Cairo: Before heading to her university early Saturday to take a mid-year exam, Hanaa, 20, was keen to switch off her mobile phone and asked her family to do the same.

The move was in response to a call made by opposition activists for Egyptians to boycott the country’s three mobile phone service providers to punish them for cutting off communications on the “Day of Rage”, January 28, 2011 —  a peak day in the protests against the rule of long-standing president Hosni Mubarak last year.

“This is the least thing we can do against these companies, which betrayed us and bowed to the Mubarak regime’s orders to suspend telecommunications,” said Hanaa.

Remembrance

She added that many of her friends heeded the boycott call and switched off their mobiles too. “This is also part of our remembrance of the martyrs who fell on that day.”

The bulk of the protesters killed during 18 days of nationwide demonstrations against Mubarak were slain on the “Day of Rage”, say local human rights advocates and activists.

At least 846 people were killed and more than 6,000 injured during the revolt that began on January 25 and forced Mubarak to step down 18 days later, according to an independent investigation commission.

Activists, marking the first anniversary of the revolution last week, were keen to propagate their call for boycotting the telecoms businesses for at least 12 hours on Saturday.

Sarcastic thanks

“Switch off your mobile on January 28 to express your thanks for these companies for their role in aiding in the killing of the revolutionaries,” a statement circulated in Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the anti-Mubarak uprising, said sarcastically.

An Egyptian court last year cleared telecoms executives of responsibility for suspending the service during the protests against Mubarak and blamed security agencies for the cutoff.

Cutoff

“May be the idea of the cutoff was not theirs. May be they had to comply with orders from the authorities. But they apparently did not object to these orders because they never believed that the revolution would ever succeed in toppling the [Mubarak] regime,” said Nessrin Refaat, an activist engaged in the campaign.

“The boycott should give a lesson to these companies to avoid in the future making the same mistake, which caused a great harm to the revolutionaries and robbed some martyrs of making one last call to their families before they died,” she added.

Last May, a court ordered Mubarak to pay $34 million in a fine for cutting off communications during the revolt against his regime.

Cheap rates

In an apparent bid to minimise possible losses, the telecoms providers offered clients to make calls at cheap rates.

“My company announced a package of inexpensive offers during the day,” an unidentified official in the Mobinil, one of the three providers of the service in Egypt, told the independent newspaper Al Shorouk on Saturday.

He added that the offers included free calls when the client uses the service for certain duration. “If succeeded, the campaign could cause heavy losses to the companies,” he added.