#Tamarud : Rebels With A Cause

“Rebellion” or “Tamarud”  is a name of a public campaign in Egypt now that is causing controversy and making headlines in the media. Everybody is speaking about this campaign , the revolutionaries have high hopes for it while the Muslim brotherhood supporters mock it. The former regime supporters are divided whether to support it or not while the Islamists refuse it altogether and even launched a counter campaign to this rebellion

The iconic logo of the campaign

“Tamarud” campaign aims to two main goals : To withdraw confidence from Mohamed Morsi and to have early elections.
It is crazy thing to topple a democratically elected president but the campaign is doing this through the collection of ID signatures from Egyptians.They are putting a target of 15,000,000 signatures to withdraw the confidence from the elected President. On next 30 June 2013 the campaign will present these signatures "if it manages to collect that number" to the Supreme Constitutional Court. In the campaign's best case scenario the Court will consider these signatures like votes and withdraw confidence from Morsi and call for early presidential elections.

The famous document now

Collecting signature is not a new thing actually it was used before by the National association of Change in 2010 against Mubarak if you remember before the revolution.
Tamarud campaign started in late April 2013 but its official birth was in Tahrir square in May Day , during then people mocked those young men and girls but in one month it seems that the members of the campaign had the last laugh so far. What started in small campaigns in at crowded streets in the evening at clubs and main squares turned big day by day.

Signing the petition "Cairo Dar"

On last Wednesday the Campaign announced they managed to collect exactly 7,540,535 , yes in one month they were enabled to collect this number from all over the country. On the same day they launched an official website to receive signatures and post Updates thought it online.

 You can see the info graph here.

In Graph

You can notice that in governorates Cairo , Monufia and Daqhalia we got more than One million signature South Sinai and North Sinai as well Matrouh got the lowest number of signatures. Well the three governorates are considered from the stronghold of Salafists.
It is worth to mention that President Morsi got exactly 13,230,131 votes “51%” in the runoffs of the Presidential elections in 2011.
against President Morsi. It is not a surprise considering the voting pattern of those governorates in the the presidential elections as well the Constitution referendum. 
The huge numbers in this short period are not surprising considering the fact the problems the Egyptian society currently faces and blames President Morsi and his administration for. More people in the cities suffer from fuel and energy crises. A little example from couple of days ago , I knew that taxis were standing in a long queue for hours at one fuel station in the Ring highway when some Tamarud campaigners saw that scene and seized the opportunity to go and get signatures using the people’s anger. Almost all the taxi drivers signed the petition to withdraw confide fence from Morsi.
From couple of weeks ago in Shubra El Kheima , the popular current members seized the opportunity and headed to crowded café showing the UEFA champion league final match to call people to sign the petition.
You will find now some shops in some areas in Cairo putting the petition papers besides the cashiers. Already it is now crossing borders and Egyptians are having “Tamarud” days in the States and Canada.
The opposition parties found a resort in this campaign and several parties including those in the Salvation Front joining it. Already many of the campaign founders are from the revolutionary youth that joined parties and movements. You will find members from April 6 Youth , Free Egyptians Party, Popular Current Constitution Party and the Egyptian social democratic party in the campaign announcing their full support. In fact those parties and movement have announced that their headquarters began to receive the signatures from the public. Their members also started mobilizing in different governorates giving big push to what started a small campaign.Strong Egypt Party praised as a popular movement that should be away from any partisan affiliation.
Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabbahi and Amr Moussa also praised it. 
Famous people from politicians , intellectuals, celebs and activists signed the petition. Bassem Youssef spoke about too.

Novelist Alaa El Aswany

Actress Athar El Hakim

Former MB leading MB Mokhtar Noah and his family

Amazingly the small campaign would not have gained much success as I could tell from the failures of Morsi only but rather from the counter campaign launched by the Islamists in Egypt against it. Even Morsi helped the campaign when he mentioned it during his meeting with the Egyptian community in Qatar. Al Gama’a Al Islamiyaa even launched a counter campaign to collect signatures to support Morsi !!
Some say that Rebellion is the from the first true revolutionary actions taken since the elections of Morsi. Well without doubt that it is one of the biggest political revolutionary popular actions we have seen since the huge protests that rocked Cairo in November 2012 after the constitutional declaration.
Others believe that there is no use in what the campaign is doing because it is not constitutional. It is true , it is not constitutional but politically if the campaign manages to collect the number of signatures it will be a huge challenge to Morsi. According to some analysts in best scenarios Morsi may be forced to hold a public poll about his presidency. It is worth to mention that political forces and parties are calling for massive protests on 30 Junes 2013. It will be on hell of a day as it seems.
I spoke with Mahmoud Badr , one of the founders of that young movement in order to know more about it. Badr , a young journalist who voted for Morsi in the second stage of the President is currently accused by the President’s supporters of being Shiite as well atheist !! 

Badr told me that the idea came to that group of youth when they found Morsi failing all his promises as well his duties as a President. He is very confident in what he is doing and believe that the campaign will make it.

In my short talk with Badr I spoke with him the fear that the campaign was being used by some to promote for the early elections just like What former Presidential candidate and former Ahmed Shafik wants.

“Early elections do not mean Ahmed Shafik , already there are candidates as well other than Shafik like Hamdeen Sabbahi, Abu El Fotouh, Amr Moussa and ElBaradei , why focusing on Shafik” Badr replied.

It is worth to mention Abu El Fotouh , Amr Moussa and ElBaradei all declared that they are not going to run in any future elections including early Presidential elections. It is also worth to mention that once Shafik declared he signed the petition calling his supporters to sign it , the campaign issued a statement slamming him despite its respect to his supporters. The campaign later issued a statement saying that its partisan, ideological and persons free campaign. The Shafik supporters considered it an apology.

Some of the extreme Felol and old regime/Pro-military rule supporters who hate both the brotherhood and revolution believe that Tamarud is actually a secret MB/revolutionary movement made to stop Abdel Fatah El Sisi’s powers of attorney campaign launched from several months ago !! The Not so extreme Felol supporters are happy with the campaign despite all its revolutionary talk insisting that they are the ones behind its success and not the revolutionaries. That team believes that the upcoming 30 June 2013 will be the end of the so-called “MB occupation” and brotherhood in Egypt and in this world.

I asked Badr also about a very important technical question on how they are going to check the ids and details they got from the citizens , there could be fraud and there could be duplications. Already we know that famous Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Nagm  signed 16 copies from the petition !! Badr told me that the campaign is currently installing a database system that will filter the petition without giving more details. Hopefully that system will work. 

Personally I believe “Tamarud” is the one of the great pressure tools we can use against the regime. I do not what will happen on 30 June 2013 to be honest , nobody knows after all who could have predicted what would happen on 25 or 28 January 2011 still what I want from the campaign and told Badr about is to have a Plan B just in case of anything.
Wise people said and say that to make 25 January revolution works we must have two parallel paths : A revolutionary one and A political one . Unfortunately our elite whether from activists or politicians do not get this and are insisting on taking one path only without the other. We need a plan to have both.