CAIRO: The April 6 Youth Movement denied Tuesday foreign press reports that claimed its members had received funding and training from pro-democracy American organizations. The group, which is also suffering from internal rifts, vowed to file a complaint to the Prosecutor General to investigate these "defamatory" allegations. Its general coordinator Ahmed Maher said that internal disputes over the future of the movement are natural and will not affect its work. "We are shocked at how other youth groups are promoting these rumors to attack us,” Maher said in a press conference. "We reserve our legal rights to sue those who help circulate them." The New York Times said in a report last week that cables obtained by WikiLeaks found that the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt received training and financing from organizations such as the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House. It said that a group of young Egyptians went to a 2008 meeting in New York sponsored in part by Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department, where they were instructed on how to use mobile technology, mostly social networking, to promote democracy. "We learned how to organize and build coalitions and this certainly helped during the revolution," the newspaper quoted Bassem Fathy as a co-founder of the youth movement who attended a Freedom House training workshop. Maher said that the quoted person only helped the movement as an interpreter with foreign journalists and researchers and misused this to visit the American embassy and present himself as a representative of the movement. The group had issued a statement warning that he was not a member. "Foreign funding is totally refused and the movement runs on membership fees and donations from its members. The headquarters are made available to us by ordinary Egyptians; however, we welcome ideological and moral cooperation," he said. The revolution was "purely Egyptian" and American technology was only a helping tool, he added. "We won't accept being a tool by the United States for it to appear as a pro-democracy country while in fact they backed the ousted regime at the beginning of the revolution," said Mahmoud Afify, coordinator of April 6 in Qaliubiya. Maher addressed inner conflicts within the movement over the decision to turn it into a political NGO or continue to continue as a pressure group. He said that the NGO option was a collective decision approved by the majority of members in 22 governorates. However, a group of April 6 members and a member of the Justice and Freedom movement announced earlier that they no longer recognize Maher as the general coordinator of the movement, citing their disagreement with the decision to turn the movement into an NGO. "Any attempt to change the form of the movement now is a violation of its founding manifesto. We will continue as a movement, not as anything else," read a statement they issued. The group said that being an NGO will open the doors for foreign funding and claimed that Maher had taken the decision unilaterally in an authoritarian manner. "We held several meetings over the past months and agreed on presenting a draft law governing political NGOs in Egypt so we can be legitimate and be under the oversight of the administrative prosecution and the Central Auditing Agency," said Maher. "We want to be a pressure group and not a political party because we don't seek power. Our members subscribe to many ideologies which makes it difficult to unite under one partisan ideology," he added. He also said that they will freeze their activities in the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution until they examine the stance of the Youth for Justice and Freedom Movement. "Attempting to destabilize or distort our image will affect the revolution because we were one of its main initiators," Maher said.
