Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
Revolution U
by Tina Rosenberg
Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the
Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going
on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low
wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an
hour’s drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook
group to organize protests and strikes on April 6 throughout Egypt in solidarity
with the mill workers. To their shock, the page quickly acquired some
70,000 followers.
But what worked so smoothly online proved much more difficult on the
street. Police occupied the factory in Mahalla and headed off the strike. The
demonstrations there turned violent: Protesters set fire to buildings, and
police started shooting, killing at least two people. The solidarity protests
around Egypt, meanwhile, fizzled out, in most places blocked by police. The
Facebook organizers had never agreed on tactics, whether Egyptians should
stay home or fill the streets in protest. People knew they wanted to do something.
But no one had a clear idea of what that something was.
The botched April 6 protests, the leaders realized in their aftermath, had
been an object lesson in the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic
revolution. Facebook could bring together tens of thousands of sympathizers
online, but it couldn’t organize them once they logged off. It was
a useful communication tool to call people to—well, to what The April 6
leaders did not know the answer to this question. So they decided to learn
from others who did. In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old
blogger and April 6 activist, went to Belgrade, Serbia.
The Serbian capital is home to the Center for Applied NonViolent Action
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