6
march 2007
After the Damascus Spring
Syrians search for freedom online
Guy Taylor
Shortly
after I arrived in Damascus last June, Amr Nazir Salem, the minister of
telecommunications and technology, told me that champress.net would be “a great
site to check out.” Champress was a locally produced independent news website—an
example, he assured me, of Syria’s advances in media freedom. I took his advice
as evidence that the site must be government
propaganda. But my interest was piqued a few days later, when I attempted to
visit it from one of the city’s many Internet cafés and found only a blank page.
It
didn’t make sense. Salem had admitted that the Syrian authorities block
websites—namely pro-Israel and hyper-Islamist ones, those run by the illegal
Muslim Brotherhood, and those calling for autonomy for Syrian Kurds. But
Champress, one of the very sites the government was recommending I visit? It
was a small example of the paradoxes that abound in Syria, an authoritarian
state whose government, which has long maintained ownership and control over
the media, claims now to be intent on spreading information technology to the
masses.
The
last six years have seen an explosion of Internet use in Syria, with close
to 1 million of the country’s 18 million people now online, compared to just 30,000
in 2000. Outside observers say the surge will continue, with Syrian users “projected
to exceed 1.7 million by 2009,” according to a recent study by the Jordan-based
Arab Advisors Group. Damascus writers are already churning out hundreds
of blogs in English and Arabic as well as dozens of broader independent news-and-commentary
sites like Champress. The websites are run from homes and from more than
two dozen cyber-cafés, where it costs about $1 to spend an hour online.
The
technology is advancing so quickly that it seems impossible for Syrian
authorities to maintain their stranglehold on the free flow of local news and
ideas. Yet the government’s obsession with manipulating the content of
independent sites and its apparent desire to extend traditional media
restrictions into cyberspace raise the question of whether the country’s rulers
merely seek to use the Internet as a tool to enhance their own power.
The
Syrian segment of the Web is a gauge for whether Bashar al-Assad is genuinely
committed to building the “contemporary and progressive” society he described
when he ascended to power after the 2000 death of his father, Hafez al-Assad,
who ruled Syria and its lone political party, the Ba’ath, for 31 years. Some
observers are encouraged by the younger Assad’s interest in computers and his
Western leanings: He is fluent in French and English, and his wife is a British-born
woman of Syrian descent who was a Citibank investment banker when he met her
while training as an ophthalmologist in London. But is the Internet really
opening Syria’s public sphere to freer speech? Or is the government simply letting
people speak up online as a means of identifying opposition figures and
troublemakers? Six years into the reign of Bashar, who turned 41 in September,
the gauge is delivering ambiguous readings.
A ‘Deal’ With the Government
Days
after I was unable to access it, champress.net suddenly became available
again. It turned out to be a daily aggregation of material from independent
Arabic papers across the region, plus a mixture of original editorials and
local news. It’s among the most popular news sites in Syria; according to its
founder, Ali Jamalo, it receives about 30,000 visitors a day. Other
popular sites use the same format, including syria-news.com and aljaml.com (“The
Camel”). Each appears relatively balanced, though any serious opposition to
Assad generally comes not in the form of news stories but as anonymous or
pseudonymous comments from readers.
Some
of the commenters openly bash the government. Last year a reader angry about
government censorship used Champress to urge the country’s rulers to “Loosen
your hold on peoples’ thoughts,” adding, “When are we going to talk about
freedom and democracy and transparency?” More recently, the summer violence in
Israel and Lebanon produced a flood of reader comments with a predictably anti-Israel
slant—a position generally shared by Syrians whether or not they back Assad. Support
for Hezbollah was also a theme, although it was presented more carefully than
the anti-Israel material, with seldom a mention of the militant Lebanese Shiite
party’s actual name. In a show of solidarity, they instead referred to it as
the “resistance.”
I
decided to phone Jamalo, who agreed to meet me at a café in Damascus’ upscale
Al-Mezza neighborhood, and from the start things felt slightly odd. My taxi had
dropped me off in front of the wrong café, and when I phoned Jamalo to tell
him, he demanded I stay put. I was taken aback when he suddenly swerved up to
the curb in a black Mercedes 600 with tinted windows, the sort of car that
seemed more likely to be driven by a secret security agent than by a man who
spends his time breaking down barriers to free speech.
