The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (29 page)

The spring of 2008 was a moment of great discontent in Egypt. The most common complaint was economic: food prices had soared while people’s wages remained flat. The price of basic staples like bread and cooking oil had more than doubled. In April 2008,
the UN World Food Programme reported that average household expenses in Egypt had jumped 50 percent from the beginning of the year. With anger mounting over stagnant wages, Egypt had quickly become a hotbed of labor activism. Although labor demonstrations were officially illegal, the Egyptian government witnessed a sharp rise in workers voicing their demands through sit-ins, work stoppages, and strikes. In 2002 and 2003,
there were fewer than a hundred labor protests in Egypt. Between 2004 and 2008, there were nearly two thousand. The actions did not come from one corner of the country or a single
group of workers; they were widespread. Textile workers, taxicab drivers, doctors and nurses, garbage collectors, and university professors all threatened to strike. Even the government’s own tax collectors went on strike in hope of better wages.

If the labor activity had an epicenter, it was the gritty northern industrial town of El Mahalla El Kubra. It is the home of the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, the largest textile factory in Egypt and, with roughly twenty-seven thousand workers, one of the largest in the Middle East. The factory workers there had been engaged in on-again, off-again negotiations over their wages and working conditions since 2006. When the workers claimed that the state-owned company had once again reneged on its promises, they announced they would go on strike on April 6, 2008.

With very little activity in Egyptian streets, bloggers had turned their attention to the growing wave of labor unrest around the country, publicizing worker strikes and government crackdowns. Maher had some contact with the leaders of the El Mahalla El Kubra strike, but not much. He, like most activists living in Cairo or Alexandria, had failed to establish deep ties with labor leaders in other parts of the country. It had been difficult to convince labor organizers that their economic demands—better pay, safe working conditions, workers’ rights—could best be solved through political demands. Nevertheless, Maher sensed an opportunity. In discussions with fellow youth activists, he wanted to find a way that people without connections to the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company could still support the workers in their fight. “We brainstormed and came up with the idea of a general strike,” says Maher. “The slogan was ‘Stay at home.’ Don’t go to the university, don’t go to work, don’t go out. Stay at home.”

These activists didn’t have a blueprint. Even after years of demonstrations, protests, and street actions, they were feeling their way. They took risks and tried to learn from them, attempting to locate the regime’s pressure points as they went. And there was a lot to learn: organizing protests, defending themselves, marketing their message, connecting with local populations, maintaining morale, and trying to outwit the state’s security apparatus. “As a youth movement, we are pretty much working on trial and error,” Maher admitted. “We are studying nonviolent movements, following their lead, and trying
to adapt it to Egyptian circumstances. But what we are working on mainly is trying to link social issues with politics.”

The 2008 call for a general strike would be one of their first great lessons. After they came up with the idea, the next step wasn’t organizing a march, handing out flyers, or staging a sit-in. Maher turned to Facebook. He and a friend, Esraa Rashid, set up a group on Facebook—dubbed the April 6 Strike group—in support of the workers. People who logged on and became members could post ideas to the group’s wall on how people could show their solidarity. To their surprise, the April 6 Strike group’s membership exploded overnight. By the first day, it had more than a thousand members. Every time they refreshed the page, the number jumped. Within a few days, they were surpassing twenty thousand, then thirty thousand members. Maher and Rashid had to work in shifts to administer the group’s page, approving or deleting an avalanche of messages posted to its wall. A couple of days before the workers’ strike,
the Facebook group exceeded seventy-six thousand members.

In part, Maher credits the response to the power of the idea. For a public that had reason to fear reprisals, a general strike was appealing. People were not being asked to storm the barricades or stare down riot police. They didn’t need to take great personal risk; they simply needed to stay within the confines of their homes. Yet if enough people joined, the regime would feel its effects as the country came to a standstill. The online group not only presented an opportunity for people across Egypt to demonstrate their support for the textile workers but also sent a powerful signal of the wider discontent and brewing anger among the population at large.

