Photo Gallery: Egypt's Revolutionary Trigger
The Unwilling Revolutionary Egyptian Activist Wael Ghonim's Quest for Peace
He has stuck his white headphones into his ears so that no one talks to him, he is looking at the ground so that no one recognizes him, and he is walking briskly so that no one stops him. But everyone in Egypt knows Wael Ghonim, and some call him the face of the revolution. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and Time counts him among the 100 most influential people in the world.
But Ghonim doesn't like all the attention. It makes him feel uncomfortable, and he believes that it is bad for him. He starts walking faster. It's only a few blocks from his parents' apartment in Cairo's Muhandisin neighborhood to the offices of a PR company he has hired to keep the press at bay.
It is the period surrounding the anniversary of the revolution that began on Jan. 25, 2011, the day Ghonim had spent so much time and effort working to achieve, a day that ultimately led to the revolution. There is a strange tension in the air over Cairo. On the one hand, the first freely elected parliamentmet for the first time in this last week of January . On the other hand, it is dominated by Islamists. On the one hand, the military council lifted Egypt's emergency laws, in place since 1981, to mark the anniversary of the revolution. On the other hand, there are angry demonstrations against the military government almost every day. Ghonim has a lot on his plate -- and then he has written a book, which has just been published.
It's called "Revolution 2.0." In it, Ghonim describes how he came to the revolution, how he guided the protests through the Internet, and how agents working for then President Hosni Mubarak's state security service tracked him down, jailed, isolated and interrogated him. By the time he was released, the country was no longer the same. And then Ghonim found out that he was partly responsible for it.
The book is interesting because it finally tells the story behind sayings like the "Internet revolution" and the "Facebook youth," which the West has used to explain the toppling of the regime in Egypt. Until it was published, no one but a few computer nerds truly understood the significance of people coordinating their plans on the Internet and then taking to the streets to protest.
Lack of an Icon
Besides, to this day the Arab revolutions lack an icon, a figure with whom we can identify its stories so that we can understand them better.
Stories without characters are not as compelling, which is one reason why people in the West have now somewhat lost their sense of connection to the Arab spring. There is no Danton, no Gandhi, no Dutschke, no Che Guevara, and not even someone like the former East German artist and activist Bärbel Bohley. The revolution has no face.
For the West, Ghonim was the most appealing candidate for the role of symbolic figure. He seemed modern, well-educated, morally upright and not overly radical -- living proof, in other words, that Western values could indeed bring down an Arab dictatorship.
But Ghonim doesn't want to be this face. In fact, he would prefer not to be Wael Ghonim at all, but rather "Admin1" or "AlShaheed," the Martyr, the screen name he used while masterminding the Facebook page that coordinated the protests. Until a year ago, the world puzzled over who could be behind the Facebook page, and not even his friends knew that it was Wael. Wael, the computer specialist who found politics boring? Who had married at 20 and founded companies, who had studied business at the American University, who had always been a go-getter and had now found his dream job at Google in Dubai? He, the one who spent his nights in front of a computer, was supposed to be coordinating the uprising?
But then there is the video of Ghonim's appearance on Egyptian television. It depicts the moment that changed everything and made the rest of the world aware of Ghonim. The clip, broadcast on Feb. 7, 2011, quickly circled the globe.
It was the day of Ghonim's release. The riots on and around Tahrir Square had escalated by then, people had been killed and the Mubarak regime was teetering. But none of this news had reached Ghonim in his prison cell. From the prison, the state security agents drove a blindfolded Ghonim via a circuitous route to the Interior Ministry, where the new interior minister congratulated him on his release. The dying regime was now hoping to gain Ghonim as an ally.
Unbroken
When he understood the situation, he decided that same evening to go on television. His friends told him he should drive to Tahrir Square first, assess the situation there and speak with other revolutionaries. After all, they added, he had disappeared into a black hole for 12 days and might have been brainwashed. But Ghonim wanted to show the country right away that the government had not broken him.
When the host of the program began the live interview by showing images of the dead on Tahrir Square, Ghonim broke down. He lowered his head and began to weep. But the host was unrelenting. As even more private images of the victims appeared on the screen, set to a dramatic musical score, she spoke about their lives and what they had done. Ghonim couldn't stop weeping. The station showed the two images on a split screen, with the victims on the left and the sobbing Ghonim on the right. He managed to say that he was sorry, and that he had not wanted people to be killed. Finally, he got up and walked out of the studio.
