Nobel Peace Prize nominee, political activist Ahmed Maher to speak at UCLA

Ahmed Maher, a prominent protest organizer during the Egyptian revolution in 2011 and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, will speak on a panel today at UCLA.

The political activist is returning to UCLA for the third time to participate in a panel called “Reclaiming the Egyptian Revolution” at 3 p.m. in the Charles E. Young Research Library. James Gelvin, a UCLA history professor, and Maher will discuss and reflect on the 2011 revolution in Egypt.

Maher said he hopes to speak to people during the panel who identify with the struggle of Egyptians for political freedom and representative government.

Maher has been involved in political activism since the beginning stages of the Iraq War. In 2008, he co-founded the April 6 Youth Movement, a group that initially intended to support an industrial workers’ strike. Later, the group was the first to publicly oppose former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to call for human rights and democracy, and to utilize social media to mobilize protestors, Maher said.

In an effort to gather support for the movement, Maher created a Facebook page that eventually reached 70,000 members. The page’s large youth membership foreshadowed the unrest that would emerge in the form of protest in 2011.

“The young people have hoped for change. … In January 2011, the youth were alive in the streets and victorious,” Maher said.

In 2011, hundred of thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to protest former president Mubarak. Working with other activists, Maher helped coordinate large public protests in Tahrir Square that led to Mubarak’s resignation and the election of Mohamed Morsi.

While Maher was organizing protests and participating in demonstrations, the government began to take notice, he said.

Police and security forces began to show up at scheduled demonstrations, arresting protestors and intimidating supporters, Maher said.

“Many people over the years told us we were crazy. … We were arrested, tortured, and many were killed in the pursuit of freedom and dignity,” Maher said.

Although Mubarak resigned, the revolutionary ideals of the April 6 Youth Movement were never fully attained, Maher said.

Earlier this year, Maher joined with other activists to create a new group that stresses the importance of human rights and democracy. When translated from Arabic, the group is called the “Front for the Path of the Revolution,” Gelvin said.

He added that Maher’s group expresses an alternative view to the Muslim Brotherhood and military, and it is important to understand the different perspective.

“People like Maher represent a tendency that says, ‘don’t make us choose between the brotherhood and the military. We had a revolution for a reason, and the revolution was to get rid of autocracy for human rights and democracy,’” Gelvin said.