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NY Times February 9, 2011
Wired and Shrewd, Young Egyptians Guide Revolt
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — They were born roughly around the time that President
Hosni Mubarak first came to power, most earned degrees from their
country’s top universities and all have spent their adult lives
bridling at the restrictions of the Egyptian police state — some
undergoing repeated arrests and torture for the cause.
They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who
touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of
the Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless — very
deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the
secret police.
Now, however, as the Egyptian government has sought to splinter
their movement by claiming that officials were negotiating with
some of its leaders, they have stepped forward publicly for the
first time to describe their hidden role.
There were only about 15 of them, including Wael Ghonim, a Google
executive who was detained for 12 days but emerged this week as
the movement’s most potent spokesman.
Yet they brought a sophistication and professionalism to their
cause — exploiting the anonymity of the Internet to elude the
secret police, planting false rumors to fool police spies, staging
“field tests” in Cairo slums before laying out their battle plans,
then planning a weekly protest schedule to save their firepower —
that helps explain the surprising resilience of the uprising they
began.
In the process many have formed some unusual bonds that reflect
the singularly nonideological character of the Egyptian youth
revolt, which encompasses liberals, socialists and members of the
Muslim Brotherhood.
“I like the Brotherhood most, and they like me,” said Sally Moore,
a 32-year-old psychiatrist, a Coptic Christian and an avowed
leftist and feminist of mixed Irish-Egyptian roots. “They always
have a hidden agenda, we know, and you never know when power comes
how they will behave. But they are very good with organizing, they
are calling for a civil state just like everyone else, so let them
have a political party just like everyone else — they will not win
more than 10 percent, I think.”
Many in the circle, in fact, met during their university days.
Islam Lotfi, a lawyer who is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood
Youth, said his group used to enlist others from the tiny leftist
parties to stand with them in calling for civil liberties, to make
their cause seem more universal. Many are now allies in the
revolt, including Zyad el-Elaimy, a 30-year-old lawyer who was
then the leader of a communist group.
Mr. Elaimy, who was imprisoned four times and suffered multiple
broken limbs from torture for his political work, now works as an
assistant to Mohamed ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for
his work with the International Atomic Energy Agency. In turn, his
group built ties to other young organizers like Ms. Moore.
The seeds of the revolt were planted around the time of the
uprising in Tunisia, when Walid Rachid, 27, a liaison from an
online group called the April 6 Movement, sent a note to the
anonymous administrator of an anti-torture Facebook page asking
for “marketing help” with a day of protest on Jan. 25, Mr. Rachid
recalled. He wondered why the administrator would communicate only
by Google instant message. In fact, it was someone he already
knew: Mr. Ghonim, the Google executive.
The day of the protest, the group tried a feint to throw off the
police. The organizers let it be known that they intended to
gather at a mosque in an upscale neighborhood in central Cairo,
and the police gathered there in force. But the organizers set out
instead for a poor neighborhood nearby, Mr. Elaimy recalled.
Starting in a poor neighborhood was itself an experiment. “We
always start from the elite, with the same faces,” Mr. Lotfi said.
“So this time we thought, let’s try.”
They divided up into two teams — one coaxing people in cafes to
join them, the other chanting to the tenements above. Instead of
talking about democracy, Mr. Lotfi said, they focused on more
immediate issues like the minimum wage. “They are eating pigeon
and chicken and we are eating beans all the time,” they chanted.
“Oh my, 10 pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame what
a shame.”
Ms. Moore said: “Our group started when we were 50. When we left
the neighborhood we were thousands.” As the protests broke up that
day, she said, she saw a man shot to death by the police. She
carried her medical bag to the next demonstration and set up a
first-aid center.
By the time they occupied Tahrir Square, she and her friends had
enlisted the Arab Doctors Union — many of whose members are also
members of the Muslim Brotherhood — which set up a network of
seven clinics. The night before the “Friday of anger”
demonstration planned for Jan. 28, the group met at the home of
Mr. Elaimy while Mr. Lotfi conducted what he called a “field
test.” From 6 to 8 p.m., he and a small group of friends walked
the narrow alleys of a working-class neighborhood calling out for
residents to protest, mainly to gauge the level of participation
and measure the pace of a march through the streets.
“And the funny thing is, when we finished up the people refused to
leave,” he said. “They were 7,000 and they burned two police cars.”
When he called the information in to the group at Mr. Elaimy’s
house, they drew up a detailed plan for protesters to gather at
specified mosques, then march toward main arteries that led to
Tahrir Square. They even told Mr. ElBaradei which mosque to
attend. Then they informed the press where he would be, and
pictures of a Nobel laureate drenched by water cannons flashed
around the world.
In signs of a generation gap echoed across Egypt, the young people
acknowledged some frustration with their elders in the opposition
parties. “Simply, they are part of the system, part of the
regime,” Mr. Lotfi said. “Mubarak was able to tame them.”
Even so, he said, having members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the
square proved to be a strategic asset because as participants in
an illegal, secret society, “they are by nature organized.”
That organization proved crucial a few days later when the
protesters quickly formed a kind of assembly line to defend
against an onslaught of rocks and firebombs from an army of
Mubarak loyalists. One group used steel bars to break up pavement
into stones, another relayed the rocks to the front and the third
manned the barricades.
“When people have been killed, from time to time you feel guilty,”
Mr. Lotfi said. “But after the war that night, we felt more and
more that our country deserves our sacrifice.”
A few days later, seven members of the group were abducted by the
police after leaving a meeting at Mr. ElBaradei’s house and
detained for three days.
The organizers disseminated a weekly schedule, with the biggest
protests set for Tuesday and Friday, to conserve their energy. And
before each protest they leaked a new false lead to throw off the
police, letting out that they would march on the state television
headquarters, for example, when their real goal was to surround
Parliament.
They formed a coalition to represent the youth revolt, with Mr.
Ghonim on their executive committee. When the government began
inviting them to meetings, they held a vote in Tahrir Square to
decide. About a half-dozen representatives of youth groups
participated, one person said, and they voted against negotiating
by about 70 percent.
Most of the group are liberals or leftists, and all, including the
Brotherhood members among them, say they aspire to a Western-style
constitutional democracy where civic institutions are stronger
than individuals.
But they also acknowledge deep divides, especially over the role
of Islam in public life. Mr. Lotfi points to pluralistic Turkey.
On the question of alcohol — forbidden by Islam — he suggested
that drinking was a private matter but that perhaps it should be
forbidden in public.
Asked if he could imagine an Egyptian president who was a
Christian woman, he paused. “If it is a government of
institutions,” he said, “I don’t care if the president is a monkey.”
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.
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