, is a genuine
intifada borne of the old and the new. Traditional methods of
communication such as pamphlets, faxes, landlines and ‘stealth meetings’
in homes, street corners and mosques, have been augmented by virtual
congregations on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
These cyber-rallies have the obvious advantage of bypassing the dangers
inherent to geographically fixed meeting points. In an age where
information moves at the speed of light, the internet has become both a
brawny social muscle that can be collectively flexed, as well as a vehicle
used by repressive states to track and counter activists.
In Iran, where internet penetration rates are estimated at 35%, most
service has been disrupted during periods of unrest. However, the
government has usually allowed citizens to continue accessing Twitter as a
means of intelligence gathering to monitor protests.
In Tunisia, Facebook proved critical when 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor
Mohamed Bouazizi, who fatally set himself alight in protest at constant
police harassment, left a message on the networking site asking his mother
for forgiveness. After this was picked up by the Al Jazeera news network,
global awareness of the mounting Tunisian rebellion was generated,
becoming instrumental in the uprising gaining such swift momentum.
CITIZEN NARRATIVES VS. GOVERNMENT BACKLASH
The extraordinary recent events in Tunisia and Egypt have been
documented in large part through the use of citizen-generated social
media – a substitute for traditional reporting following the suspension of
many publications – allowing ordinary people to ‘narrate’ their own
struggles.
Moreover, traditional media outlets have often used citizen narratives as a
form of transmitting information, leveling the playing field in countries
like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel where news outlets are often
heavily influenced by, or in favour of, the regimes in power.
Unlike Tunisia, where over a third of the population has internet access,
penetration is much lower in Egypt at around 15%. And those accessing the
internet in Egypt, such as followers of the April 6 Facebook movement,
face a number of obstacles. Among the biggest of these is that operating