Egypt: Portrait of a Facebook Rebel

If you needed to, you could squeeze Khaled Kamel's life into a six-foot square box, his mother says. "This is basically Khaled's life," says Amal Abdel Maguid, pointing to a narrow twin-size bed crammed into a corner next to a desk with a hulking HP desktop computer on it.

And for a 20-year-old university student with a penchant for Facebook and computer games, that might not seem so extraordinary. But from this desk in the tiny, concrete, Soviet-style apartment that he shares with his mother, grandmother, and two younger siblings in the Nile Delta village of Zowiya Ghazal, Kamel also helped launch one of the most momentous events in modern Middle East history: the revolution that toppled the 30-year-old dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak.

Kamel represents that newly vocal sector of the Egyptian population that opposition parties have long referred to as the silent majority - but is now widely known as the Facebook generation. There are millions of them; middle and lower class Egyptians - many under 35 - who have long complained of regime corruption, unemployment, and police brutality, but who, without ties to any political party or local leadership, were never motivated to take to the streets. "We were all regular young people," Kamel says. "It was never about politics."

More often, it was about anxiety over jobs and marriage, and a burning animosity toward a central authority and its foot soldiers that Kamel says treated him and others like creatures they could kick around and squash. "The police treated us like we were a different kind of humans," he says. He remembers falling off a train once, only to get assaulted by a police officer. "Instead of helping me, he hit me because I was lying there on the platform, which you're not supposed to do."

For a couple of years, Kamel blogged about his frustrations. "It was a sarcastic blog," he says, because humor is an important way the Egyptians have learned to cope with the hardship in their lives. "I wrote about anything that I felt was wrong." Kamel's mother thought he was wasting his time. "I didn't want him sitting at the computer so much," she says. "I wanted him to study, get a diploma, get a job, and not get involved in politics."

But then, all of Kamel's frustrations - and suddenly, his raison d'Être - came into sharp relief one day with the news of another man named Khaled. "I was shocked by the picture of Khaled Said's face," he says. "I needed to do something about it." Said, a businessman, was eight years older than Kamel when he was beaten to death on an Alexandria street by plainclothes cops in June of last year. He was just another young computer nerd like Kamel. But his death - and the gruesome picture of his smashed face that circulated on the internet soon after - attracted more than 100,000 people to join a facebook page that would later help send thousands into the streets on Jan. 25, 2011.

Back in June, the page's then-anonymous administrator, Middle East Google executive Wael Ghonim, came up with the idea of organizing Said's large Facebook following in order to stage a series of silent, black-clad vigils. Kamel took a train half-an-hour north to Alexandria with a small, new Kodak camera. He filmed the first vigil and posted it on Facebook. Ghonim noticed, and soon, they were chatting regularly over gmail, talking strategy and planning for the months ahead.

Last week, shortly after Kamel learned Ghonim's identity for the first time, the two joined other activists on the popular Egyptian talk show "10'o'clock at Night" to talk about how they - a bunch of unknowns - had helped launch a revolution. 

It was a startling success for a silent majority that, Kamel insists, cares little about Egypt's traditional political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood or the liberal Wafd party. "I don't care who ends up running this country, as long as I have the ability to change them if I don't like them," he says. "We just wanted to make the country ours. Our country - meaning we're not going to wait for someone else to fix it."

Outrage over Said's death had set the ball in motion, but it was the Tunisian revolution in January that confirmed that Kamel and Ghonim and others could make it a serious game. "There were a lot of people ready to do it," Kamel says of his and other youth activists' planning in the lead-up to the Jan. 25 protests, "But when they saw that the revolution in Tunisia succeeded, they realized that it was possible."

The turnout and the 18-day stand-off that ensued between protesters and the Mubarak regime rocked the Arab nation far beyond the borders of Tahrir Square. In the Egyptian bread basket of the Nile Delta, it pushed the village of Zowiya Ghazal, and the neighboring agricultural town of Damanhour to finally come to terms with their own mixed feelings about the Mubarak regime. In many ways, it exposed a generational divide, and opened up a debate over who is better suited to lead the country towards the change that many yearn to see. "I was surprised by how many people went out on Jan. 25," says Kamel's mother. She was impressed by her son's videos too. "I realized we were all on the same path of thinking about change, but they had a fast way of getting there."

Fame and the Future
On a Tuesday afternoon, Kamel and four of his friends - some fellow activists, some not - tour the burned and ransacked state security headquarters in the center of Damanhour, a few miles away from where his family's home. Destroyed on the night of Jan. 28, Egypt's nationwide day of rage, it is now an ad-hoc museum to the horrors inflicted by Mubarak's regime on the Egyptian people. Dozens of families and couples stream through its stone entryway, where someone has spray-painted "Museum of the Unjust" and "Entrance is free for the Egyptian people."

Off of one room, there is a bathroom-sized space that people are lining up to see. "It was a torture room," Kamel says. When the first morbid tourists crept in here two weeks ago, he adds, an ex-prisoner - a member of the banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood - hung around to give tours. "There used to be an electrical box here," Kamel says, pointing to an off-colored rectangle on the wall. "They ran a cable up here into the room like this," he traces the marks on the wall, "and gave people electric shocks in here."

But inside most of the charred rooms and corridors, much is now left to imagination and memories, the files of the people held prisoner and tortured having gone up in flames when security forces abandoned their posts on Jan. 28. The writing on walls is still there - literally - in the shadows, where visitors who were once prisoners say the security brutalized their captives with dogs and electric shocks. "October 29, 2009. Abu Nuyera," reads one name - the father of a girl named Nuyera. It says he came from the village of Hosh Issa. "Al-Faragony. June 10, 2010," reads another - scrawled four days after Khaled Said was murdered 40 miles northwest of here.

An older man in the building's courtyard recognizes Kamel from his appearance on Egyptian TV. "We are so proud of you," the man exclaims. He asks Kamel to pose for a picture with him. Another man asks Kamel for his Facebook name.

Back in Kamel's living room crowded with furniture and stuffed animals, the older generations of his family are also marveling about how a formerly lost generation took the world by surprise. They were especially moved by Wael Ghonim's televised reaction to the uprising's "martyrs" last week. Kamel's grandmother "was watching the TV the whole time saying, 'Enough Mubarak, leave, after what you've done to these people.' It was very hard on her seeing the people who were killed and injured," says Maguid, Kamel's mother. From her chair on the other side of the room, Feriyal Hussein's elderly eyes fill with tears again as she listens. "I was a child when King Farouk was king," she says. "But he left peacefully. Not like this."

Maguid and Hussein consider Kamel as well as Wael Ghonim, and their online associates Egypt's newest heroes. But Kamel echoes Ghonim on that thought: everyone who took to the streets is a hero. The thing about online organizing, he adds, is that there was never a need for a leader in Egypt's youth revolution. "We all chatted, we posted our ideas on the page, and we saw each other's ideas." 

And in "the new Egypt," as he calls it, Kamel will keep using his individual activism and his amateur video skills to push for change until it comes, until the country looks like a place where people can realize their dreams, he says. After that, he would like to become a film director. And his favorite movie happens to be an American one: V for Vendetta, a film about a man who uses terrorist tactics to bring down a totalitarian regime. Not that terrorism is the right strategy, Kamel adds. He has stressed repeatedly that Egypt's movement was a peaceful one, and that was crucial to its success. "I just liked that he was smarter than them, not stronger than them," he says of the film's protagonist. "Like how we used our intelligence and technology to win the fight here." 

Source - Time (UK)