Who Is Behind The Egyptian Protests?

A Panoply Of Activists and Opposition Groups Are Maintaining The Assault On Hosni Mubarak's Presidency

By Robert Dreyfuss
Wednesday 2 February 2011 13.09 GMT
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

Mohamed ElBaradei speaks during the Egyptian protests in Tahrir Square. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Viewed from above, the protests in Egypt have been impressive to watch on television, with hundreds of thousands of people in motion. In some reports, it's portrayed as a spontaneous eruption, a leaderless rebellion. But behind the scenes, a panoply of activists and groups are responsible for organising, directing and sustaining the movement against President Hosni Mubarak and his cronies.

Young, angry and organised

In particular, a movement led by tech-savvy students and twentysomethings – labour activists, intellectuals, lawyers, accountants, engineers – that had its origins in a three-year-old textile strike in the Nile Delta and the killing of a 28-year-old university graduate, Khaled Said, has emerged as the centre of what is now an alliance of Egyptian opposition groups, old and new. Sparked by the April 6 Youth Movementand another group, We Are All Khaled Said, the coalition has established a leadership committee of 10 people that includes Islamists, nationalists, liberals, reformers and Nasserists, and which for the time being has settled on Mohamed ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as its spokesman and titular leader.

But revolutions are messy things, and although the anti-Mubarak coalition is bound together by its distaste for the regime, there's no telling if it can stay together, especially if the prospect of taking power looms. Who, and what, will emerge on top when Mubarak steps down – and presuming that the Egyptian armed forces don't decide to put forward one of their own – isn't clear. But what's clear is that the masses who've packed streets and squares in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, Port Said and Ismailia and other cities are far from leaderless.

At the core of the revolt is the April 6 Youth Movement, which runs a veritable war room in downtown Cairo, issuing leaflets, internet missives and guidances to the crowds filling Tahrir Square. The group takes its name from April 6, 2008, when Egyptian authorities cracked down brutally to suppress a strike among textile workers in the gritty industrial town of El Mahalla El Kobra. Despite vigorous efforts by the authorities to suppress and sabotage April 6 and We Are All Khaled Said's internet presence, both groups have reached out beyond Egypt's college-educated youth to the unemployed and underemployed, hewing to a strictly secular and pro-reform message. April 6 organiser Ahmed Maher, along with many of his confreres, mode common cause with the more grizzled activists who made up the hardy band of pro-democracy advocates in Egypt, including two dissident groups, Kefaya ("Enough!") and El Ghad ("Tomorrow"), both set up in 2004, and Maher even used El Ghad's offices to get started.

Kefaya and the reborn democracy movement

The democracy movement in Egypt was reborn, to a degree, with the founding of Kefaya in 2004. Kefaya was sparked in part by its support for the intifada in the Palestinian territories in 2000, and it gained energy by joining the fierce opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. It drew on an eclectic base that included communists, Nasserists, Islamists and secular activists, and its spokesman was Abdel-Halim Qandil, editor of the Nasserist newspaper al-Arabi.

Also in 2004, Ayman Nour, a lawyer and member of Egypt's parliament, founded El Ghad. Both Kefaya and El Ghad quickly fell foul of the authorities, and Nour was famously imprisoned for speaking out. The 10-member steering committee formed at the height of the Cairo protests in 2011 included several representatives of Kefaya, along with Nour of El Ghad, and Qandil, representing the Nasserist party, plus Osama al-Ghazali Harb of the liberal Democratic Front, established in 2007. Though none of these older movements, who often comprise veterans of Egyptian politics, can be said to have sparked this year's eruption, they've joined it wholeheartedly and anchor it with their activist and pro-reform bona fides.

The role of the Muslim Brotherhood

Existing in uneasy alliance with the secular groups, of course, is theMuslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 in Ismailia by Hassan al-Banna, the secretive Ikhwan ("Brothers") has long been Egypt's most powerful opposition group. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Ikhwan had a paramilitary adjunct and carried out assassinations of top officials and police. But its back was broken under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and in the 1970s Anwar Sadat rehabilitated the Ikhwan and, with strong support from Saudi Arabia, the organisation re-established itself. Since then, it has eschewed violence, and in 2005 candidates supported by the Muslim Brotherhood won scores of seats in parliament. In the recent upsurge in Egypt, the Brotherhood has been at pains to stay in the background, though its decision this week to take part in Monday's outpouring signalled, perhaps, that the balance had tipped irrevocably against the Mubarak regime.

Both inside and outside Egypt, there is concern that the Muslim Brotherhood, which is tightly organised, well funded and maintains a cell structure – along with decidedly reactionary views on social issues and a strong strain of antisemitism – might hijack Egypt's revolution and impose an Islamist order. Yet the core leadership of the revolt, from April 6 on down, cannot be said to have Islamist leanings, and most experts on Egyptian affairs do not believe that Egypt would readily swallow the ultraconservative views of the Brotherhood's leaders, many of whom are in their 70s and 80s. In addition, the Egyptian Brotherhood is utterly unlike either the Taliban or Iran's clerical regime in its outlook. Yet it provides muscle and organisation discipline to the anti-Mubarak movement, and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed al-Beltagui, was quietly included as a member of the leadership committee.

ElBaradei, the Nobel peace prizewinner

ElBaradei, 68, returned to Egypt last February to explore the possibility of challenging Mubarak in presidential elections scheduled for 2011. He'd already gained widespread fame in Egypt during his tenure at the IAEA for having confronted President George W Bush over falsified claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and again over US alarmism over Iran's nuclear research programme and he won the Nobel peace prize for his work in 2005. Back in Egypt, he set up the National Association for Change, and he inspired Ahmed Maher and his allies to redouble their efforts. Because of his name recognition, and because he is well respected outside Egypt, the other members of the anti-Mubarak movement – from the April 6 group to the Muslim Brotherhood – designated ElBaradei its leader. Since then ElBaradei has spoken out forcefully, saying that Mubarak "must go".

All of these elements were in place when the spark from a similar revolt in Tunisia fed the flames of rebellion in Egypt. Whether the leadership can maintain its unity is uncertain, especially if and when the question of apportioning power arises. Class differences, disputes over relations with the United States and with Israel, and the possibility of arguments over the role of Islamism in politics can drive wedges into the now-united opposition.

More significantly, however, is the sheer weight of the wreckage left after three decades of corruption and economic mismanagement. If the leaders of the Egyptian revolt take power, they'll inherit staggering problems of how to feed, shelter and employ a vast and growing population that is overwhelmingly young, while, at the same time, navigating the tricky shoals of inter-Arab and Arab-Israeli politics. Like Barack Obama, who inherited an economic collapse and two unfinished wars from his predecessor, the leaders of Egypt's rebellion might also find that it's not easy to deliver change that its population can believe in.