ဘယ်သူလက်ခံမလဲ။

Since the 2013 military coup in Egypt, the country witnessed an unprecedented state of despair. People were afraid to talk about politics due to the regime’s brutality: ten thousand detainees, several hundreds martyrs, and thousands of victims of torture, all due to the widespread state violence. The situation was intolerable particularly because it followed a wave of fearless struggle, full of sacrifices, for freedom and dignity that actually achieved the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 - a victory against decades of tyranny and dictatorship.

Under such repressive circumstances, it was logical for activists and people in general to be wary of criticizing the authorities and the military. In response, myself and nine women initiated a safe way to provoke people towards expressing their resentment of the regime and restore their desire for change while maintaining a low risk of being arrested or otherwise repressed by the authorities.

Without making any direct criticisms of the regime, our campaign was nonetheless able to indirectly criticize the corruption and incompetence of the military dictatorship.

We established a movement called “Free June 30” and we worked on two campaigns, one of which was “Who Would Accept” that addressed politics through economic arguments.

The target audience of both campaigns was the general public. Our main goal in the first campaign was to encourage people to find their courage, and to realize that there are safe ways to speak out. The campaign spoke only about “non-political” issues: high gas prices, garbage in the streets, bread shortage, electricity blackouts, water shortages, extreme poverty, and many other economic problems. Without making any direct criticisms of the regime, our campaign was nonetheless able to indirectly criticize the corruption and incompetence of the military dictatorship, since, obviously, these problems were happening under their tenure.

The campaign began by holding small demonstrations with big banners.

We wrote the hashtag, #whowouldaccept (يرضي_مين#), on the banners, and then we wrote on each banner one sentence describing a specific problem, such as: “ high price of gas”, “unemployment”, and so on.

This initiative attracted all sorts of reactions. Some bypassers would react to us with anger, which we understood because at the time the media was portraying all activists as traitors who are serving America, Turkey and Qatar. Nonetheless, the majority of people appreciated our efforts with many coming by thanking us for our courage or saying “May Allah bless you”.

Our demonstrations took place twice a week over a period of six months, until one morning the police came and we were forced to flee. We decided to suspend the demonstrations to avoid further security escalations.