Alaa freed, but did the campaign help?

After a total of forty-five days in jail, Egyptian blogger, technogeek and democracy activist Alaa has been freed.

I joined in the campaign to publicise his arrest and that of other Egyptian political campaigners by googlebombing aimed at producing a "Free Alaa" message for anyone googling "Egypt".

My usual insatiable curiosity at that time about whether googlebombing actually worked led me to check out the theory over a couple of days by repeatedly googling on "Egypt." As far as I could see, it wasn't working, though the number of hits on googling the phrase "Free Alaa" went up at the very impressive rate of 57,000 links to 336,000 links.

Tonight, if you google "Free Alaa", you will get over 1,000,000 links, which I'm impressed by. But you still won't find Free Alaa anywhere amongst the top pages if you google "Egypt". Hardly suprising, because there are 344,000,000 links for that.

The Egyptian bloggers Sandmonkey and Big Pharaoh both link to a fellow Egyptian blogger activist, the Arabist, who reports that Alaa was made to undergo a roughing up and sleep deprivation after his release was announced, and before he was let out yesterday. This is what happened:

I spoke with his wife Manal. She says Alaa was moved from Tora prison
to 3omraniya police station last night, for the notorious bureaucratic
paper work. Alaa was locked up in a tiny cell, full of criminals, some
of whom are high on drugs and others are armed with knives and sharp
objects, Manal said. Scuffles have broken out inside the cell between
the criminals, who reportedly hit Alaa several times. Alaa spent the
night standing on his feet, coz there was no room for him to sleep in
that filthy cell. According to Manal, he managed to call her on the
mobile phone, and he sounded in a very bad state.

Reading the whole story of his arrest, three repeated re-imprisonments and then the brutal cat-and-mouse of the last day of his imprisonment reminds me so much of the methods of the KGB as described so vividly in Anne Applebaum's Gulag and of course a host of incredible prisoner memoires.

Perhaps that's not surprising, because Egypt used to be a client state of the Soviet Union.

Of course, what he suffered, bad as it was, pales beside what they went through. No-one who was a KGB prisoner managed to get uncensored letters smuggled out, let alone use a phone, as Alaa did.

But the great irony is that the Egyptian state still seems more wedded to the old totalitarian ways than it is to the ways of democracy, for all that it's seen as a US client state these days.

Which is why the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt seems to be able to represent itself as a champion of democracy in Egypt, when its aim is for the establishment of a caliphate totalitarian state.

Was the roughing up Alaa received a two-fingers response to the campaign to release him? It will be worth seeing how Glenn Reynolds, who previously claimed that blogger campaigns had led to an earlier imprisoned democracy activist being freed by the Egyptian authorities, reads the situation now.

Comments

[Lisa]

Quite a few prominent bloggers, including Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices, confirmed early on in the Free Alaa campaign that Google bombing does not work. Someone at Google told Ethan that the search engine sniffs out these campaigns and regards them as bad practice.

On the other hand, bloggers did succeed in getting a lot of mainstream media exposure for Alaa. Egyptian Sandmonkey and Manal were interviewed on CNN and several articles were published in the Western press. Yael (Olehgirl) and I were interviewed by a Cairo-based Spanish reporter who was interested in knowing why Israeli bloggers were joining the online campaign to free Alaa; we were both quoted in the article that was published a few days later. So now Spanish readers have been informed that Israelis and Arabs were working together to free an Arab political prisoner.

There's no way of judging whether the publicity influenced the decision to release Alaa, of course, but I do think that raising awareness of the Egyptian regime's repressive, anti-democratic policies is a good thing.

[Judy]

I'm sure it was worthwhile to raise awareness of Alaa's arbitrary imprisonment as a blogger and pro-democracy activist, and that it was a campaign which attracted Israeli and Jewish bloggers as well as others.

Would I have joined the campaign if I'd known that googlebombing didn't work, and that it's regarded as bad practice by Google? Probably not.

I think there's food for thought there about the need to go on finding ways to devise campaigns that capture people's imagination (or, as in my case, appeal to my subversive instincts) without adopting bad internet practice.

And I didn't pick up on any of the posts I read by fellow googlebombers that it had emerged that it was regarded as bad practice.

What also still interests me is whether we will get any evidence of how the Egyptian authorities were affected by the campaign.

[Lisa]

I sort of doubt that the Egyptian authorities were directly influenced by the bloggers' campaign to free Alaa. Actually, I'd be surprised to learn that they read blogs at all. But it seems reasonable to assume that that they watch CNN and read the mainstream Western press, which did pick up on the story from blogs. So perhaps blogging had an indirect influence.

No-one knew going in that Google bombing was bad practice. That discovery was made after the campaign was already well underway. Google bombing was an idea that one blogger suggested and it gathered steam quickly because it's (a) easy and (b) (let's face it) appealingly populist.

I guess that a lot of bloggers who participated in the Google bomb would not otherwise have written about Alaa, so perhaps the wrong thing was (unintentionally) done for the right reason.

[Tomi]

I want to vote but I can't dowload the rriequed forms from the website. Whenever I write down my ID number on the website, I get a message saying This service is available for those who'll vote in round 1 , please visit us later for round 2 & 3 voting . I can't understand what that means. Will the voting for Egyptians abroad be divided into 3 rounds? and which round shall I join? and if it's only 1 round and the last date for submitting papers is tomorrow the 26th, how can I vote and send a letter by post that arrives to London tomorrow while I can't even dowload the forms ??? !!!!!!!!!