But Maher and his fellow activists don’t believe Facebook was the most effective tool for publicizing the strike. For that, they give credit to the Egyptian regime itself. Soon after the government became aware of the support building for a strike, it started issuing stern warnings against participating in the protest. “
The [regime’s] security had fallen into the trap of putting warnings, very heavy and authoritarian-like warnings, on television, radio, and on the news bar every half hour or so,” says the youth activist Ahmed Salah, laughing as he recalls it. Impersonating a deep, stern voice, he continued, “A statement from the Ministry of Interior: Anyone not showing up to work, anyone participating
in this, anyone doing that, will be punished in accordance with the laws and regulations. No disorder is allowed!”

The regime had been caught flat-footed. The growing support for the workers in El Mahalla El Kubra, triggered in part by Maher’s call for a strike over Facebook, had led the government to make a miscalculation. In 2008, April 6 fell on a Sunday, which is the first day of the workweek in Egypt. But people say it felt like a Friday, the day of rest in the predominantly Muslim country. The streets in Cairo and Alexandria were noticeably quiet. The little bit of traffic in the city centers moved briskly. Police and riot squads were the only crowds you found in the typically bustling public squares and markets as the security forces congregated outside. For all the stereotyping of the Egyptian people as docile and apathetic, a significant number of them apparently did not want the Ministry of Interior ordering them to go to work. “[The regime] was a great help in spreading the word, because no matter what we have, our means of communication with the people are limited,” says Salah. “Television is absolutely the widest possible way to get the word out, and this was very successful on April 6.”

The streets, however, were not quiet in El Mahalla El Kubra. The strike at the textile factory was supposed to begin at 7:00 a.m., when the night shift ended. Plainclothes security officers had entered the factory overnight and squashed any effort to organize. Outside, angry crowds formed. Tensions turned violent, with residents throwing stones and setting tires ablaze as police fired tear gas and rubber bullets. The rioters tore down a billboard of President Mubarak, and public buildings were torched. At least two people were killed, and more than 150 were injured in the clashes. Around Egypt, state security arrested hundreds of people accused of organizing the national day of protest. Sensing the danger, Maher went into hiding.

Having broken the strike through force, the regime then sought to smooth over tensions with handouts. Two days after the violence, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, with a group of cabinet officials in tow, visited the workers at the textile factory. Nazif told the workers they would receive a bonus equal to thirty days’ pay. Several weeks later, President Mubarak made an even grander gesture. In a speech on the eve of May Day, he announced a major salary increase for government workers, along with expanded efforts to provide subsidized bread,
cooking oil, and other basic foods. “
We had talked about a 15 percent raise,” Mubarak said, “but decided on 30 percent. The government will have to find the resources.”

Meanwhile, Maher and his colleagues, hoping to capitalize on their recent success, called for a second strike timed for President Mubarak’s eightieth birthday on May 4. This time, however, the regime issued no public response or dire warnings. Ahmed Salah went out on May 4 and asked people if they knew there was a strike that day. “Strike? What strike? Nobody knew about it,” he says. It was a flop. The regime had quickly learned its lesson.

It also knew that Ahmed Maher had been the ringleader behind the online campaign. So it waited. Maher remained in hiding for a month. “I used to have my phone off all the time. I would only access Facebook from Internet cafés and only stay half an hour,” he recalls. On May 7, when he thought things had calmed down, he resurfaced. He was immediately arrested and taken to dreaded Lazoghly, which is what Egyptians called the imposing state security intelligence headquarters that sat in Lazoghly Square. Once he was in custody, his interrogators stripped him and beat him. They threatened to sodomize him with a stick. Maher says the beating and abuse continued for the next twelve hours. After delivering heavy blows to his back and neck, his tormentors would apply lotion to try to keep the bruising and swelling down, and then they would beat him again. The purpose was simple: they wanted Maher’s Facebook password. He refused. Outside, demonstrations and protests calling for Maher’s release had already begun. When the security officers realized they weren’t getting anywhere and the pressure for his release was building, they tried to negotiate with him. “They were like, ‘Okay, how about you set up an NGO? Or, how about you become the youngest leader of a legal opposition party? We’re not bad people. We are nationalists, too. You can work with us,’ ” recalls Maher.

