Revolution 2.0. Wael Ghonim

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СКАЧАТЬ I finally had a chance to meet with Dr. ElBaradei himself. His brother informed me by e-mail of the appointment, mentioning that others would also attend. I asked him if I could invite two other people to join us; he didn’t mind. AbdelRahman Mansour couldn’t make it, as he was out of the country, so I called two other friends who were equally devoted to helping to change Egypt: an engineer, Mostafa Abu Gamra, who owns a technology company that works in content development, and Dr. Hazem Abdel Azim, a senior government official working at the Ministry of Communications. I was quite excited to meet the man whom I had been independently campaigning for.

      ElBaradei lives in a villa in one of the private residential compounds on the Cairo–Alexandria Desert Road. I planned to take a taxi, to avoid any potential trouble of being recognized by State Security informants via my car’s license plates. Dr. Abdel Azim, however, decided to drive and offered me a ride. ElBaradei was a prominent Egyptian figure and there should be no problem visiting him, he assured me. We met Mostafa Abu Gamra on the way, and the three of us headed off. The guards at the compound’s gates let us in without any problem.

      The villa was beautifully furnished and decorated, yet it was not extravagant in any way. Some of Dr. ElBaradei’s critics claimed he lived a lavish suburban life disconnected from that of ordinary Egyptians. They had portrayed his home as a palace or fortress, with high fences, but this was not the case.

      ElBaradei received us in person. Everything he said lived up to my expectations. I was worried that this might change once I offered some criticism; people’s true faces appear under criticism, not under praise. He stood among a group of his guests, which included two young film directors, some senior businessmen, and other prominent figures.

      Everyone was involved in a heated debate. ElBaradei was an excellent listener, and it never felt like he was leading the discussion. On the contrary, he seemed to be seriously learning from the opinions of others — just the type of leader I felt Egyptians needed. Then I offered my criticism: I suggested that he needed to speak in a language closer to the hearts of mainstream Egyptians. The jargon of elitist intellectuals would not help our quest for popular support.

      I also mentioned ElBaradei’s recently initiated Twitter account. It was new at the time, but he already had 10,000 followers. It took very little time for him to become the most followed Egyptian on Twitter. I suggested that he sometimes seemed too rushed in his posts. Some of his tweets did not sit well with activists and newspaper readers (newspapers regularly published his tweets). His great quality, if you asked me, was that he refused to be considered a savior. He believed in the nation’s youth and in their ability to bring change. I recommended that he tweet about that more frequently. Young Egyptians needed to regain their self-confidence before they could take action.

      I also criticized his travels outside of Egypt during these difficult times. Many others viewed this as his worst error. Regardless of the fact that he actually had many scheduled commitments abroad, ElBaradei’s frequent travels hurt the perceived effectiveness of the campaign and gave his opponents a chance to taint him as a tool of the West, or a self-promoter who ignored his homeland.

      Everyone had something to say. The two directors, Amr Salama and Mohamed Diab, thought that the seven-demands petition was inviting trouble for ElBaradei. Making it a priority and making the signees’ information publicly available at a time when dissident Egyptians were not yet ready to go public was not right, they claimed. They had a point: a vast gulf separated the total number of potential supporters and the actual signees up to that day.

      On that question, however, I defended Dr. ElBaradei’s vision. I found the statement to be an excellent manifestation of the snowball effect. The daily increase in signatures, I believed, made people hopeful. It also prompted community discussions about the statement’s seven demands, adding pressure on the government to implement them.

      It was a fruitful meeting that left me both optimistic and energized. I took a picture with ElBaradei and made it the profile image on my Facebook page. The caption under it said, “I am Wael Ghonim. I declare my support of Dr. ElBaradei.” The meeting had helped me partially break my own barrier of fear.

      Next I created a Google e-mail group called “ElBaradei” to enable key supporters to communicate effectively. It was a closed group that could be joined only with permission from one of the moderators. I began adding people whom I knew and trusted to the group. Ali ElBaradei forwarded the e-mail addresses of his brother’s other supporters, those whom he thought would add value to the group. Discussions proliferated through this e-mail group, but fieldwork remained limited.

      On ElBaradei’s Facebook fan page, both AbdelRahman and I tried hard to improve his public image in spite of the government’s vicious defamation campaigns. We searched through state press archives available online and extracted articles that praised ElBaradei’s efforts. These articles made the recent defamation look absurd: how could a “despised traitor” be a celebrated hero abroad? I found many pictures of ElBaradei with such world leaders as the American president, the French president, the German chancellor, the king of Saudi Arabia, and others. I deliberately published them to stress the fact that ElBaradei was not simply an “apolitical scientist,” as his detractors sought to portray him. AbdelRahman even translated and posted the full transcript of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which ElBaradei affirmed his loyalty and allegiance to both his country and his faith.

      The core accusation of the smear campaign was that ElBaradei was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, having misled the United States into believing that Saddam Hussein secretly harbored weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were adamant about proving this to be a blatant lie. I found an online video of the UN Security Council meeting at which ElBaradei presented his report asserting that Iraq was free of any weapons of mass destruction. The report demanded more time for inspections and rejected the military intervention proposed by the United States. I added Arabic subtitles to the video and published it, hoping it would show ElBaradei’s innocence regarding allegations that he had somehow facilitated the U.S. war on Iraq.

      On April 6, 2010, less than three months later, the number of members of Mohamed ElBaradei’s page exceeded 100,000. The April 6 Youth Movement also attempted to celebrate its anniversary on that day by organizing a demonstration, but the attempt failed. The security forces were watchful and well prepared.

      Online, AbdelRahman and I were restrained. After all, we were writing on behalf of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei. Our language was formal. We rarely posted our personal opinions, and we were convinced that the page had to present him in a formal light. Most contributors thought that Dr. ElBaradei was personally managing the page. The experience taught me a lot. I had never before managed a Facebook page.

      On April 15, I received an encouraging message from Dr. ElBaradei himself, sent through his son. He wrote: “Spent some time browsing the fanpage today. It is wonderful. Many thanks for a very creative and professional job. Keep it up.” I replied, thanking him for the support and telling him that it meant a lot to me. I cc’ed AbdelRahman Mansour in the e-mail thread and introduced him as the page’s second admin, who deserved as much recognition as I did for all his efforts.

      One of the important activities I initiated on the ElBaradei page was the use of opinion polls to make decisions. Despite the fact that Internet polls are far from scientific, they still offer a good means for testing trends of opinion. Besides, in Egypt, offline opinion polls, carried out through actual interviews, were possible only with a permit from the Ministry of Interior. Needless to say, the ministry had no interest in helping political activists gather information from the public.

      I located a good polling site that supported Arabic and subscribed to its services. The first poll I developed aimed to measure the page members’ level of satisfaction with Egypt’s status quo and to explore why many of them had not signed the seven-demands petition. More than 15,000 participants completed the questionnaire. СКАЧАТЬ