Ordeal in Egypt


February 27, 2011

By Menachem Wecker

When Egyptian native Nathalie Atalla describes the experience of being in Cairo during the recent weeks of mass protests, she gets emotional.

“It still gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. The people finally spoke up!” says Ms. Atalla, who is a master’s candidate in the Graduate School of Political Management’s strategic public relations program. “They could no longer take it and finally gathered the courage to express themselves.”

By Ms. Atalla’s count, when she finishes the program, which she is taking online so she can care for her two daughters, she will be the first and only woman in the Middle East to hold such a degree from GW.

On Jan. 30, Ms. Atalla had to put her studies on hold, because Internet connections went down. She warned her classmates and professors at GW that she wouldn’t be able to participate in the weekly conversations. Little did she know that she still would not be able to log onto the online chats the following week too.

“We were totally disconnected and couldn’t share our stories with the outside world,” “We couldn’t reach family and friends. We felt trapped!”

It all started on Jan. 25, when she says “the people of Egypt decided to protest against a power that has been in place for 30 years.”

The protests that lasted 18 days were sparked by a range of ongoing issues, she says, including police corruption that led to the death of an Alexandria man, abductions of opposition leaders and election fraud.

On “Police Day,” Jan. 25, demonstrations had been planned on Facebook and Twitter, Ms. Atalla says. Thousands of Egyptians attended the demonstrations, and millions of others, like Ms. Atalla, watched on television. Ms. Atalla says she had never seen anything like the masses gathered in Tahrir Square.

When Twitter was shut down, Ms. Atalla switched to Facebook to communicate with family, friends and other Egyptians – a tool swap that she compares to “moving from a Ferrari to a tricycle” – and she tried to keep people updated as much as she could given the “super slow connection.”

Facebook would go down next, and then text messages were delayed. “We could not believe that the government was really disconnecting us that way,” she wrote at the time. “I was pretty sure mobile lines would be suspended shortly, so I urged my friends to exchange landline numbers just in case. By 11 p.m. we were completely Internet-less!”

Soon curfews were imposed, and army personnel deployed in the city, but the soldiers were unable to prevent looting and vandalism. On the night of Jan. 29, a Saturday, Ms. Atalla was brandishing her father’s rifle guarding from the balcony of her apartment and jammed the apartment door with furniture and a metal ladder.

The boys and men from the neighborhood stood guard all night with baseball bats, rifles, samurai swords, batons and sticks. “The government wanted to teach us a lesson, ‘You can’t survive without us,’ yet we had,” says Ms. Atalla. “We survived by sticking together. I believe we are the ones who taught the government a harsh lesson!”

On Jan. 31, Ms. Atalla, her two daughters and her sister boarded a plane for Zurich, unsure when they would return. The plane sat for hours on the tarmac, so the group missed its connecting flight and was stuck in Istanbul. Without visas to enter Turkey, they couldn’t leave the airport.

The group was finally booked on a flight the next morning but had to spend the night in the airport. Her children fell asleep in an airport lounge within minutes, but Ms. Atalla found it hard to “warm up to the idea of sleeping in an open space with other people stranded in Istanbul.” The next day, Ms. Atalla, her daughters and her sister arrived in snowy Zurich without their luggage.

A week later, Ms. Atalla was back in Cairo, and though nothing had changed politically, she was glad to be back. “Happy to be home and surrounded by the people I love,” she wrote at the time. “Military tanks are all over the place. We went through four different military checkpoints to get home from the airports, and many roads were blocked by stones, trash cans, plants, metal fences, bars and cars.”

After she got home, Ms. Atalla created a list of the aspects of the uprising that impacted her the most. The role of social media, which protestors had used to organize, was one of the items on her list.

“It’s impressive how many people were communicating on Facebook and Twitter. I was always a great believer in the power of social media to mobilize people, but never thought it would lead to such a great change,” she wrote. “It’s amazing how technology and the Internet have set a whole different set of rules for politics and civil society. It is great to see how empowered the people feel!”