Shortly after the broadcast, a page called "I nominate Wael Ghonim to be the spokesman for the Egyptian protest movement" appeared on Facebook. It accumulated a quarter of a million followers within 48 hours. The Egyptians were clearly touched by this sincere young man in an Argyle sweater.
"I was supposed to become the spearhead of the revolution on that day," says Ghonim. "But I knew that it would harm the protest movement. There would be resentment and envy. And what had I done compared to those who had risked their lives in the streets and had been killed or wounded by Mubarak's henchmen?"
A meeting with Ghonim today, almost a year later, is an encounter with a harried man. He is carrying a shoulder bag, the white headphones, an iPhone 4S and a thin Apple Notebook, and he is wearing narrow glasses and, once again, an Argyle sweater. He was unreachable for weeks, even for his publisher. Is he hiding again?
"No. I just wanted to stay away from the media."
'Write that I Am a Geek'
He sits down right away and forces his face into a crooked smile. Can we get started, he asks? He doesn't really understand the purpose of an interview with the mainstream press. And he doesn't comprehend why his book is attracting attention. What he has to say can be found on the Internet, so why take the trouble to speak with people directly? He postponed a book tour his publisher had organized for the United States. He believes that he would not be forgiven for being on a PR tour of the United States on the anniversary of the revolution, and he is probably right. There is already a Twitter account called "GhonimWithBalls," whose authors poke fun at this well-behaved young man who suddenly emerged from the Internet at the height of the revolution, and then disappeared back into it.
Ghonim says: "In the virtual world, I'm relaxed and interested in communicating with people. In the real world, unfortunately the opposite is the case. You can go ahead and write that I'm a geek."
It makes sense that at a time in which Apple co-founder Steve Jobs inspires people more than the American president, in which former hacker Julian Assange is responsible for more truth than the Washington Post, and in which the leading thinkers are no longer philosophers but brain researchers and computer scientists, the leaders of revolutions work at Google.
Ghonim was the Middle East marketing director there. In Dubai, where the company stationed him before the revolution, his American wife, a daughter and a son are still waiting for him to return to them, that is, if this revolution ever comes to an end. Ghonim is only 31, but he has already founded multiple companies, including one of the leading financial websites in Arab world. He is a computer scientist, economist and marketing expert. He has taken a sabbatical from Google and now heads a group called Masrena, or "Our Egypt."
After spending a few hours with Ghonim, one quickly realizes why the job of revolutionary leader was entrusted to him. He is an intelligent specialist, as well as an optimist with an undisguised openness, like an algorithm with feelings. If he isn't pleased with the interview, he says so. If he feels the need to weep on television, he weeps. When he was interrogated, the agents asked him whether he was behind the leading protest site on the Internet. He reflected for a moment, put his faith in God and, against all reason, said: yes.
A Digital Tsunami
His Facebook page, called "We are all Khaled Said," was dedicated to the young blogger who was beaten to death by corrupt policemen, because he had allegedly observed them carrying out a drug deal. Cases of police torture and abuse were common in Mubarak's Egypt, as human rights groups repeatedly pointed out. But the fact that this particular incident ultimately led to the president's downfall was a result of Ghonim's emotionalism. It began the way Ghonim's story ended: with tears. On June 8, 2010, his wife found him in his study in Dubai, staring at his computer with tears streaming down his face. He had discovered the pictures of the murdered blogger online and was weeping in sorrow for his country, where, as he says, policeman had turned into monsters.
"I wasn't a political person," he now says. "And I'm still not a political person." In fact, he is more of the young, sentimental patriotic type. For us in the West, it is a type that doesn't exist, making it difficult for to fully understand him. When Ghonim had stopped crying, he set up a Facebook page and tried to apply all the knowledge he had acquired over the years on how to disseminate information on the Internet.
Ghonim knew that the tone was important. He had to speak the language of all Egyptians and not just that of the activists, which was full of rage and hate. And his comments had to be written in the first person. His first post on the new site read: "Today they killed Khaled. If I don't act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me."
Two minutes later, the page had 300 members. There were 3,000 after an hour and 36,000 by the evening, and soon that number had shot up to 100,000. Today the page has almost two million members. Some 1,800 people posted comments on the first day alone. Apparently ordinary Egyptians felt safe on the site. It seemed to be beyond the range of the government's repressive apparatus because it had apparently never heard of Facebook. (Today even the military council has its own Facebook page).
