CAIRO — An activist in a police state should know when to sprint.
Mohamed Abdel Aziz has bolted from trouble a number of times, including dashing from security forces closing in on a demonstration in the port city of Alexandria. His less mercurial moments have three times landed him in police stations, but upon each release he has returned to his computer, opened his blog and conspired in cyberspace to end President Hosni Mubarak's 27-year rule of Egypt.
That's an unlikely prospect. But Aziz, a thin man in black clothes with a wristwatch shimmying up and down his arm, is a founder of the 6th of April, a protest movement that draws from a Facebook group of nearly 76,000 people, mostly high school and university students. The movement opines, plots and Twitters, though it has yet to generate feet in the street: Three of its calls for nationwide strikes drew more police than protesters.
"No one knows when the trigger of revolution will be pulled. The state is oppressive, but ordinary Egyptians from all over sympathize with us," said Aziz, who likes to recall the passions that roused his countrymen's 1919 revolution against the British.
"When we started using Facebook it was a novelty," he said. "Calling for a national strike was a novelty. It was like lighting a candle in a dark room. But this is still an oppressive state, and people are scared."
Human rights groups say the public's fear is a testament to mass arrests, torture and other violations of civil liberties against political opponents in a nation that has been under a state of emergency for nearly three decades. The Mubarak government, which receives about $1.2 billion in U.S. military and economic aid annually, is blamed for inflation and corruption and for allowing public services such as schools and hospitals to deteriorate into brittle artifices. Young Egyptians see a nation scoured of opportunity and run by patronage and connections.
"The generation born since 1981 came into the world during the worst period of Egyptian history," said Aziz, 23, an aviation engineer. "We can see how dynamic the rest of the world is, but we feel alienated, as if we are living outside of time. We've spent years in schools and learned nothing. We have diplomas that are useless."
