The role of Ultras as a politically biddable, readily mobilized, self-organized, street-savvy, battle-hardened corps d’élite in urban conflict has been underexamined but would clearly repay deeper academic interest. One of the world’s pioneering researchers in this field, James Dorsey, has written extensively on the role of Ultras in European, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern politics. As Dorsey points out, Ultras—by virtue of the militarization and fortification of soccer stadiums (the “military urbanism”) that they confront, and the pitched battles against police, security forces, and other fan groups that their urban tribal lifestyle involves—have become increasingly radicalized and militarily experienced. “With elaborate displays of fireworks, flares, smoke guns, loud chanting, and jumping up and down during matches,” Dorsey writes, the Ultras form a hard-core supporter element for their team, seeking to intimidate opposing fans and rally their own, and this brings them into constant conflict with the police.31 Most ultras are young working-class men “who embrace a culture of confrontation—against opposing teams, against the state, and against expressions of weakness in society at large.”32 For many years, Ultras in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and other parts of the Middle East engaged in stadium battles against police and other fans on a weekly basis. Indeed, their actions can be seen as a struggle (like that of gangs in San Pedro Sula or Kingston, Jamaica) for control over key urban terrain—in this case, soccer stadiums—in what Dorsey describes as “a zero-sum game for control of a venue they saw as their own.”33 Regimes across the region saw these urban youth tribes as a challenge to their monopoly on the use of force. “In the name of public safety they turned football pitches into virtual fortresses, ringed by black steel and armed security personnel. The ultras, for their part, radicalized in response to the militarization of the stadium.”34 As Dorsey points out, however, they did not always view their own actions as political:
“We steer clear of politics. Competition in Egypt is on the soccer pitch. We break the rules and regulations when we think they are wrong. You don’t change things in Egypt talking about politics. We’re not political, the government knows that and that is why it has to deal with us,” said one Egyptian ultra in 2010, after his group overran a police barricade erected to prevent it from bringing flares, fireworks and banners into a stadium.35
Despite their initial lack of political consciousness, Dorsey’s description shows these organizations (including the Tunisian Ultras) for what they are: nonstate armed groups that engage in exactly the kind of competitive control behavior we discussed in Chapter 3. They seek to control not only urban populations (soccer fans, opposition supporters, and local inhabitants) but also physical and economic terrain (stadiums, social venues, and rallies) in the cities where they operate. They compete for control against other fan groups and against the police, security services, and other representatives of the state, and they apply a spectrum of coercive, administrative and persuasive tools in order to do so. They’re also, of course, a primarily urban and periurban phenomenon, since major sporting events tend to occur in cities and towns, though Ultras—like other urban nonstate armed groups—often live in marginalized areas that are physically or functionally on the periphery of the urban core. Likewise, access to mobile communications technology, especially cellphones, text messaging, or Twitter feeds, gives soccer fans a degree of connectivity that lets them self-synchronize their activity, and such connectivity (via Wi-Fi or cellphone network coverage) is also usually much greater in urban than in rural areas.
We should note here, of course, that the vast majority of soccer fans (like fans of any other team sport) aren’t particularly violent, and there’s nothing necessarily disruptive about most supporters’ behavior. The Ultras are a small, hard-core, organized, violent minority within a much larger and more diverse movement—an urban vanguard, as it were. Their tight cohesion, self-synchronizing swarming behavior, willingness to engage in violence, and battle-hardened tactical competence in the scrappy business of street fighting combine to give this radical subset of fans a great deal of latent military strength. In particular, Ultras—who battle the cops every weekend anyway, just in the normal course of events—have little fear of, and much familiarity with, police riot control tactics, and this turned out to be a key adaptive trait when the uprisings came. When online activists such as the Taks managed to unify the disparate Ultra groups in Tunisia via the Internet, and thus helped raise the fans’ political and anti-regime consciousness, they were creating an alliance with an urban tribal force. This alliance had enormous military potential for conflict in cities—but its power rested on the twin pillars of electronic connectivity (which connected Taks with Ultras and broke down barriers among rival Ultra groups) and virtual-human network overlap (the meshing of real-world and cyber relationships), which allowed online networks connecting city-dwelling activists to map onto human networks that connected Tunisian cities with rural towns and villages.
The Uprising
In December 2010, Tunisians’ long-simmering opposition to the Ben Ali dictatorship boiled over into open violence. The immediate trigger was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi—a fruit vendor in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid who, on December 17, 2010, doused himself in paint thinner and struck a match in protest against police corruption and harassment—but the reaction to Bouazizi’s act drew on a deep reservoir of frustration and resistance that had been fed over many years by a cycle of protests and violent regime repression.36 While Bouazizi lay in critical condition in a hospital burn unit, protests broke out almost immediately in several Tunisian towns, then rapidly escalated, spread, and became more violent in response to regime brutality against demonstrators. 37 This included targeting the funerals of activists killed by police. (As we’ll see in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, regime targeting of protestors’ funerals created a self-replenishing cycle of violence: when protests led to regime repression and deaths, demonstrators who gathered to mourn these deaths were themselves targeted, leading to more protests, more deaths, more funerals, more attacks on funerals, and so on.)