An Important Step
Ghonim remembers how the state security service had questioned him once before, a few years earlier. At the time, they were only interested in his religious views. They believed that religion posed the greatest threat. Ghonim was stunned. "If they had spent more time thinking about the Internet, instead of classifying Egyptians according to their faith, they might have been better prepared for the digital tsunami that was headed for them," he says.
What was to be done now with the hundreds of thousands of people who were waiting for his instructions? It was clear to Ghonim that it was time for him to take an important step, out of the safe Internet and into the dangerous streets. But he didn't want to be the leader, so he asked the members of his site to make suggestions and vote on them.
They agreed on something Ghonim called silent stands: chains of silent people, lined up along the coastal road in Alexandria, and later along the Nile River in Cairo. They were all dressed in black, and it almost seemed like a piece of performance art. The uncanny aspect of it all was that the people came out of nowhere, and yet they had merely come from the Internet. They trusted Ghonim, and it worked. But Ghonim became increasingly fearful. He disguised his IP address and used proxy servers around the world so that no one could track him. More and more members asked: "Who are you, Admin?" but he merely showed them a picture of a Guy Fawkes mask, which later became famous when the Occupy movement used it at the other end of the world.
Ghonim felt conflicted, realizing that more was needed, that it was time for a real demonstration. He chose Jan. 25, which was a holiday, National Police Day, in Egypt. On the Facebook page, he sarcastically called upon members to attend a "celebration of Egypt's National Police Day." But then the Tunisians ousted their president and Ghonim felt ridiculous with his semi-ironic call for a protest to commemorate National Police Day. On Jan. 14, he changed the name of his event. It was now called "January 25: Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption and Unemployment." There it was, the word revolution. Now Ghonim was calling for an overthrow, something he had not dared to do until then. His appeal reached a million people, and the revolution he had evoked actually began.
Retreating Back to the Internet
On its third day, Jan. 27, 2011, after Ghonim had destroyed his SIM card and gone into hiding in the office of a friend, state security agents attacked him on the street at night. They put him in a blindfold, and kept it on for the next 12 days. Ghonim still doesn't know how they found him, nor does he know where he spent those 12 days. He was told that he was no longer Wael Ghonim. He was now Number 41.
Today, in the week of the anniversary, Ghonim says that he is no longer afraid. In Cairo, protests are now taking place against his revolution on Abbasiya Square, the anti-Tahrir Square. A majority of Egyptians have lost interest in the revolution, perhaps partly because it no longer has a figure like Ghonim.
In the weeks leading up to the anniversary, the people who assembled in Tahrir Square were only hardcore activists, the wounded of the revolution, family members of those who died and vendors selling trinkets.
Almost every day, there was a small demonstration of perhaps 100 people, who shouted slogans against the military government. They set up tents on the square, in the dust and the mud and the garbage, and in the tents they hung up photos of the uprising that had taken place a year ago, a sort of archive of the revolution. One photo depicts an older Egyptian sitting on a blue container with the Facebook logo sprayed onto its side. But Ghonim rarely visited the square; it could be that he feared the activists' anger.
Last Wednesday, however, the day of the anniversary, Ghonim did join the protesters once again. He met with people from his Masrena organization on Mustafa Mahmoud Square in the neighborhood where he lives, Muhandisin. From there, they planned to join thousands of others as they marched to Tahrir Square. Ghonim had prepared signs that showed an artist's rendition of the faces of those killed in the revolution and he had attached a mask onto the back of his head that showed the face of Khaled Said, the young man whose story had marked the beginning of Ghonim's involvement in the movement. Throughout the march, Ghonim repeatedly fled from photographers trying to take his picture and people trying to talk to him.
And so, Ghonim found himself moving through the crowd, holding up a sign showing the face of someone else. No, it was never about him, he says. It isn't his movement, this movement that was always bigger than he is. That, at least, is the way he sees it. It is the movement of the people who were standing around him on that day, people he had merely helped, during those turbulent days a year ago, to find their voices.
By the time Ghonim and the other marchers arrived, there were already hundreds of thousands of people on Tahrir Square. It was so crowded that it was difficult to move. But it suited Ghonim well. His sign in one hand and his iPhone 4S in the other, he disappeared into the crowd. The next day, Ghonim retreated back into the Internet.
