“No one is going to go against our desire. We are getting back our country,” Wael Ghonim declared on CNN last night, and today the 30-year-old Google executive is arguably the most powerful man in Egypt. Ghonim’s spectacular interview on Egyptian TV Monday night hours after he was freed from 11 days of imprisonment spurred the revolution to new heights and stirred the White House (as David Gergen said on CNN).
This small passionate intellectual with the wide forehead instantly became the face of the revolution, and today as reports swirled that Mubarak was stepping down, Ghonim tweeted, “Revolution 2.0: Mission Accomplished,” and also:
“I promise every Egyptian that I will go back to my normal life & not be involved in any politics once Egyptians fulfill their dreams.”
Who is Ghonim and what is his program? I watched the staggering interview with Dream Television’s Mona El-Shazly to try and figure out some answers.
Ghonim is 30 years old and lives in a villa in Dubai. A graduate of the American University of Cairo, he married an American Muslim 10 years ago, and they have two children. He called Google the greatest company in the world on CNN last night, and he has gotten steady raises in his job as the head of marketing for Google Middle East and North Africa.
But more important than Google or his marriage is Egypt. He became eligible to apply for American citizenship in 2001 and has never done so. And for the last nine months at least, he has been involved in the democracy movement in his country.
“You know, my personal life is in a shambles,” he told El-Shazly. His wife has threatened to divorce him because he was not spending enough time with her, he said; and on CNN he spoke of his marriage in the past tense. All his time has been taken up sitting crosslegged at a computer.
As Ghonim put it with typical lacerating self-derision–comparing his sacrifice to others: “I was just using my keyboard. Your fingers don’t even hurt.”
For several months, Ghonim has had a secret life: he was the administrator of a facebook page We Are All Khaled Said, dedicated to 28-year-old Alexandria blogger who died in police custody last June. This page became the organizing engine of the youth movement in Egypt. But its administrator was anonymous. Indeed, Ghonim said his fear when he was in detention was that people would figure out that he was the admin– I assume because to be administering such an activist political page was a violation of Google corporate policy.
The facebook movement that kindled the revolution was based in fear and love, as he explained to El-Shazly. The young, educated people with whom Ghonim was interacting want to serve Egypt but were afraid of the corruption and political culture that was the opposite of the culture they were learning on the internet. Thus the revolution was part human-potential movement– an awakening by Egypt’s future leaders that the structure of their society was defeating its potential.
Ghonim says that there are two great problems in Egypt. One, communication. The authorities do not trust the people ever to tell them the truth. It has been the father, and treated them like children who cannot absorb the truth. That whole system had to be taken apart. And two, mistrust. The government was filled with “cats,” Ghonim said, “and no disrespect to cats,” but cats who tell others what to think. And the people now so mistrust the government that if Ghonim came out of detention and said he was tortured and took off his shirt and had no marks at all they would believe him–and if he said he wasn’t tortured they wouldn’t believe him…
It is time, he told El-Shazly, for the cats to go back to their cages, and go eat mice.
And here I would note, if it is not obvious already, Ghonim is a man not just of great intelligence but of political imagination. His awareness and imagination have made him a leader in spite of himself. People value his crystalline judgments and pronouncements, and are thrilled by them.
When the protest movement began planning its January 25 demonstration on the facebook page with the idea that they were not afraid to die, Ghonim knew he had to leave Dubai. He says that he “tricked” his bosses at Google and told them it was a family matter. His father is half blind and ill in Saudi Arabia. When his bosses asked why he needed 6 days, he said, “Personal reasons.” Then he came back to Egypt before the stunning Tuesday January 25th demonstration– which the government promptly lied about, saying it was tens of people in the street, when it was tens of thousands.
Ghonim was as surprised as anyone by the power of the first demo. “We didn’t know. We were just doing…”
And then on Wednesday, the government cut the internet off and Ghonim reached out to Mona El-Shazly, a leading independent television personality on Dream 2 channel. She was afraid that she was going to be shut down herself, and when he called, Ghonim spoke in a headlong and passionate manner. “The vein of their living has been cut, which is Facebook, which is connecting them to the world, and to each other,” El-Shazly later related.
The next day she got a text from Ghonim apologizing for his emotionalism.
“Wael, do not worry. Good luck,” she texted back, and then that night, Thursday, they spoke by phone.
“The phone call ended with sweet wishes, and I told him, Take care of yourself, Wael… a natural phone call, between two people.”
And within hours after that he was abducted by four men in the streets of Cairo. “Save me, save me,” he shouted, but they slammed his face down and blindfolded him.
For the next 11 days as the revolution boiled, no one knew where Ghonim was. His family was frantic, his sick father was agonized. Relatives searched the hospitals and called the government. They were lied to. Ghonim’s best friend, a Google employee named Najid, had the code to his phone. He found the call to El-Shazly in the hours before Ghonim was abducted and called her and asked for her help. She was shocked to learn of Ghonim’s disappearance, but she too began making calls, and promised she would not air the news. And she too was lied to.
But before long the news got out. Google issued an appeal, and so did Amnesty International.
Ghonim says that he was blindfolded constantly so that he would have no idea where he was, and that he had no idea what was happening in the streets. He thought that maybe everyone had gone home after the big Friday demo he was planning. He thought maybe people had forgotten about him.
