Kifaya – "Enough!" One man and the riot police in Cairo today

  
Well, who would have believed it? Today's protests in Egypt far exceeded my own expectations and, no doubt, the expectations of the organisers and the Egyptian authorities. The Mubarak regime, even if it's not headed for oblivion just yet, must surely be shaken to the core.

For blow-by-blow accounts of the events as they unfolded, seeAhramOnline, Enduring America and the Guardian.

I wrote this morning that today would be the first real test of the "Tunisia effect" – and we can now safely assume that it does exist. Without Tunisia, the protests in Egypt would have had nothing like the support they got. Today, someone coined the word "Tunisami" (Tunis + tsunami) and there were chants of "Ya Mubarak, Ya Mubarak, al-Saudia fi intizaarak" – Mubarak, Mubarak, Saudi Arabia (the retirement home for ex-dictators) is waiting for you.

I also suggested this morning that today would be a test of the "new" Arab politics (largely informal and organised online) against the old, institutional, opposition politics. Case proven. The new politics has shown itself to be viable.

Maybe I should add, too, that it was a test of the new media versus the old media. Again, case proven. The old media – even al-Jazeera – looked slow on their feet and too preoccupied with the less important game of musical chairs in Lebanon.

As for the new media, this morning, Wael Abbas, the most famous Egyptian blogger, was out and about in Cairo, with a live webcam mounted in a car. The independent newspaper, al-Masry al-Youm, was also streaming live video from the streets. Twitter (hashtag #jan25) went into overdrive. Citizen journalists were everywhere – someone counted seven of them recording the scene on their mobile phones at just one location during a single 21-second film clip.

Late this afternoon there were signs that some kind of internet crackdown had begun, with reports that Twitter had been blocked. At present, though, it's not entirely clear what is going in that area.

The protests themselves started off peacefully, though the tear gas, plastic bullets (and possibly live bullets too) came later. The security forces were out in strength and thought they had planned well. But in Cairo they were wrong-footed by the protesters who had announced their own plans but then changed them at the last minute. By staging multiple demonstrations in different places they also seem to have kept the security forces on the hop.

In fact, for much of the day the security forces don't seem to have behaved with quite the gusto that Mubarak might have expected of them. There were reports of demonstrators being allowed through police lines in some cases, and of demonstrators fraternising with the police. One woman was photographed giving them roses.
At present, no one can say with any certainty where all this will lead. But I suspect today's events will leave the protesters feeling emboldened rather than intimidated. 

Man against a water cannon

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 25 Jan 2011 (evening).