By January 2011, after two weeks of violence, several Tunisian cities were in open revolt, workers were on strike, businesses were closed, foreigners had fled the country, and urban elites were joining the protests. Street demonstrations had reached the capital, Tunis—a coastal city of just over 1 million inhabitants, with roughly 2.5 million people (almost a quarter of Tunisia’s total population) in its greater metropolitan area, and by virtue of its size and political importance the decisive terrain of the uprising. At this point, the Takrizard-Ultra alliance came into its own: online groups produced and disseminated anti-regime information, helped mobilize and organize protestors, and provided situational awareness for opponents of the regime. Simultaneously, the connectivity between urban Tunisians and relatives in their rural villages of origin allowed awareness of the uprising to spread rapidly—initially from the countryside into Tunis and later, as the revolution took hold, from the capital back to smaller towns and villages. The Ultras, for their part, formed the hard core of the mass protests. Their experience in urban fighting against police gave them a self-confidence and tactical skill that made them less fearful of the regime, and their confidence was infectious. They set the example and reassured other demonstrators, who might otherwise have wavered, by showing it was possible to fight the regime and survive.
In the virtual world, online activists such as Slim Amamou, one of Tunisia’s most prominent regime opponents, used their access to mobile connectivity to help rally these broad-based street protests against the regime.38 This wasn’t a “Twitter revolution”—Twitter was not well known in Tunisia (where, “pre-revolution, only around 200 active tweeters existed out of around 2,000 with registered accounts”)39 and Twitter feeds weren’t a key part of the protestors’ arsenal. But resistance groups did make extensive use of Facebook, which had an unusually high subscribership in Tunisia and was one of the few social networking si
tes that the regime didn’t block.40 After an unsuccessful attempt to block Facebook that collapsed after sixteen days of online protests back in 2008, the regime had instead decided to set up fake “phishing” sites that mimicked Facebook and drew dissident users to reveal their login details, so that security forces could track their movements.41 Despite this harassment there were 1.97 million Tunisian Facebook users by early 2011, representing “over half of all Tunisians online, and almost a fifth of the total population.”42
In late 2010, the synergy between virtual and real-world activism escalated into revolution. As John Pollock described it:
On December 27, thousands rallied in Tunis. The next day Ben Ali sacked the governors of Sidi Bouzid and two other provinces [and] threatened to punish the protestors. On December 30, a protestor shot by police six days earlier died. Lawyers gathered around the country to protest the government and were attacked and beaten. On January 2, the hacking group Anonymous began targeting government websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks in what it called Operation Tunisia. As the academic year started, student protests flared. A flash mob gathered on the tracks of a Tunis metro and stood, covering their mouths, eloquently silent. On January 4, Bouazizi died of his burns. The next day, 5,000 people attended his funeral. January 6 brought the regime’s response to the Anonymous attacks: several activists were arrested. . . . Cyber-activist Slim Amamou was also arrested, and he used the location-based social network Foursquare to reveal that he was being held in the Ministry of the Interior. . . . The next day, 95 percent of Tunisia’s lawyers went on strike. The day after, the teachers joined in. The following day, the massacres began.
Over five grisly days starting on January 8, dozens of people were killed in protests, mostly in towns like Kasserine and Thala in the poor interior. There were credible reports of snipers at work. These deaths would turn the protests into outright revolution. One graphic and deeply distressing video was highly influential: it shows Kasserine’s hospital in chaos, desperate attempts to treat the injured, and a horrifying image of a dead young man with his brains spilling out. “It was really critical,” [said a Takriz activist]. “That video made the second half of the revolution.” Posted and reposted hundreds of times on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere, it set off a wave of revulsion across North Africa and the Middle East. The regime had cut Internet service to Sidi Bouzid [so] Takriz smuggled a CD of the video over the Algerian border and streamed it via MegaUpload. [Takrizards] saw the video and found it enraging. Takriz then forwarded it to Al Jazeera.43
The role of Anonymous in this process illustrates the fact that, beyond enabling the Tak-Ultra alliance we have discussed, networked connectivity allowed international groups to play a part in the revolution in real time—something not seen, at least not to the same extent, in any previous uprising. Q uinn Norton’s reporting on Anonymous, in a seminal series of articles she wrote for Wired magazine in 2012, shows that Tunisia was a new departure for the “anons,” as participants in the hacker group are known. Norton points out that anons’ activism in support of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, during 2010—activism that was virtually leaderless, an online variant of the swarming behavior discussed in Chapter 2, or perhaps an emergent characteristic of what Norton calls the “hive mind” of the Internet—led directly to the hacker group’s involvement in the Tunisian uprising:
