SYRIA: The Syrian authorities are trying to silence an independent and pointed voice in their midst, reports David Hirst from Damascus.
Ali Farzat is a cartoonist of international repute. His work appears, among other places, in Le Monde, the French newspaper. He has won many an award. Last year, it was Holland's Prince Claus prize for cartoons with a "human content"; before that, Switzerland's International Mourg Committee named him as one of the five most important cartoonists in the world.
But he is without official honour in his own country. This week, the Damascus satirical weekly, Addomari, of which he is the publisher, mounted an unprecedented challenge to the authorities, who seem bent on silencing him and the renascent spirit of free speech in this country, which he exemplifies.
He founded Addomari, the Lamp Lighter, during the so-called Damascus spring, the cautious liberalisation that followed the death in 2000 of President Hafiz Assad, who had ruled with an iron fist for 30 years, and the accession of his son Bashar.
It was the first privately owned publication to be licensed in the 40 years since the one-party Baathist state seized control of the media. It was an instant success; with a circulation of 75,000, it sold many times more than the three official daily newspapers, al-Baath, al-Thaurah and Tishreen, monuments of dullness and conformity, put together.
The Damascus spring didn't last long, but, despite official harassment, Addommari survived.
The Syrian public is as hostile as any in the Arab world to the US invasion of Iraq, as scornful of the US claims to be bringing democracy to the region; nonetheless, in implicit response to them and to the nervousness they have induced in almost every Arab autocracy, the agitation for reform, democratisation and human rights is picking up again, with Addomari in the thick of it.
But Farzat simply went too far; he continued to attack a perennial target of his, Saddam Hussein, even as Americans and British prepared to invade his country. He portrayed him or his portly generals stuffing the Iraqi people as cannon fodder into the barrel of a gun or haranguing a crowd of hungry and ragged citizens: "They have come to plunder your palaces, your riches, your businesses and your oil".
Doing just that had not been a mistake 12 years before, when, in the previous Gulf war, the US had led an international coalition to free Kuwait.
On the contrary, it had been patriotic duty itself for it so happened that, in those days, there was no more vicious inter-Arab feud than that which pitted one Baathist regime against the other - and Syria had joined the international coalition.
So when, at an exhibition of his work in Paris, the Iraqi ambassador publicly and notoriously issued what amounted to a death threat against him, an outraged Syrian government leapt to his defence against the "bloodthirsty" tyrant in Baghdad.
This time, however, with Syria strongly opposed to the war, mockery of Saddam now became mockery of a sister Arab country in its darkest hour. The authorities now vilified the self- same cartoons - for Addomari and the Kuwait newspaper al-Watan reprinted some of them, so very fresh and relevant had they remained - which they had formerly published in their own official newspapers.
In one of these, Tishreen, a headline now screamed: "Have the dollar and the \ dinar become more precious than the blood and tears of \ children?" In a country where an unofficial street gathering of more than three persons is an illegal act, angry citizens converged "spontaneously" on Addomari's offices in protest.
The young Bashar, who betrays reformist intentions which the old guard around him then busies itself trying to subvert, is said to have a soft spot for Addomari. Perhaps that is why the executives of this "hereditary Baathist Republic", as the reformists sarcastically call it, hesitate to close down such a popular publication outright.
Officially, there is no censorship here. In practice, through the state control or domination of printing, distribution and the flow of advertising, the Ministry of Information can block the issue of any publication it wants. Since the offending cartoons appeared, it has deployed these bureaucratic devices to the full, virtually shutting Addomari down.
Then, in an Orwellian touch, the Ministry of Information warned Farzat that if he failed to bring out the required number of issues over a three- month period he would, under law, forfeit his licence.
"On the one hand, it was ordering me to publish," he said, "on the other I couldn't, because it wouldn't allow the printing house to print it."
This week, the three months was up. In this extremity Farzat managed to find a private printer to do the job. Issue number 115 of Addomari is both more sober in tone and more deliberately confrontational than earlier ones.
"For better or for worse," he said, "this could be a critical juncture in our career."
It focuses almost exclusively on Syrian domestic affairs, on corruption, bureaucratic oppression, human rights abuses, incompetence; these, not Saddam Hussein, were in fact always its basic fare.
It emblazons the word Democracy across its front page in the form of prison manacles; it reports that in the trial of those responsible for a recent dam disaster - the result of defective construction - underlings took the rap for higher-ups who got off scot-free; it compares Syria's publishing laws unfavourably with those of the reactionary Abdul Hamid, the last sultan to rule this one-time province of the Ottoman empire; it carries the text of a documentary on children electrocuted in public parks which state television was forbidden to air.
But issue number 115 will not reach much of the public, at least not by regular means. That is not censorship; of course not; it is just that, once again, the state-controlled distributors have declined to distribute it.