Out of the Mountains (33 page)

The Uprising

In December 2010, Tunisians' long-simmering opposition to the Ben Ali dictatorship boiled over into open violence. The immediate trigger was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi—a fruit vendor in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid who, on December 17, 2010, doused himself in paint thinner and struck a match in protest against police corruption and harassment—but the reaction to Bouazizi's act drew on a deep reservoir of frustration and resistance that had been fed over many years by a cycle of protests and violent regime repression.
36
While Bouazizi lay in critical condition in a hospital burn unit, protests broke out almost immediately in several Tunisian towns, then rapidly escalated, spread, and became more violent in response to regime brutality against demonstrators.
37
This included targeting the funerals of activists killed by police. (As we'll see in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, regime targeting of protestors' funerals created a self-replenishing cycle of violence: when protests led to regime repression and deaths, demonstrators who gathered to mourn these deaths were themselves targeted, leading to more protests, more deaths, more funerals, more attacks on funerals, and so on.)

By January
2011
, after two weeks of violence, several Tunisian cities were in open revolt, workers were on strike, businesses were closed, foreigners had fled the country, and urban elites were joining the protests. Street demonstrations had reached the capital, Tunis—a coastal city of just over
1
million inhabitants, with roughly
2
.
5
million people (almost a quarter of Tunisia's total population) in its greater metropolitan area, and by virtue of its size and political importance the decisive terrain of the uprising. At this point, the Takrizard-Ultra alliance came into its own: online groups produced and disseminated anti-regime information, helped mobilize and organize protestors, and provided situational awareness for opponents of the regime. Simultaneously, the connectivity between urban Tunisians and relatives in their rural villages of origin allowed awareness of the uprising to spread rapidly—initially from the countryside into Tunis and later, as the revolution took hold, from the capital back to smaller towns and villages. The Ultras, for their part, formed the hard core of the mass protests. Their experience in urban fighting against police gave them a self-confidence and tactical skill that made them less fearful of the regime, and their confidence was infectious. They set the example and reassured other demonstrators, who might otherwise have wavered, by showing it was possible to fight the regime and survive.

In the virtual world, online activists such as Slim Amamou, one of Tunisia's most prominent regime opponents, used their access to mobile connectivity to help rally these broad-based street protests against the regime.
38
This wasn't a “Twitter revolution”—Twitter was not well known in Tunisia (where, “pre-revolution, only around
200
active tweeters existed out of around
2
,
000
with registered accounts”)
39
and Twitter feeds weren't a key part of the protestors' arsenal. But resistance groups did make extensive use of Facebook, which had an unusually high subscribership in Tunisia and was one of the few social networking sites that the regime didn't block.
40
After an unsuccessful attempt to block Facebook that collapsed after sixteen days of online protests back in
2008
, the regime had instead decided to set up fake “phishing” sites that mimicked Facebook and drew dissident users to reveal their login details, so that security forces could track their movements.
41
Despite this harassment there were
1
.
97
million Tunisian Facebook users by early
2011
, representing “over half of all Tunisians online, and almost a fifth of the total population.”
42

In late
2010
, the synergy between virtual and real-world activism escalated into revolution. As John Pollock described it:

On December 27, thousands rallied in Tunis. The next day Ben Ali sacked the governors of Sidi Bouzid and two other provinces [and] threatened to punish the protestors. On December 30, a protestor shot by police six days earlier died. Lawyers gathered around the country to protest the government and were attacked and beaten. On January 2, the hacking group Anonymous began targeting government websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks in what it called Operation Tunisia. As the academic year started, student protests flared. A flash mob gathered on the tracks of a Tunis metro and stood, covering their mouths, eloquently silent. On January 4, Bouazizi died of his burns. The next day, 5,000 people attended his funeral. January 6 brought the regime's response to the Anonymous attacks: several activists were arrested. . . . Cyber-activist Slim Amamou was also arrested, and he used the location-based social network Foursquare to reveal that he was being held in the Ministry of the Interior. . . . The next day, 95 percent of Tunisia's lawyers went on strike. The day after, the teachers joined in. The following day, the massacres began.

Over five grisly days starting on January 8, dozens of people were killed in protests, mostly in towns like Kasserine and Thala in the poor interior. There were credible reports of snipers at work. These deaths would turn the protests into outright revolution. One graphic and deeply distressing video was highly influential: it shows Kasserine's hospital in chaos, desperate attempts to treat the injured, and a horrifying image of a dead young man with his brains spilling out. “It was really critical,” [said a Takriz activist]. “That video made the second half of the revolution.” Posted and reposted hundreds of times on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere, it set off a wave of revulsion across North Africa and the Middle East. The regime had cut Internet service to Sidi Bouzid [so] Takriz smuggled a CD of the video over the Algerian border and streamed it via MegaUpload. [Takrizards] saw the video and found it enraging. Takriz then forwarded it to Al Jazeera.
43

The role of Anonymous in this process illustrates the fact that, beyond enabling the Tak-Ultra alliance we have discussed, networked connectivity allowed international groups to play a part in the revolution in real time—something not seen, at least not to the same extent, in any previous uprising. Q
 
uinn Norton's reporting on Anonymous, in a seminal series of articles she wrote for
Wired
magazine in 2012, shows that Tunisia was a new departure for the “anons,” as participants in the hacker group are known. Norton points out that anons' activism in support of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, during 2010—activism that was virtually leaderless, an online variant of the swarming behavior discussed in Chapter 2, or perhaps an emergent characteristic of what Norton calls the “hive mind” of the Internet—led directly to the hacker group's involvement in the Tunisian uprising:

[In December 2010, Ben Ali] began blocking web access to Wikileaks cables that pertained to his and other Arab nations. A few anons formed a new channel called #optunisia on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] and started talking about what they could do . . . Over the next couple of weeks the small group brought down the website of the Tunisian stock exchange and defaced various sites of the Tunisian government. It also passed media and news reports about the Tunisian uprising in and out of the country. It distributed a “care package” containing details about how to work around privacy restrictions in Tunisia, including a Firefox script to help locals avoid government spying while they used Facebook. Some who supported #optunisia were themselves Tunisians, including Slim Amamou, an outspoken blogger. After Amamou was arrested on January 6, 2011, the anons on the #optunisia IRC channel barely slept as they waited for word. But eight days later, the regime fell, and Amamou was appointed a minister in the new government. We'll never know how important Anonymous was for Tunisia, but Tunisia changed everything for Anonymous. OpTunisia was the first of what became the Freedom Ops, which focused largely on other Middle Eastern countries during the Arab Spring but spread much farther. For the first time, Anonymous had gotten on the winning side of a real fight, and it liked the feeling.
44

Within twenty-four hours, Anonymous had taken down several of the Tunisian government's websites, including not only that of the stock exchange but also those of the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Commerce, the presidential palace, the electoral commission, and the central government Web portal.
45
Although the attacks likely had little or no direct effect on Tunisian security forces' ability to suppress the revolution, they demonstrated strong international support for the uprising and thus probably both encouraged anti-government protestors (online and on the street) and undermined regime officials' and supporters' morale. This contributed to a cascading loss of cohesion within the government and security services, ending in the fall of Ben Ali's regime as the dictator fled to exile in Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011.

Along with WikiLeaks and Anonymous, other nonstate groups were closely involved in the contested information space of the uprising. Activists living in Europe who were members of
Nawaat
(a Tunisian diaspora-based collective blog that functioned as an online democracy forum) played a critical role in getting news out of Tunisia when the regime attempted to censor and block information about the uprising, while global groups such as the Open Net Initiative and WikiLeaks provided support from abroad, and anti-secrecy sites such as Cryptome carried leaked information relating to the uprising.
46
Thus access to networked connectivity, which enabled an urban street-level alliance of online activists with Ultras and demonstrators in Tunisia, also enabled collaboration among individuals and organizations across the planet. This same pattern would be repeated in the next major uprising of the Arab Awakening, which was already beginning to break out in Egypt.

Egypt: Network-Enabled Revolution

Many features of the Tunisian uprising—the role of hard-core soccer fans as shock troops of a broad-based protest movement, the self-selected engagement of international and local activists, the synergy between online activism and street protest, and the mass mobilization of a frustrated citizenry in response to crackdowns against an initially smaller radical group—also emerged in the Egyptian revolution. Indeed, the Egyptian uprising itself resulted in part from an extremely high level of networked connectivity across the entire densely populated, heavily urbanized coastal strip of North Africa that stretches from Tunisia in the west through Libya to Egypt—a zone that, as we've noted, experienced rapid coastal urbanization during the generation prior to the uprisings, making Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt three of the most heavily connected, urban, littoralized countries in the entire Mediterranean basin.
47

Egypt, like Tunisia, had experienced extremely fast population growth and coastal urbanization in the generation prior to the uprising—indeed, between
2006
and
2012
alone, Egypt's population grew by fully
18
percent, to reach
83
million people within the country, along with another
8
million in the diaspora, and just over
9
million people in the greater metropolitan area of Cairo, the capital city.
48
Unlike Tunisia, however, until
2011
Egypt had enjoyed an unusually high and unfettered degree of network connectivity: unlike many other authoritarian regimes in the region, the Egyptian government “never built or required sophisticated technical infrastructures of censorship. (Of course, the country has hardly been a paradise of free expression: the state security forces have vigorously suppressed dissent through surveillance, arbitrary detentions and relentless intimidation of writers and editors.)”
49
Partly because of its relatively liberal telecommunications policy, “Egypt became a hub for internet and mobile network investment, home to a thriving and competitive communications sector that pioneered free dial-up services, achieved impressive rates of access and use, and offered speedy wireless and broadband networks at relatively low prices. Indeed, Egypt is today one of the major crossing points for the underwater fibre-optic cables that interconnect the regions of the globe.”
50

Popular uprisings against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak began on January
25
,
2011
. Egyptian activists, both secular and religious, had followed the Tunisian uprisings closely on Internet forums and via radio, Twitter, newspapers, and electronic media including Al Jazeera satellite television. Tunisian and Egyptian democracy activists had coordinated and shared tactics and lessons learned over several years, and studied methods of nonviolent revolution together, in online forums and face-to-face seminars.
51
Egyptians reacted to the news of Ben Ali's fall on January
14
,
2011
, with immediate calls for the ouster of Mubarak: that evening, protestors rushed to the “heavily guarded Tunisian embassy in Zamalek, one of Cairo's most affluent residential districts . . . ‘We are next, we are next, Ben Ali tell Mubarak he is next,' the protestors chanted.”
52

On January
25
, eleven days after Ben Ali's fall from power, Egyptian pro-democracy groups organized a national day of protest, in which massive rallies of peaceful demonstrators called for democratic freedoms similar to those just won by Tunisians. The day of protest was sponsored by a loose alliance that included secular democracy organizations, liberal and leftist groups, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was timed to coincide with Egypt's National Police Day.
53
As in Tunisia, brutality against the early demonstrators led to an escalation of the protests, which rapidly turned into a series of violent uprisings in Egypt's major cities, including Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said.