The regime wished to draw Maher into the artificial world of Egyptian politics. He and his movement would become the newest members of a co-opted opposition that coordinates its activities within the strict limits set by the government. Maher had no intention of agreeing to the security officers’ proposal, but he wanted to be released. “I said I’d think about their offer. I was released, and the first thing I did was expose them. I talked to everyone,” he recalls. “One officer called
me and said, ‘Is that what we agreed on?’ Then they stopped calling me. And we started the movement from there.”

The next two years represented a time of tremendous learning for Maher and the members of the April 6 movement, and they looked far beyond the streets of Cairo to draw their lessons. Maher told me about studying examples of nonviolent struggles from Poland, Chile, and Serbia and reading portions of the book
From Dictatorship to Democracy
. Its author, Gene Sharp, was a former Harvard researcher and the leading thinker on the strategy of nonviolent conflict. His book has been translated into dozens of languages and read by democratic movements around the world. “We were following the wrong theory,” Maher told me. “We thought we would take to the streets and start to demonstrate. People are very angry, so they will join us and suddenly we would be a million people and we would topple the regime. That was wrong.”

Other members of the movement traveled abroad to learn more. I first met Ahmed Salah in Boston in June 2009 when he attended a six-day course organized by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. The center, funded by the American multimillionaire Peter Ackerman, brought together more than forty people from different countries to study the strategy and tactics of nonviolent struggle. Each day the participants gathered in a classroom for lectures and discussions. But Salah told me that his most important insights came from the opportunity to compare notes with other activists. Specifically, he zeroed in on the advice he received from two of the leaders of the Serbian student movement that helped topple Miloševic. Early attempts to organize against the government, particularly by the youth wing of Kefaya, had been infiltrated by the regime’s informants. Salah learned that their movement’s efforts had been too open, indeed, too democratic. “I had always been extremely supportive of democracy, and I would say we have to be the biggest example of democracy,” says Salah. But the Serbs explained that was mistaken. “They gave me the answer regarding how they managed to fight sabotage and infiltration attempts. There is no democracy in the leadership of a resistance movement. A resistance movement is not a club,” he says. “You cannot leave it open to elections and debate, because this makes it prone to all sorts of interference.”

The model for a successful democratic movement wasn’t a democracy;
it was a military operation. One of Gene Sharp’s central observations was that democratic movements, even if nonviolent, needed to be as strategic and disciplined as any military unit might be. It was a lesson successfully put in practice by the Serbs in their own movement, Otpor. In their idealism, it was something Egyptian activists had misunderstood. Salah returned to Cairo with new ideas for the group’s organization. “From our experience and in Youth for Change, we had meetings every month, and they were constantly infiltrated by security,” says Maher. “Ahmed Salah was with me in Youth for Change, and we learned our lessons in April 6. When Ahmed Salah went to Boston, he understood, ‘Yes, you can’t run it democratically.’ We are in a fight, and we are in a fight with this regime. We are more like a military organization.”

In that same month, Mohamed Adel, a member of the April 6 movement, traveled to Belgrade to attend a different workshop.
Among all the youth movements they had studied, Adel told me, they had taken a particular liking to the Serbian example. The April 6 movement’s logo—the outline of a clenched fist—was a copy of the Serbian group’s own stencil. Even some of the slogans they spray-painted on the streets of Cairo—for example, “Mubarak is over”—were borrowed from Otpor. (In Serbia in 2000, they had passed out stickers that read, “Miloševic Is Finished.”) The workshop was organized by the Centre for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, a group founded by leaders of the Serbian youth movement. Its purpose was to help train other activists how to lead a nonviolent campaign to topple their dictators. When I met Adel in Cairo, I asked him what he had learned in Belgrade. “We learned the difference between a protest movement and a resistance movement,” Adel told me. “The critical thing is how to take advantage of the regime’s mistakes.”