The New York Times has an interesting article about the background to the revolts in Tunisia and now Egypt:
The Egyptian revolt was years in the making. Ahmed Maher, a 30-year-old civil engineer and a leading organizer of the April 6 Youth Movement, first became engaged in a political movement known as Kefaya, or Enough, in about 2005. Mr. Maher and others organized their own brigade, Youth for Change. But they could not muster enough followers; arrests decimated their leadership ranks, and many of those left became mired in the timid, legally recognized opposition parties. “What destroyed the movement was the old parties,” said Mr. Maher, who has since been arrested four times.
During 2008
… Mr. Maher and his colleagues began reading about nonviolent struggles. They were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.
Some Egyptians went to Serbia to learn from Otpor, and later on organizers from Qatar went to Egypt to help the rebels organize.
And so forth and so on.
This didn’t happen over night. And, as we know, Facebook was a critical organizing tool.
But, how much of this story was known in the US State Department and Department of Defense before 25 January 2011? How seriously was it taken? Did this knowledge ever reach the White House? Did it reach Obama?
It’s clear that the American foreign policy establishment was taken completely by surprise and so had to make up policy as events unfolded. Why? I don’t see how they, or anyone else, could have known just when things were going to jump off. But they could have been prepared for substantial and serious protest and have had some policy in place for how to react. They didn’t.
Saba Mahmood, writing in The Nation, explains how the Egyptian blogospher became the 'incubator' for the use of Facebook by the protesters: "The Egyptian blogosphere first came into existence around 2004 with the birth of the Kifaya! (Enough!) movement and its sizeable demonstrations, which were brutally crushed; its leaders jailed by Mubarak. Many of the prominent young bloggers date the beginning of their on-line activism to these demonstrations. By 2005, the numbers of blogs had jumped from a handful to the hundreds and are now estimated in the thousands. Currently there are over three million Facebook members—still a relatively small percentage of the 80 million population. Despite their relatively small numbers in a country that is also overwhelmingly illiterate, these bloggers have put a face and a voice to the ubiquitous police brutality that most Egyptians have experienced but seldom saw reported or condemned in the news media. YouTube videos, shot with shaky cell phone cameras, of innocent Egyptians tortured and violated for crimes they never committed were a regular feature of these blogs and Facebook pages. By 2008, when I was living in Cairo, the blogs had become a surrogate form of journalism that circumvented the censorship laws in Egypt."
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