Hero of Egypt’s digital tsunami

• BY:MATTHEW CAMPBELL 
• From:The Sunday Times 
• January 16, 2012

Wael Ghonim, centre, a key organiser of the online campaign that sparked the first protests in Egypt a year ago, addresses a crowd of protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Picture: AP Source: AP

Nobody could have imagined such a bizarre and pathetic end for Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for 30 years with the absolute powers of a pharaoh. How could it have come to this?

Mubarak, 83, might find it hard to believe, but the “revolution on the Nile” that swept him from power almost a year ago and led to his trial on capital charges was unleashed by a young internet geek called Wael Ghonim.

How Facebook postings and tweets prevailed over guns and bullets is an extraordinary tale that has turned Ghonim, a diminutive, bespectacled figure, into an international celebrity garlanded with awards and bombarded by literary agents, the media and talent scouts offering speaking engagements.

“The state could have done better,” he says with a chuckle, referring to the failure of the secret police to understand what was happening in cyberspace until it was too late. “Thank God they didn’t.”

Forget the bearded, Kalashnikov-toting insurgents of other rebellions; Mubarak’s 31-year-old nemesis is an eloquent, well-educated executive who is on sabbatical from Google and comes from a well-to-do family. No wonder nobody saw him coming.

He unleashed the “digital tsunami”, as he calls it, by creating a Facebook page in the (northern) summer of 2010 as he sat behind a laptop in Dubai, where he had been posted by Google as regional marketing director. The site was called “We are all Khaled Said”, after a young man who had been beaten to death by police in the port city of Alexandria.

It quickly became an online meeting place for Egyptians inspired by the revolution in Tunisia and was used to organise protests by hundreds of thousands of people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. After 18 days of demonstrations, Mubarak, to his amazement, was forced to resign.

That was a stunning victory, but the revolution is not yet done. Protesters will return to the square on January 25 to mark the first anniversary of the day that Ghonim chose as the start of the revolt and to vent their anger over the slow pace of reform under military generals overseeing what Ghonim hopes will be the transition to democracy.

The possibility of prolonged chaos seems to have intensified as the country’s various power groups jostle for influence: just as the military seems intent on consolidating its power, the Muslim Brotherhood is set to dominate parliament after elections won by Islamists who played little role in the protests that brought down Mubarak but are poised to reap the benefits.

The Brotherhood’s critics warn that it has been waiting for Egypt to drop like a rotten fruit into its hands and will use the democratic process to hoodwink the electorate, eventually dispensing with elections to install a theocracy.

Ghonim says the world cannot object to democratic elections just because it does not like the contenders.

“The Egyptian people should be empowered to make their own decisions and learn from those decisions,” he says.

He insists that he is no revolutionary leader: even after protesters had taken over the streets of Cairo, he posted a message saying: “I want to go back to my real life.”

Uneasy in the spotlight, he prefers sitting in front of his laptop. He spends several hours a day online and even met Ilka, his American wife, on the internet. He dislikes being described, as he often is, as “the face of the Egyptian revolution” and plays down the idea that it could not have happened without him. He agrees, however, that if he had been arrested earlier, it “might have delayed it (the revolt) a bit”.

What made the uprising successful, he maintains, was its lack of leadership. “There was no masterplan,” he says. “Just people on the streets. Having no leadership was a big plus because the regime had no leader to negotiate with. If we had had leadership we might have ended up with a different kind of dictatorship.”

For a long time he was known to his tens of thousands of Facebook followers only as “admin”, the name under which he posted his messages.

He was outed as the face behind the page at the height of the protests when, after arriving in Egypt to participate in the rally last January 25, he was detained and held blindfold for 11 days in a cell, only to be released to the adulation of thousands of people in Tahrir Square.

Since then, he has fallen in with fashionable, international company and become the star of conferences such as the one in Zurich last September at which he rubbed shoulders with Desmond Tutu of South Africa, the crown prince of Norway and singer Joss Stone.

Ghonim is revered by protest movements from Wall Street to Syria, where anti-government rebels have copied his formula with a Facebook page called “We are all Hamza al-Khateeb”, after a 13-year-old boy tortured and killed by security forces. Time magazine described him as one of the 100 most influential people of 2011. Arabian Business magazine named him the second most powerful Arab, after Prince Alwaleed Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.

He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and has received numerous other awards, including the JFK Profile in Courage award, given to him “in the name of the people of Egypt”. He is reported to have been paid an advance of $US2 million ($1.9m) for his book, Revolution 2.0, whose release will coincide with the anniversary of the protests.

