From Spiegel
They're suspicious -- five young Egyptians in hooded sweatshirts with their faces hidden, arms crossed and bodies in a defensive stance. "The media represents us as thugs," says one. "They say we're killing policemen and setting the country on fire, but we are just defending ourselves. The real aggressor is sitting in the presidential palace."
As Wednesday night turns to Thursday morning, fighting rages in the streets adjacent to Tahrir Square in Cairo -- just as has happened daily for the past week. Security forces and government opponents watch each other furtively, then the first stones are thrown and tear gas canisters fired.
Violence is increasing in the capital, but also in Alexandria, and everywhere else President Mohammed Morsi declared a state of emergency on Sunday of last week: Ismailia, Suez and Port Said. More than 60 people have been killed since Jan. 24, and hundreds have been injured. The protests against Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood have become more radical, and that due in part to a new phenomenon here: the Black Bloc.
The five young men are members of the movement. They know their emergence has fueled speculation, and that the government sees them as terrorists and enemies of the state. Supporters of the deposed regime of Hosni Mubarak have reportedly mixed in with the masked men, government officials claim. Others accuse the government itself of being behind the Black Bloc, using it as a tool to discredit the opposition. But many demonstrators say the organization is simply an answer to the violence exercised by the Muslim Brotherhood and its thugs.
For President Morsi, the protesters in black present the perfect chance to split the opposition. He brought up the issue last week while visiting Berlin, saying there was a "big difference between the revolutionaries and peaceful demonstrators" on the one side and the Black Bloc on the other. Hasn't Germany often suffered from such troublemakers, too, he asked? Morsi added that Egypt's legal system would take care of the problem.
"We aren't criminals," counters 33-year-old Gika, one of the five in masks. "We are free citizens who love this country." He chose his pseudonym because it belonged to a well-known activist who was killed in street fighting with the police last November.
Unified Hate for the Goverment
On Jan. 25, the second anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, the Black Bloc announced its formation on the Internet. A YouTube video showed images of militant-looking youths in Cairo throwing Molotov cocktails. Many of them wear the grinning Guy Fawkes masks that have become the trademark of the hacker group Anonymous.
"The Black Bloc is everywhere where injustice is committed against a people," Gika says. "We started to mask ourselves so the security forces couldn't identify us. And they've masked themselves too ever since we filmed them purposely shooting demonstrators in the eyes."
No one knows how many members the Black Bloc has in Cairo and other cities, Gika says. He says he saw about 300 masked men on Tahrir Square, and that more and more Egyptians are putting black masks over their heads to show their unified hate for the government and the Islamists. Gika's own group, which he says has no hierarchy and no one person calling the shots, primarily coordinates its actions using text messages and Facebook.
When asked what they want to achieve, Gika replies: "To defend the revolution. To protect every revolutionary from attacks by the Muslim Brotherhood and other thugs. Only 5 percent of our actions are acts of revenge."
But actions like setting fire to tires in front of the president's home in Sharkia province or blocking tram lines in Alexandria are, in fact, vengeance. A YouTube video titled "Black Bloc Egypt" shows the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood in flames -- a clear threat.
Gika has been unemployed for two years. He says he, like hundreds of thousands of other Egyptians, feels that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have betrayed the revolution. He is not happy with the performance of the opposition and calls them "very weak".
Gika also says he doesn't see stabile politics as necessary for an economic upswing, nor does he want to wait until the Muslim Brotherhood has snatched control of the entire country. He mistrusts the Islamists and isn't afraid to keep on fighting.
"I know it could cost me my life," he says. "I pray to God every day to prepare myself for that."
With additional reporting by Marwa Nasser.

Comments
"The black bloc is everywhere
"The black bloc is everywhere injustice is committed against a people."
solidarity!
\m/
<3
small solidarity march
small solidarity march happened in atlanta on the 6th.