But he was never roughed up — in stark contrast to Khaled Saeed. And surely this had something to do with his status. One of the most important moments in the interview is when El-Shazly says of Ghonim’s unique expertise about the internet: “I don’t want to say more because there are agencies that are important in Egypt that depend on him for his technical knowledge.”
Which is to say, Ghonim’s industrial power was known inside the country, and played a role in his treatment.
The interrogators kept Ghonim blindfolded so he would not know where he was, and they had a simple question: Who was behind this movement? What was the international hand that was manipulating things in Egypt?
Ghonim was able to convince his interrogators, without any proof, simply by talking, that they were mistaken. He explained the roots of the revolution to the smartest men in the security forces, and convinced them of their error.
As he told El-Shazly on television. “I am a young person, but I am a son of Egypt. I love Egypt….This is the revolution of the youth of the internet, which became the revolution of the youth of Egypt. And it has become the revolution of all of Egypt…. No one can trump our love of Egypt.”
The security men had believed that only outsiders could be doing this, Ghonim said, and it was this false belief that was the heart of the corruption and that the revolution is now deconstructing. The idea that young people who love Egypt would not be doing such a thing. And when El-Shazly made the mistake of saying that Najid who had called her was Syrian, Ghonim corrected her sharply. He is Jordanian, he said, and it is important to correct that lest people think that outside forces are manipulating the situation (ie, Iran/Syria).
Similarly, he explained that the Muslim Brotherhood had had no role in the coordination of the January 25 demonstration. Later they had asked to join the January 28th demo. But the youth reached out to no party. The demo was about youth and love of Egypt and human and civil rights. The motto was “Do not break.” Be hurt before you hurt someone else. Ghonim was most proud that during the January 25th demonstration, he saw thousands of young women, and none were harassed. And people picked up trash. And when someone held a club, others told him to put it down.
To El-Shazly, and all of Egypt, Ghonim revealed his poetic side when he spoke nationalistically:
“We are Egyptian. We are beautiful in soul. We are a people who– someone can be extremely upset or sad, and yet satisfied with that, even happy with it.”
He said that he got along with the men of the secret police. They understood that his agenda was a better Egypt. Though he had to explain the special democratic power of the internet and facebook.
“There is no one on a horse smacking his saddle and moving the people… I was just a mouthpiece. I was a horn. I was honking and telling people to get out.”
On the last day of his detention, Ghonim was brought to the new minister of the interior and head of the National Democratic Party, Hosam Badrawi. Badrawi’s own daughter had been in the demonstration–for as Mona El-Shazly says, many gov’t officials have children in the demonstrations– and told him about Wael Ghonim, and he had gone and found him. They sat and spoke as peers. There was no patriarchal feeling, Ghonim said.
Badrawi assured Ghonim that the country was now changing. “There is no turning back. We are moving forward. We all love Egypt and fear for it.”
But Ghonim told him that the country would not be free till the regime is ended. The logo of the National Democratic Party must be removed from every street in Egypt. Because this was the party that had ruined Egypt, which had built the mistrust and lies. It must be removed, and all the good people inside that party, for there are good people, must run with some other party if they choose to run.
Badrawi released Ghonim personally, and Ghonim sent out a twitter that will resound through history: “Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it.”
By now he knew of all the people who had died in the streets and when the cameras found him that night, he said, “I am not a hero. Please direct the cameras on the right people.”
An hour or two later he told El-Shazly, “I’m not a hero or a symbol. I’m a regular person and I eat Super Watermelon seeds, and I’m a fan of the Ahly [football] Club.” And El-Shazly’s interview with Ghonim ends, famously, when she begins to show the photographs of the young people killed on the streets– “youth just like roses, roses in a garden,” she says, movingly, “they did what the generation before them should have done and couldn’t do”– and Ghonim begins to sob and drops his big head on the table, before he expresses his condolences to the parents.
“It’s not our mistake,” he says. “It is the mistake of those in charge of this country who don’t want to leave their positions.” And then overcome, he walked off the set.
In his tweets since gaining his freedom, Ghonim has thanked Google for its support, called on Egyptians around the world to come home and help their country, and apologized for not having time for any foreign interviews–a policy he suspended in order to use CNN last night to address Omar Suleiman personally, in English.
In the CNN interview, Ghonim showed an ingenuous side, reminding us that he is a rich young man. But he has a mature political vision, and there can be little doubt that Wael Ghonim will be a leader of his people in years to come. What can we say about Ghonim’s agenda and political values? He’s wealthy, but as he says, “I am willing to give up all my money today.” He has populist concerns: the revolution is for the poor whose dignity has been murdered, he said movingly, it is their Egypt; and the man who earns only 500 Egyptian Pounds a month ($100), much of which goes to taxes, has an absolute right to question his leaders.
Sounding like Pete Seeger in Arabic, he chanted, “This country is our country, our country, not yours.”
Throughout his detention, Ghonim had three thoughts ringing through his head, he said. One, this is not the time to settle scores. There are many he is angry with, this is not the time. Two, this is not the time to cut the cake. And people in politics know what that means, he said wryly; it is not the time to divide any spoils. And finally, this is not the time to spread ideologies. It is the time of demanding rights.
So now you understand. The Egyptian revolution has a face as strong as Lech Walesa’s in the shipyard in Gdansk of 22 years ago. But that shipyard is the internet; and Ghonim’s horn could change the world.