The revolution, he agrees, appears to have stalled: although there are calls for Mubarak’s execution — he is on trial for the deaths of about 800 protesters — few expect him, or anyone else, to be punished any time soon.

“There is a lack of trust,” says Ghonim. “People don’t believe in the system as a whole. No single officer has been jailed. All those people who were killed and no one’s been penalised for it. People just want a democratic transition of power and transparent trial. To show that the blood spilt by all of those people had some value.”

The military’s grip on power gives a depressing sense that nothing has changed in Egypt, however. In one widely reported incident, the army subjected female protesters to virginity tests. In another, it was accused of beating up a woman demonstrator. The premises of foreign aid organisations, meanwhile, have been raided on the pretext that they act as fronts for foreign intelligence.

“My biggest concern,” Ghonim says, “is that people’s mentality has not changed.”

It was a picture of a body that turned him into a digital rebel. Khaled Said, 28, had been beaten to death by two police officers in June, 2010. Nobody knew why. It outraged Ghonim and he decided to act.

He anonymously launched a Facebook page dedicated to Said and wrote in his first message: “Today (Sunday) they killed Khaled. If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow (Monday) they will kill me.” Within minutes it had hundreds of followers, and, within days, thousands. Yesterday, it had 1.8 million.

With his marketing experience, Ghonim knew how to inflame an already indignant public, posting links to videos of other police torture victims and mocking the official version of how Said had died: he was a drug trafficker, the authorities said, who upon his arrest had fatally swallowed a batch of marijuana, an account that did not explain the disfigurement of his corpse.

When Ghonim suggested holding “silent stands” to protest about Said’s death, thousands of people dressed in black gathered to stand in a line along the seafront.

Some of his critics believed he was not harsh enough on Mubarak. In the early stages of the revolution, he favoured a moderate tone to appeal to a wide audience. As it turned out, he was astute: within a few weeks he had hundreds of thousands of followers.

He called for a mass protest in Cairo on January 25, a national holiday, and on the night of the 24th he posted a farewell message that attracted 173,861 “views”, 1429 comments and 2105 “likes”.

“I have no idea what will happen today (Sunday),” he wrote. “I have no idea where I might end up tomorrow (Monday) night, at home, arrested in a prison cell, buried in a cemetery, but what I do know is that I must reclaim my rights and my children’s rights.”

Arrested and roughed up, he was subjected to lengthy interrogations by state security officers, who were convinced that he was part of a CIA conspiracy.

“They kept asking me how the demonstrations could be spontaneous when there was someone like me, an employee of an American company, married to an American woman. This could not just be a spontaneous uprising. They did not believe that the Egyptian people were capable of change or even of demanding their rights.”

Friends realised that something had happened to Ghonim when he stopped updating the Facebook page with news of the spreading protests — he usually posted messages several times a day. His friends began a search of prisons and hospitals.

“Friends, family members and the world’s largest search engine were all on my trail,” says Ghonim in a joking reference to his employer, Google.

Then the Mubarak regime made a terrible mistake. On the morning of January 25 it cut all communications within Egypt, so people’s mobile phones went dead and they could no longer use the internet.

“This was the single largest promotional effort possible for the revolution,” says Ghonim.

“Every citizen who had not heard of the uprising now realised that a major challenge to the regime must be under way.

Huge numbers of people decided to take to the streets, some for no other reason than to find out what was happening.”

When Mubarak’s resignation was announced on February 11 and the crowd exploded in euphoria, Ghonim thought that the revolution had triumphed, that the country would quickly begin a new chapter of justice and freedom for all. He has had a lot to learn since then.

He understands now that “it’s harder than we thought it would be”. There are some positive developments — even the armed forces have a Facebook page these days and ask for feedback — and Ghonim sounds enthusiastic about the future.

One big test will be the presidential election this year. Beyond that, he predicts that “the role of technology in the next few years will be huge, with everyone getting together and collaborating”.

Ghonim used to talk about the need to end oppression and poverty; these days he seems to have scaled down his dreams: he says he only hopes that “in 10 years Egyptians will look back and not wish that Mubarak had stayed”.

He has founded a movement called Our Egypt to “collect together all those Egyptians who are concerned about the future of the country, the poverty, the lack of freedom . . . and to gather them under one umbrella to ensure that the demands of the revolution are met”.

The uprising, he says, will go on: “It is not going to die or go away.” He pauses, before adding: “But at the end of the day it’s a process that is going to take us some time.”

THE SUNDAY TIMES