"Gika's own group, which he
"Gika's own group, which he says has no hierarchy and no one person calling the shots, primarily coordinates its actions using text messages and Facebook. "
Please, oh please, someone contact these people and tell them this is a horrible idea!
agreed, but i wonder if there
agreed, but i wonder if there is a difference between using facebook for such things in the US or other western states as opposed to using it in other parts of the world. as in, i wonder if facebook treats a request for people's personal info/account records/whatever from the egyptian government differently than they would treat the same request from the US government?
this was my gut reaction, but
this was my gut reaction, but something tells me that people who have been living in a country that has had very high levels of social conflict for two years know what they're doing.
Yeah, it's not like anyone
Yeah, it's not like anyone could have anything to learn from American radicals about methods of state repression....
Thanks so much American
Thanks so much American Anarchist, you have saved the Egyptian revolution from almost certain disaster by pointing out that facebook has been compromised...
-A grateful Egyptian blac bloker
Hey, do you guys know about
Hey, do you guys know about the American anarchist who calls himself an international group and said that you all "have to" destroy the pyramids or the rest of us "won't win"? Because if you like self-important American attempts at calling the shots through manifestos while actual revolutionaries risk their lives in the streets, you'll love the Anarchist "International."
Nice!
Nice!
u autistic, bro?
u autistic, bro?
Facebook????? They may well
Facebook????? They may well well be potentially fucked. I think faceshit would sing like a bird to any bastard that knocks on their door.
Hey losers ... your paranoia
Hey losers ... your paranoia exceeds your analysis. Yes, facebook is totally compromised but obviously if you're just calling large public demonstrations, IT DOESNT MATTER.
Don't need much security culture when you're just posting a time/place and thousands of people are guaranteed to show up.
ummmm.....no. no. no. calling
ummmm.....no. no. no. calling for lasrge scale demos on your privately associated account that directly accounts you to the demo is A TERRIBLE IDEA. Not because it illegal, but because it makes organizers into TARGETS. The point of the criticism of using FB isnt just that it could get you arrested for doing something illegal, but that it offers and easy as hell way for the state to map organizers, agitators, and other key folks and the relationships they have with others. Security culture is broader than just being smart about not being obvious about illegal stuff, its also about not handing a nicely printed social map of the culture and community of insurgents to State investigators like a golden ticket. Also, btw, they can arrest you and torture you without having called for anything illegal. We re not talking about a stable democracy operating under normal rules of law here, worried about its reputation in the media - we re talking about an unstable authoritarian state desperately clinging to power. Im pretty sure theyre gonna be willing to make a visit to a public organizer in the middle of the night if it means disrupting the organization of demonstrations....In any case, it seems pretty stupid to use FB in this way when it is unnecessary to do so.
Ill adjust....perhaps when a
Ill adjust....perhaps when a thousand people are all reposting something, this point is less relevant. But being the original call for such a thing, via facebook, seems horrifically stupid. The egyptian rev kicked off the first time around after such media was shutdown....surely it can (and already has) figure out numerous other, safer ways to communicate.
Yeah, I know. Facebook is
Yeah, I know. Facebook is fucking stupid and yet, millions of people use it so, if your goal is populist organizing (mine isn't. I think public demos rarely accomplish much, although the level of conflict in egypt certainly adds weight to the tactic) but if your goal is to get numbers in the streets, you use the formats people are using. You can pie-in-the-sky all day about what would be better social-media technology and reality remains the only game there is to play.
this still seems like a false
this still seems like a false dichotomy...its possible to us fb for spreading already public mass stuff, without using it as the original source for a post, or as a base for organizing tighter structures (for example all the bloc stuff getting posted and spread via FB in cairo....)
reality, yes, stupidity, no. nuance, yes.
Funny how two hundred years
Funny how two hundred years ago before facebook people were able to organize mass protests without much problem.
Yeah that's funny remember
Yeah that's funny remember the time they defeated capitalism?
you're right. this time they
you're right. this time they have facebook
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