“Don’t Cry, Wael”

Video Subtitles courtesy Alive in Egypt

The interview that Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was secretly detained by the Egyptian government, gave to Egypt’s Dream TV just after his release is incredibly compelling. (The Times Lede blog has videos with several parts of the interview, which have been given English subtitles by Alive in Egypt.) Ghonim worked on the Facebook page (“We are all Khaled Said”) that helped give the protests some shape—he refers to himself as “the Admin,” and many of the protesters are calling him a hero. But he doesn’t:

The heroes are the ones in the streets … people who put themselves in danger for real. And I’m sitting writing on the keyboard…. This is the revolution of the youth of the Internet that became the revolution of the youth of Egypt.

“Sitting writing on the keyboard”—and sitting in a prison, blindfolded, for twelve days. He also mentions that he had been awake for the previous forty-eight hours. If his detention was meant to expose Ghonim’s rawest aspect, then his interrogators defeated themselves: what has been left most exposed, after twelve days, is a set of clear convictions about what he was doing and why, the meaning of the rule of law, and the gamble of civil disobedience. He describes what happened when he was grabbed off the street:

All of a sudden, four people surrounded me, kidnapping me…. I kept screaming, “Save me!” but I knew this was the security forces. “Save me! Save me!” A car came they put my face to the ground.

He worries that people will think that what he says next is “treacherous,” but goes on:

There’s nothing to excuse the crime of kidnapping. This abduction that happened to me was a crime, a crime. And that’s exactly what we’re fighting. If you want to arrest me there is a law…. I’m not a terrorist or a drug dealer. You can’t enforce emergency laws on me, with all due respect.

And:

If you suspect me of anything, please bring out all your evidence. I told the truth. And I don’t know if they knew it beforehand, but I told them the entire truth. I’m proud of what I’ve done and prepared to pay the price.

He also says that the Muslim Brotherhood “was not a part of this.” One of the fascinating aspects of the exchange is when he, with increasing intensity, explains that he is not a traitor. (And he isn’t.) The interviewer, Mona El Shazly, asks him, “Were they accusing you of that?” He talks about “what I call the season of making everyone a traitor”—and the need to hold onto the truth, including refusing to exaggerate what happened to him and say he was beaten rather than blindfolded, and the way the word traitor has been thrown around. Then he begins saying, again, that he is not a traitor—if he didn’t care about Egypt, he could have stayed at his house in the Emirates, with its pool:

We are not traitors, and no agenda moved us other than the agenda of our love for our country…. [The protesters] thought about all this. How they were going to make the protests peaceful and how they were going to clean the streets. They thought of all of this. But what I want to say…

There he breaks down, and El Shazly says,

Wael, take your time. We are not here on a fact-finding mission; you don’t have to swear an oath that you love this country or that you are not a traitor.

That is one of the interview’s defining moments: El Shazly’s unwillingness to be implicated in the usual interrogation, or to continue with the line of inquiry the security forces started and accept their questions as the right ones.

In the last part of the interview, there is a slide show of young people killed in the protests. Again, Ghonim loses his composure. Mona says, “Don’t cry, Wael. Wael, don’t cry.” But he does, and says,

I want to tell every mother and every father, truthfully, of the people who died: I am so sorry. I swear to God, it’s not our mistake, it’s the mistake of those who are in charge of the country and don’t want to leave their positions.

And that is true.