Medan Tahrir, January 2011/Links.org.au

“Black Saturday” January 26 1952….Cairo ablaze. From the Gazeera Sporting Club roof on Zamalek Island, we watched a city burn. Tens of thousands of protesters from throughout Egypt rampaged through downtown streets torching everything in their path. The inferno consumed the British club, a Jewish school, four hotels (including the world-famous Shepard’s), four night clubs, seventeen cafes and restaurants, eighteen movie theaters and seventy other commercial establishments including automobile show rooms and airline offices. Thirty people were killed outright and hundreds were injured. A revolution was underway.

Fifty-nine years later, almost to the day:

“The Day of Anger”…January 25 2011. According to one report, “Protesters clashed with police in Cairo (population 15 million) and other Egyptian cities, where most of the country's 80 million (75 percent under age 35) subsist close to the United Nations' global poverty level of $2 a day - and where 26 new billionaires spawn a blend of envy and hatred” Protests were triggered from anger over the iron-fisted President Hosni Mubarak who has held power in Egypt for thirty years. Protesters say Mubarak’s government, prominently including its police, is corrupt. They also say, and not merely as an afterthought, that they want democracy.

Déjà vu? Not by a longshot. To vastly over-simplify, the 1952 conflagration was an anti- imperialist/colonialist revolt, and this time around the rage is directed toward one individual. No one knows how Egypt’s ongoing uprising will play out but the sheer carnage of “Black Saturday" forty-nine years ago dwarfs what’s happening now.

But now there is the Internet. There was none in 1952. The chaos then was largely confined to Egypt.

This time, the Web was the primary vehicle which just drove long-time Tunisian strongman, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali into disgraced exile. The first protests in Cairo were triggered by a Facebook page honoring the young Tunisian street merchant who had immolated himself to protest the Ben Ali regime. Social media outlets like Twitter and YouTube quickly jumped on the event and spread the word which rocked the Arab world. Aljezeera reported “Coverage of the uprising there [in Tunisia] was lapped up by Arab audiences and in Yemen, Algeria and Egypt demonstrators took to the streets. State-controlled media tried desperately to spin the coverage of the unrest, but no amount of spinning could hide the reality of the events in Egypt….The Egyptian government clamped down on the Internet, but with global news media tracking the events in the Arab world carefully, footage of the protests was beamed around the world.”

Historically, Arab countries lagged behind others in adopting the Internet, the last ones doing so were Saudi Arabia in 1999 and Iraq in 2000. But by mid-2008, circa 38 million Arabs were on line, Egypt leading the way with 8.6 million users. www.al-bab.com adds “Having accepted the inevitability of the Internet, the first instinct of Arab regimes was to look for ways to control it. This was based partly on their fears of political subversion but also on fears of conservative and religious elements that would undermine ‘traditional’ values – fears that in both cases were well-founded.”

Nonetheless, the optimistic take is that the Information Highway will become the eradicator of Arab despots. Mubarak’s first response to the uprising was to slam the Web shut. Renesys, a US based Internet monitoring firm, maintained this was “unprecedented in Internet history…the Egyptian government’s actions have essentially wiped their country from the global map.” This was too much, even for the Mubarak regime. Egypt is now back on the air, but the president had quickly and correctly identified the source of his plight.

Foreign Policy Magazine, January 11 2011, states that “North Africa and the Middle East now have the highest percentage of young people in the world. Sixty percent of the regions’ people are under 30, twice the rate of North America, found a study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. And with the unemployment rate at 10 percent or more, North Africa and the Middle East also have the highest rates of joblessness in the world. For the region’s young people, it’s four times that.” The population of Arab countries has nearly tripled since 1970, climbing from 128 million to 359 million

The disproportionate number of disenchanted young in "Arabia"  may actually be cause for optimism. The good news is that these kids are bright and many are computer-savvy. This generation could bring the Arab world, kicking and screaming, into the Twenty-First Century.

Then again, there is a down side. Iran’s “Green Revolution” in 2009 was largely Internet-driven, but so was the immediate crackdown. The government quickly became adept at using the Internet to go after insurgents. Scott Shane in the New York Times observes “The Iranian police eagerly followed the electronic trails left by activists which assisted them in making thousands of arrests in the crackdown which followed. The government even crowd-searched its hunt for enemies, posting on the Web the photos of unidentified demonstrators and inviting Iranians to identify them.” Shane quotes Syrian activist Ahed al-Hindi, “Users must be aware that they are speaking to their oppressors as well as their friends.”

So will the Internet usher in an Arab “Age of Enlightenment” or be a tool for oppression? Or neither? Or both? Time will tell and time is getting short.