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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • 18 days
collapsed. In a surreal moment, I found myself on a sidewalk surrounded by
both protesters and riot police—all of them gagging from the gas.
The makeup of the crowd—a true mishmash of young and old, male
and female, Christian and Muslim—was also different from protests past.
One woman in her mid-50s, who declined to give her name, said she had
never before gotten involved in politics. But today she came out with her
two teenage sons “to show them that it’s possible to demonstrate peacefully
for change.”
I spent the day moving throughout downtown Cairo trying to keep track
of a dizzying series of fast-moving events. It started with a lesson on how a
new generation of activists—dismissed ahead of time by Interior Minister
Habib al-Adly as “a bunch of incognizant, ineffective young people”—is using
electronic means to stay one step ahead of the authorities.
Organizers announced long ago that the protesters would gather outside
the Interior Ministry downtown, prompting police to lock down that area.
But shortly after noon, it became clear that was a clever bit of misdirection,
as a whole new set of gathering points was distributed via Facebook and
Twitter.
Egyptians used the #jan25 Twitter hashtag to spread news and encouragement
about the course of the protests. “If Mubarak goes down, there are
going to be enough presidents in Saudi to make a soccer team!” read one
representative tweet by @MinaAFahmy. Other tweets linked to Facebook
groups that listed a series of new meeting spots and contact numbers.
As the day progressed, scattered groups of protesters moved through different
parts of the city, growing in strength as they joined up with others. In
a memorable moment, the 150-person-strong protest I was following met
up with a much larger protest coming the opposite direction. The two sides
embraced in the street amid raucous cheering and began marching together.
At one point, more than a thousand people stood outside a building
along the Nile belonging to Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party,
chanting “illegitimate” and “Oh Mubarak, your plane is waiting for you”—a
reference to Ben Ali’s abrupt flight into exile less than two weeks ago.
Similar protests were reported in Alexandria and in the rural Nile Delta
village of Mahalla—a hotbed of political and labor activism. Among the
protesters’ demands are that Mubarak step down, presidential term limits
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