The Arab Agenda

Chapter 6

Prior and during the events of the Arab Spring

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria etc the social media and Facebook went into action.

How did Tunisians and Egyptians use social media during the uprisings?

I decided to answer that question by reporting what actually happened, but then I came across an article on Pollock 10, a writer who specializes in Africa, who was sent to interview the principals behind the region's youth movements.

Pollock's piece follows the journey of two Tunisians known as "Foetus" and "Waterman" (their real names are unknown even to Pollock) whose organization, Takriz, helped incite the mass protests against Tunisia's president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Takriz, Pollock writes, began as a "cyber think tank" in 1998. Early on, its aims were freedom of speech and affordable Internet access. Pollock stated the following:

Waterman recalls that the Internet was the only viable option for organizers in 1998, because other media were controlled by Ben Ali. Foetus, Takriz's chief technology officer, a skilled hacker who started hacking because he couldn't afford Tunisia's then-exorbitant phone and Internet costs, saw another advantage online, safety. Takriz meetings "in real life" meant "spies and police and all these Stasi," he says, using the term for East Germany's secret police. "Online we could be anonymous."

Over the next decade, more and more Tunisians slowly came online. Even in 2008, when protests broke out in Tunisia's mining region, fewer than 30,000 Tunisians were on Facebook. Ben Ali's online censorship was so severe that Tunisia ranked below Iran and China on measures of Internet Freedom.

By the end of 2009, more than 800,000 Tunisians had Facebook accounts and when Ben Ali fled earlier this year, the number was just shy of two million, nearly a fifth of the country's total population.

Takriz used many other online tools: It created a fake Twitter account and website for Tunisia's foreign minister. Activists used Skype and Mumble to talk to one another over the Internet. One activist even used Foursquare to broadcast his location when he was being held in the Ministry of the Interior. "We were online every day," Foetus told Pollock, "and on the streets pretty much every day, collecting information, collecting videos, organizing protests, getting into protests."

In the days following the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, protests erupted in towns across Tunisia's poor interior. Dozens of protesters were killed. One video emerged filmed inside a hospital in the town of Kasserine: a young man lay dead with his brains spilling out.

Posted and reposted hundreds of times on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere, the video set off a wave of revulsion across North Africa and the Middle East.

Like thousands of Tunisians, Rim Nour, a business consultant, was "online almost 24 hours a day," spending a lot of time identifying government stooges on Facebook groups. She remembers the video vividly: "A friend put it up and wrote something like "You don't want to see this, it's horrible, but you must. You have a moral obligation to look at what is happening in your country." Even though these other tools played their parts, Facebook was on a plane of its own. Foetus calls it "the GPS for this revolution" -- quite a helpful analogy.

"Twitter, Facebook and YouTube's role in Arab Spring (Middle East uprisings)"

The "Arab Spring" in the Mid-East heavily relied on the Internet, social media and technologies like Twitter, TwitPic, Facebook and YouTube in the early stages to accelerate social protest. YouTube videos have supported the social media with recorded coverage of events. Recently social media has heavily spread to neighboring KSA, UAE and KUWAIT.

Guidelines on methods to use were disseminated and spread via the social media platforms. The guidelines used in the Bahrain, as in most if not all uprising, were Gene Sharps "From Dictatorship to Democracy". Although the methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion were supposed to be used, it did not last long.

This is how it all began and it was planned, it was no accident, nothing happens on impulse, not to such an extent and not in such a composed way.

We were ready to celebrate 10 years of political, economic, and social reforms, ending an important stage in Bahrain's journey toward the year 2030 vision. Democratic reforms had been introduced but vested interests had their own tacit agenda to fulfill and Bahrain was in their crosshairs.

A comprehensive socio-economic path for Bahrain provided a clear direction for the continued development of the economy and at its heart, a shared goal of building a better life for everyone in Bahrain. Ten years on after a major change had taken place in an archipelago of 33 islands in the Arabian Gulf, which has been inhabited by humans since prehistoric times, change was happening although not as fast as some would like.

Not many people had heard of Bahrain before... Bahrain, two seas, that's what it means and it was the heart of the Gulf region where all civilizations could meet in a climate of spiritual and intellectual tolerance. Culture flourished and religions coexisted.

Bahrain offered an environment for human activities covering agriculture, trade, a flourishing banking sector that had opened its doors and an open market for worldwide trade.

With favorable demographics and abundant resources, Bahrain has always been a choice for enterprise. Bahrain had become a gateway.

But some opposing forces weren't happy. The main opposition to the Bahrain government and the source of dissemination was Al Wefaq and their supporters.