[In December 2010, Ben Ali] began blocking web access to Wikileaks cables that pertained to his and other Arab nations. A few anons formed a new channel called #optunisia on IRC [Internet Relay Chat] and started talking about what they could do . . . Over the next couple of weeks the small group brought down the website of the Tunisian stock exchange and defaced various sites of the Tunisian government. It also passed media and news reports about the Tunisian uprising in and out of the country. It distributed a “care package” containing details about how to work around privacy restrictions in Tunisia, including a Firefox script to help locals avoid government spying while they used Facebook. Some who supported #optunisia were themselves Tunisians, including Slim Amamou, an outspoken blogger. After Amamou was arrested on January 6, 2011, the anons on the #optunisia IRC channel barely slept as they waited for word. But eight days later, the regime fell, and Amamou was appointed a minister in the new government. We’ll never know how important Anonymous was for Tunisia, but Tunisia changed everything for Anonymous. OpTunisia was the first of what became the Freedom Ops, which focused largely on other Middle Eastern countries during the Arab Spring but spread much farther. For the first time, Anonymous had gotten on the winning side of a real fight, and it liked the feeling.44
Within twenty-four hours, Anonymous had taken down several of the Tunisian government’s websites, including not only that of the stock exchange but also those of the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Commerce, the presidential palace, the electoral commission, and the central government Web portal.45 Although the attacks likely had little or no direct effect on Tunisian security forces’ ability to suppress the revolution, they demonstrated strong international support for the uprising and thus probably both encouraged anti-government protestors (online and on the street) and undermined regime officials’ and supporters’ morale. This contributed to a cascading loss of cohesion within the government and security services, ending in the fall of Ben Ali’s regime as the dictator fled to exile in Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011.
Along with WikiLeaks and Anonymous, other nonstate groups were closely involved in the contested information space of the uprising. Activists living in Europe who were members of Nawaat (a Tunisian diaspora-based collective blog that functioned as an online democracy forum) played a critical role in getting news out of Tunisia when the regime attempted to censor and block information about the uprising, while global groups such as the Open Net Initiative and WikiLeaks provided support from abroad, and anti-secrecy sites such as Cryptome carried leaked information relating to the uprising.46 Thus access to networked connectivity, which enabled an urban street-level alliance of online activists with Ultras and demonstrators in Tunisia, also enabled collaboration among individuals and organizations across the planet. This same pattern would be repeated in the next major uprising of the Arab Awakening, which was already beginning to break out in Egypt.
Egypt: Network-Enabled Revolution
Many features of the Tunisian uprising—the role of hard-core soccer fans as shock troops of a broad-based protest movement, the self-selected engagement of international and local activists, the synergy between online activism and street protest, and the mass mobilization of a frustrated citizenry in response to crackdowns against an initially smaller radical group—also emerged in the Egyptian revolution. Indeed, the Egyptian uprising itself resulted in part from an extremely high level of networked connectivity across the entire densely populated, heavily urbanized coastal strip of North Africa that stretches from Tunisia in the west through Libya to Egypt—a zone that, as we’ve noted, experienced rapid coastal urbanization during the generation prior to the uprisings, making Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt three of the most heavily connected, urban, littoralized countries in the entire Mediterranean basin.47
Egypt, like Tunisia, had experienced extremely fast population growth and coastal urbanization in the generation prior to the uprising—indeed, between 2006 and 2012 alone, Egypt’s population grew by fully 18 percent, to reach 83 million people within the country, along with another 8 million in the diaspora, and just over 9 million people in the greater metropolitan area of Cairo, the capital city.48 Unlike Tunisia, however, until 2011 Egypt had enjoyed an unusually high and unfettered degree of network connectivity: unlike many other authoritarian regimes in the region, the Egyptian government “never built or required sophisticated technical infrastructures of censorship. (Of course, the country has hardly been a paradise of free expression: the state security forces have vigorously suppressed dissent through surveillance, arbitrary detentions
and relentless intimidation of writers and editors.)”49 Partly because of its relatively liberal telecommunications policy, “Egypt became a hub for internet and mobile network investment, home to a thriving and competitive communications sector that pioneered free dial-up services, achieved impressive rates of access and use, and offered speedy wireless and broadband networks at relatively low prices. Indeed, Egypt is today one of the major crossing points for the underwater fibre-optic cables that interconnect the regions of the globe.”50
Popular uprisings against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak began on January 25, 2011. Egyptian activists, both secular and religious, had followed the Tunisian uprisings closely on Internet forums and via radio, Twitter, newspapers, and electronic media including Al Jazeera satellite television. Tunisian and Egyptian democracy activists had coordinated and shared tactics and lessons learned over several years, and studied methods of nonviolent revolution together, in online forums and face-to-face seminars.51 Egyptians reacted to the news of Ben Ali’s fall on January 14, 2011, with immediate calls for the ouster of Mubarak: that evening, protestors rushed to the “heavily guarded Tunisian embassy in Zamalek, one of Cairo’s most affluent residential districts . . . ‘We are next, we are next, Ben Ali tell Mubarak he is next,’ the protestors chanted.”52
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