Dula's Blog

The article and the video show what went underground to make the Egyptian revolution. As Newton’s First Law states that an object will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external force. Also any change in motion can cause accelertion.

In Ethiopia we have to end this interia of Woyane rule for the last 20 years. Woyane has divided the country, destroying its economy, its identity and overall welfare.

The Egyptian revolution did not happen by accident. It was those who sought the need and sat down and put a plan together. Simply, it was not spontaneous. It took months to carefully plan and put into operation. Sothe video and the text provide valuable lessons.

CAIRO — The Egyptian opposition’s takeover of the area around the parliament this week began with a trick.
First, they called for a march on the state television building a few blocks north of their encampment in Tahrir Square. Then, while the army deployed to that sensitive communications hub, they moved into the lightly defended area around the parliament to the south.

The feint gave a taste of how a dozen young activists managed to outwit Egypt’s feared security forces to launch a historic uprising now in its 17th day—and hint at how the organizers hope to keep pressure on a regime that has dug in its heels.

On Jan. 25, the first day of protests, the organizers had a trick up their sleeves in the impoverished slum of Bulaq al-Dakrour, on Cairo’s western edge.

There amid the maze of muddy, narrow alleyways, a seemingly spontaneous protest caught security forces on their heels and swelled in size before those forces could react to crush it.

That protest was anything but spontaneous. How the organizers pulled it off, when so many past efforts had failed, has had people scratching their heads ever since.

After his release from detention on Sunday, Google Inc. executive Wael Ghonim recounted his meeting with Egyptian’s newly appointed interior minister. “No one understood how you did it,” Mr. Ghonim said the minister told him. He said his interrogators concluded there had to have been outside forces involved.

The plotters, who now form the leadership core of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which has stepped to the fore as representatives of protestors in Tahrir Square, have shared their secret in recent days for the first time.

Their accounts reveal a core of savvy plotters who have managed to stay a step ahead of the security forces with decoy marches and smart politicking that has sustained popular support for their protests.

In early January, when they decided they would try to replicate the accomplishments of the protesters in Tunisia who ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, their immediate concern was how to outfox the Ministry of Interior, whose legions of riot police had managed to contain and quash protests for years. The police were expert at preventing demonstrations from growing or moving through the streets, and at keeping ordinary Egyptians away.

“We had to find a way to prevent security from making their cordon and stopping us,” said Basem Kamel, a 41-year-old architect who is a member of Mohamed ElBaradei’s youth wing and was one of the dozen or so plotters.

They met daily for two weeks in the cramped living room of the mother of Ziad al-Alimi, a leading organizer for the opposition group formed by Mr. ElBaradei and one of the chief plotters.

Mr. Alimi’s mother, a former activist herself who served six months in prison for her role leading protests during the bread riots in 1977, lives in the middle-class neighborhood of Agouza on the west bank of the Nile.

The group of plotters included representatives from six youth movements connected to opposition political parties, groups advocating labor rights and the Muslim Brotherhood.

They chose 20 protest sites, usually connected to mosques, in densely populated working-class neighborhoods around Cairo, hoping that a large number of scattered protests would strain security forces, draw larger numbers, and increase the likelihood that some would be able to break out and link up in the city’s central Tahrir Square.

The group publicly called for protests at those sites for Jan. 25, a national holiday celebrating the country’s widely reviled police force. They announced the sites of the demonstrations on the Internet and called for protests to begin at each one after prayers at about 2 p.m. But that wasn’t all.

“The twenty-first site, no one knew about,” Mr. Kamel said.

To be sure, they weren’t the only ones calling for protests that day. Other influential activist groups rallied their resources to the cause. The Facebook page for Khaled Said, the young man beaten to death for no apparent reason by police in Alexandria, had emerged months earlier as an online gathering place for activists in Egypt.

There was an Arabic page and an English page, and each had its own administrators. Mr. Ghonim, the Google executive, has now been identified as one of the administrators, but the pages’ other administrators remain anonymous.

An administrator for the English language page, known only by his online moniker El-Shaheed, or The Martyr, recounted the administrators’ role in the protests in an interview with The Wall Street Journal via Gmail Chat.

El-Shaheed said he was chatting online with the site’s Arabic-language administrator on Jan. 14, just as news broke of Tunisian President Ben Ali’s flight from the country. Mr. Kamel and his cohorts, who had already begun plotting their protest, now had another powerful recruiting force.

“I was talking with Arabic admin and we were watching Tunisia and the moment we heard Ben Ali ran away, he said, we have to do something,” said El-Shaheed.

The Arabic administrator posted on the Arabic page an open question to readers: “What do you think we should give as a gift to the brutal Egyptian police on their day?”

“The answer came from everyone: Tunisia Tunisia :),” wrote El-Shaheed.

For the final three days before the protest, Mr. Kamel and his fellow plotters slept away from home, fearing police would come to arrest them in the middle of the night and disrupt their plan. They stopped using their own cell phones and in favor of those owned by family members or friends that were less likely to be monitored.

They sent small teams to do reconnaissance on the secret 21st site in Bulaq al-Dakrour. That site was the Hayiss Sweet Shop, whose storefront and tiled sidewalk plaza meant to accommodate outdoor tables in warmer months would make an easy-to-find rallying point in an otherwise tangled neighborhood no different from countless others around the city.

The plotters knew that the demonstrations’ success would depend on the participation of ordinary Egyptians in working-class districts such as Bulaq al-Dakrour, where the Internet and Facebook aren’t as widely used. They distributed flyers around the city in the days leading up to the demonstration, concentrating efforts on Bulaq al-Dakrour.

“It gave people the idea that a revolution would start on January 25,” Mr. Kamel said.

The organizers sent small teams of plotters to walk the protest route repeatedly in the days leading up to the protest, at a slow pace and at a fast pace, to get their timing down for sychronizing when the separate protests would link up.

On Jan. 25, security forces predictably deployed by the thousands at the sites of each announced demonstration. Meanwhile, four field commanders chosen from the organizers’ committee began ordering their men to the secret gathering point at the sweet shop.

The organizers divided themselves into cells of 10—with only one person per cell aware of the secret destination.

In these small groups, the protesters advanced toward the Hayiss Sweet Shop, massing into a crowd of 300 demonstrators free from police control. The lack of security prompted neighborhood residents to stream by the hundreds out of the neighborhood’s cramped alleyways, swelling the crowd into the thousands, according to employees at the Hayiss Sweet Shop who watched the scene unfold.

At 1:15 p.m., they began marching toward downtown Cairo. By the time police realized what was under way and redeployed a small contingent to block their path, the protesters’ numbers had grown so quickly that they easily overpowered the police.

The other marches organized at mosques around the city failed to reach Tahrir Square, their efforts foiled by riot-police cordons. The Bulaq al-Dakrour marchers, the only group to reach their objective, occupied Tahrir Square for several hours until after midnight, when police attacked demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.

It was the first time Egyptians had seen such a demonstration in their streets, and it provided an explosive tipping point credited with emboldening tens of thousands of people to come out to protest the following Friday.

That day, they seized Tahrir Square again, and they haven’t given it up since.

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More info at :http://www.ethiomedia.com/above/2120.html