Interesting interview with democracy activist Alaa Abd Al Fattah at the Personal Democracy Forum.
An excerpt:
NORRIS: Help us understand your role in the uprisings in Egypt.
Mr. AL FATTAH: My role during the uprising itself was I was a foot soldier. I was one person among a big mass. I was in Tahrir. There were similar masses in other cities. And my blog was one of many blogs that were key to building a pro-democracy movement years prior to the uprising. And the online communities then kept growing and growing, and they played a very big role leading up to the revolution in building up to that event but not during.
NORRIS: You’re here in this country in part to describe what happened in Egypt. Are there things that happened there that people don’t well understand? Here, when there are large uprisings or large news events like this, a popular narrative takes hold and sometimes it’s correct and sometimes it’s not completely correct.
Mr. AL FATTAH: I think a lot of it is misunderstood and misrepresented in both internationally and even locally from the framing of this as an Internet-led revolution to a framing that it’s a youth revolution. All of that is based on the aspects of reality, but it excludes the majority of the people who participated in the revolution.
And by that exclusion, you also exclude a very big aspect of what it is about. And also, there’s a lot of focus on Tahrir while you had the majority of the revolution was happening outside of Cairo. And some of its most amazing stories were in – there were six towns that were completely autonomous after the third day of the uprising, and people had to manage the cities and had to organize themselves to keep the cities functioning. And that experience is amazing, and it’s not really being discussed.