CAIRO: Galvanized by their call for a general strike on Sunday, bloggers have set a new date for anti-regime action on May 4 as an 80th birthday present for President Hosni Mubarak.
“We succeeded on April 6, so let’s do it again on May 4, read a message on the Facebook social networking site where 64,000 people joined the group calling for action on Sunday.
While that general strike largely failed to materialize, an unknown number of people took part in the Facebook group’s call to stay at home.
Official press warned of prison terms for anyone striking, while opposition and independent newspapers had heralded a nationwide day of action which in the end took place with little visibility.
Unbowed, one member of the new Facebook group said that “If God created the world in six days, we can’t expect to change Egypt in just one.
Symbolic of their rise to power, police arrested several bloggers on Sunday, including Mohamed Sharkawi and Malak Mustafa, as well as the creator of Facebook’s April 6 group, Esraa Abdel Fattah.
Bloggers on Monday debated the impact of Sunday’s day of action, which culminated in violent clashes between police and workers protesting the high cost of living in Mahalla.
Word of Sunday’s strike against inflation and the lack of state-subsidized bread spread rapidly through the internet and via SMS text messages.
But despite Egypt’s internet explosion, the cyber realm remains largely the preserve of the young, wealthy and educated in a country where 40 percent of the population of 80 million people cannot read.
Nevertheless, bloggers, who rarely conceal their real identity, have taken on the role of bridging the gap between civil society’s desire for democracy and workers’ demands for better pay and working conditions.
In a country where there is little access to live, independent and Egyptian reporting, blogs and real time social networking sites like Twitter provided regular but unverified updates of Sunday s events, particularly the Mahalla clashes.
Among the unverified reports was one that two people were shot dead in Mahalla. That report was picked up by other blogs and some media organizations but turned out to be untrue.
At the end of the day, interior ministry hailed the failure by the professionals of provocation and illegal currents.
The call to strike had little impact because the young people who made it have neither experience, networks nor a popular powerbase, said renowned political analyst Mohamed Kamel Al-Sayyed.
But you mustn t underestimate it because it s a first, set against the background of general discontent in the country, he told AFP.
Today s younger generation recognizes opposition forces other than the umbrella protest movement Kefaya whose popular demonstrations calling for Mubarak to step down grabbed the spotlight in 2005
Importantly, the Internet also provides a forum for anti-establishment surfers to disagree with each other.
We didn t manage to show ourselves, but the strike worked, Rihan Al-Kadi said on Facebook, to which Yahia Ewadah Hassun replied No, the strike was also a failure, but that was because of the police.
In an increasingly common phenomenon, the Al-Badil opposition daily on Monday reported the Facebook call for action on Mubarak s birthday on May 4 as news.
Some surfers meanwhile pointed to the limits of technology-driven activism in a country like Egypt.
You have to tell people who have neither Internet nor mobile phone about the May 4 strike, wrote Osama Mohamed Rafat. -AFP
