When a Revolution Gets the Activists it Deserves

One Year of Revolution 

For the past few months, before the massive outpouring of the 25th of Jan, Tahrir lived the ugly reality of being a square forced to watch, silently, its own people split. The revolution, with it first wave of activists, brought to the scene a bunch of revolutionaries who’d just read way too many books. They got too attached to Tahrir, such that it became an isolated entity with too many spokesmen, leaving average people confused and with nothing to turn to but the State TV and its lies. On another level, many of the activists became BFFs with their Facebook updates and achieved celebrity status through their tweets. Some made it through donning their best Gucci sunglasses.

“The revolutionaries were too noble. They took the position of the hero eschewing power,” said Mohamed Abbas, an ex-Muslim Brotherhood member, as we walked down Tahrir a month ago (Abbas left the organization to found a new political party).

After Mubarak left us, revolutionaries split into three groups: One got locked in its Facebook/Twitter fantasy world; the second, disgusted by the first, decided to wait on the streets, ready to join in whenever called upon; and the third tried to put together some socio-political advances, but they just never figured out how to keep the movement intact.

On the other (far) side, there was the bigger crowd: Average Egyptians who never heard from any of these groups. Average people began paying attention, instead, to young people appearing on State TV talk shows claiming to be revolutionaries and preaching against any future protests. 

“See? Revolutionaries on TV are speaking against the people in Tahrir,” an average man would say, “so Tahririans must be nothing but rioters.” Then, before long, he'd run into another revolutionary on another channel taking the Tahririans’ side and conclude that revolutionaries must be just a bunch of confused kids and turn his back.

Average people were scared by the military council’s repeated speeches about the near fall of the country’s economy. That’s no news. What is news is that people started using the term “Tahririan” as a synonym for spy.

Egyptians had seen so much horror through the 18 days of the revolution that they became psychologically attached to the army. The thought was, “The army had kept its heavy hand off our necks, and thus saved the revolution.” It’s still a thought that's playing on loop at the back of most of Egyptians’ minds.

The revolution became another "One Thousand and One Nights"; a good friend took to stenciling this phrase in his graffiti, tailed with a question mark and accompanied by an image of a mom taking a photo of her kid on a military tank. This was a year ago, in the days when we were at peace with the military.

The Facebook/Twitter activists turned their backs on the streets. “Twitter celebrity” has become a moniker around town. “How is it going in the Twitter world?” I asked a famous twitter celebrity when I ran into him during the December clashes. “Good, good, how are you doing?” he replied. A couple of hours later I went back home and I found the tweet he was posting when I ran into him: “There are soldiers in the trees now!” He tweeted that after those of us on the street had already spent three days with soldiers holding positions on the rooftops of buildings in the area, showering us with rocks, stones, desk drawers (yes), dining plates and, every once in a while, a bullet to shoot a protester dead.

There’s a video from those days that zooms in on a group of soldiers on one of the rooftops. One soldier is obviously having a nervous breakdown, hysterically picking out rocks from a box he has in one hand to throw at protesters with the other. A fellow soldier is seen trying to stop him by force, but the former soldier keeps breaking free from the other’s hold to go back to throwing rocks at protesters down below, over and over. That’s a scene to tweet and re-tweet.

“What’s the objective of going down to the streets on the 25th of Jan [for the anniversary of the revolution],” asked a friend in a discussion we had in the lead up. “With more and more protesters killed, our blood is becoming cheaper and cheaper.”

Little rumbles started going around after the clashes last November: “Maybe we should start arming the ultras.” The ultras, of course, are the hard-core football fans hailed as heroes during the clashes when, for five days and with great courage, they stood their ground in the face of non-stop attacks by the riot police and Central Security Forces. Ultras became the face of the new cult of resistance. When resistance became a goal in itself.

For how long will the people hold their chests open to gunshots?

A Million Tahrirs

I don’t believe our blood from past clashes has run in vain. After the December violence, with the substantial amount of shocking footage that came out, the “Kazeboon” (“Military Liars”) campaign took off. It’s a decentralized movement that aims to spread images of the Army’s brutality. Kazeboon’s call-to-action is simple: Print photos of the army's brutality and show them to your neighbors, or to the passengers on the subway; or set up a screen in a square or a side street in your neighborhood and project the footage. The campaign has blossomed across the country.

Another campaign took off in-synch with Kazeboon. It’s called “Salasel El Sawra” (“Chains of the Revolution”). The organizers post each upcoming march’s meeting point, timing and route on their Facebook page with an attached map for the specific area of Cairo. Everyone is welcome to join in the march holding a sign with a friendly, simple, carefully chosen slogan. The aim is to hold the signs and march smoothly. The group’s page provides good answers for any question that average people on the street might ask a protester while marching. Sell the revolution!

Another group started to hold nightly gatherings at Talaat Harb square, the core of downtown, hanging a megaphone from the hands of Talaat Harb’s statue and broadcasting revolution to passersby.

These are campaigns that finally broke out of the Facebook/Twitter drift and rebooted the online world back to its original position of bringing the agenda for actual moves on the streets.

The revolution has finally started to breed the new wave of activists it deserves: Activists who are successfully talking average people into joining the revolution. 

Street artists marked the ten days before the 25th of Jan anniversary as “Mad Graffiti Week” to reclaim the streets, but if you’re walking downtown, you won’t find a lot of new graffiti. Instead, graffiti has started to move out from the Tahrir area, with fervor, to previously unvisited neighborhoods all around the country.

“Giving the military a million Tahrir Squares instead of one to fight” is the main goal now.

It can only happen with the involvement of workers. 

“Activists forgot about workers and their rights after the revolution,” said Ahmed Ramadan, a 26 year-old worker in Mahalla who edits the Facebook page Workers with No Rights. “Activists have only been interested in archiving the pre-revolution struggle, and they stopped talking about today’s bread. We, both workers and activists, need to re-unite again because that’s our only way out.” 

In Suez, days before the anniversary, it was reported that seven separate protests merged into one strike blocking the highway, with marchers facing down an attempted military police crackdown, forcing the police to retreat. Through the past few weeks, other workers have started going on strikes in varying factories, highway and railway services all across the country.

Back in February 2011, the phenomenon of workers going on a general strike comprised the last push needed to topple Mubarak, who fell three days later.

25th Jan 2012; Protest, Don't Celebrate...

Days before the anniversary, I set out to interview Asmaa Mahfouz, the girl who posted the famous video back in January 2011 calling on men to show some manhood and join her on the street. “If you want to talk about my memories from a year ago, I'm not doing the interview,” she told me. “What needs to be talked about is what needs to be done next. The revolution is a future to embrace.”

We waited for the 25th of Jan with a hope, wishing for it to come true. The military waited for it with a nightmare, wishing that it wouldn’t.

The 25th of Jan came to pass with hundreds of thousands on the streets. Half of downtown Cairo was occupied - something unprecedented, even during the revolution a year ago. Marches of thousands converged from every place around Cairo towards Tahrir, while other cities around the country witnessed protests in Cairo's image.