Over the past three decades, tensions in Egypt would periodically rise over issues such as the price of food or police brutality: small embers of dissent that would ultimately die out. This week, however, it appears things are different. There is no one reason to explain why tens of thousands of Egyptians are taking part in the largest protests in a generation, calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. It is, rather, a combustible combination of factors ranging from the torture killing of a twenty-something businessman to the emerging political force of Facebook in the Arab world.
‘We are all Khaled Said’
Khaled Said was a shy, soft-spoken 28-year-old who ran a small business in Alexandria.
Last summer, he came across a video that appeared to show local police officers dividing up the spoils of a drug bust, so on June 6, he posted it on his blog.
A few hours later, two plainclothes officers emerged from a nearby police station to pay Mr. Said a visit. They found him in an Internet café by his house, just off the harbour, and dragged him to the street.
Twenty minutes later, Mr. Said was dead, his head smashed against a marble staircase in the lobby of the building next door.
An autopsy conducted by the Interior Ministry claimed Mr. Said suffocated after swallowing a bag of drugs he tried to hide from police.
A gruesome photograph, however, started circulating online, showing Mr. Said’s battered face, with missing teeth, a ripped lower lip, a broken jaw and bloody head. Mr. Said’s family has confirmed the photograph is of their son.
Mr. Said’s case was not the first of alleged torture at the hands of Egypt’s notorious police, nor was it the worst. However, it captured the imagination of young Egyptians who decided to turn to social media as a tool of protest.
A Facebook page appeared under the name “We Are All Khaled Said,” which is run by an anonymous administrator who uses the moniker “Khaled Said.”
The page has transformed into a virtual central square for those who want to protest against police brutality and human rights abuses.
Users post photos and video, and list the names of allegedly abusive police officers. The group organized a series of demonstrations in memory of Mr. Said after his death and, with a membership topping 500,000, it has become Egypt’s most popular online human rights group.
In the immediate wake of protests in Tunisia, the page issued a rallying call for a massive demonstration to take place in Cairo on Jan. 25, national police day.
The Facebook factor
An estimated 3.4 million Egyptians use the social networking site, the vast majority under the age of 25. Egypt is the No. 1 user of Facebook in the Arab world, and No. 23 globally. It is the third most-visited website in the country, after Google and Yahoo.
With freedom of speech and the right to assemble severely limited in Egypt, which has been ruled under a state-of-emergency law since 1981, Facebook provides one of the only forums for dissent.
Unsurprisingly, in recent years, Egyptian activists have moved online, launching an anti-torture website with a hotline to report instances of police brutality, for example.
The El Nadim Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence publishes a diary on its website that has documented hundreds of allegations of abuse in the past year.
After the picture of Mr. Said’s battered body began circulating online, Egyptians used Facebook and Twitter to successfully organize a large, rare protest outside the Interior Ministry.
A thousand people, many of them strangers, attended Mr. Said’s funeral.
According to Reuters, as many as 8,000 people dressed in black demonstrated in Alexandria, answering a call issued on Facebook.