After
Jamalo took me to a private house on an upscale residential street in Al-Mezza,
I told him, through his translator, that I wanted to learn whether and how
Champress operates without interference in a place where, until very recently,
such media outlets were wholly forbidden. “I have a very careful relationship
with the government,” he said. “I know what to write. I criticize, but in a good way, in a calm way.” When he first launched
Champress, he said, he received daily phone calls from Mohsen Bilal, the Syrian
minister of information, questioning its “direction.”
A
rugged sort in his late 40s, Jamalo was a war correspondent for 25 years,
having covered Lebanon’s civil war of the ’80s for Syrian state TV and,
subsequently, the first Gulf War and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
(In the latter conflicts, in addition to filing reports for official Syrian
television, he helped organize freelance footage from cameramen close to the
action into packages sold to CNN, Al Jazeera, and anyone else who would buy.) “I
am a journalist,” he said, and he certainly carried himself like one during our
meeting, burning through a half-pack of Marlboro Lights. After his last stint
in Iraq, Jamalo decided he “wanted to do something new.”
Lighting
another cigarette and leaning back in a large leather chair, he boasted that
Champress even carries stories about the Muslim Brotherhood, membership in
which carries a death sentence in Syria. “Sometimes I criticize the policy of
the government,” he said. “My website is the most important political website
in Syria.”
I
asked whether Champress had ever been shut down. “No, no,” he said. “We have
had no problems until now.” I asked what he meant by that, mentioning that I
had recently tried to pull the site up and found it not working. Jamalo
hesitated for a moment, lighting another cigarette. Then, in a quieter voice,
he explained that the site had suddenly been closed for several days early in
the summer. Initially, he said, he believed there was a technical problem, and
as phone calls poured in from readers wondering what was wrong, that’s what he
told them. It wasn’t until the problem went on for several hours that he phoned
Information Minister Bilal. “He told me to wait, and the site would come back
up,” Jamalo said, adding that Bilal then informed him that a story posted on
Champress the day before “had upset several senior government officials.” As I
formed the words of my next question, Jamalo looked at me and said in English, “I
have no comment.”
“But
what was the story that had angered the officials?” I asked. I needed to know,
otherwise how could I write about it? Through the translator, Jamalo said in
Arabic, “I now have a deal with the government not to speak about this.”
‘Pervasive’ Web Filtering
Before
becoming president, Bashar al-Assad’s only formal political role was as head of
the exclusive Syrian Computer Society. It came as little surprise, then, that
when he took power he spoke of the “importance of spreading education and
knowledge and Internet technology.” But today Reporters Without Borders ranks
Syria as “one of the worst offenders against Internet freedom.” The
organization’s 2006 report said the government “censors opposition and
independent news websites, barring access to those that deal with Syrian
policy, monitor[ing] online activity to silence dissident voices, and jailing
Internet users and bloggers.”
The OpenNet Initiative,
which monitors government filtration and surveillance of the Internet, says Web
filters in Syria are “pervasive.” According to the group’s profile of the
country, “Syria’s filtering takes place at the ISP level. Syria targets the websites
of Syrian-specific and Arabic news sites that are critical of the government,
Kurdish organizations, and foreign-based Syrian opposition parties. Access to
the country code top level domain of Israel, ‘.il,’ is also blocked. There is
variation in the level of filtering amongst the ISPs.”
Salem,
the telecommunications and technology minister, acknowledged that the Syrian
authorities have developed their own software for monitoring the Web. There’s
also evidence that security officials hang around the cyber-cafés, blending in
and looking busy while watching people. During one of my many café visits last
summer, a Syrian I was working with discreetly motioned toward a well-dressed,
mustached man sitting in a corner, smoking and tapping away on a laptop. “I see
him here a lot,” my friend said. “I think he’s government.” The man and I
suddenly made eye contact. I looked away, nervously touching my own mustache,
and decided it might not be the best idea to approach him and ask him his
business.
Beyond
rumors that the president is a computer nut (one prominent Syrian intellectual
working in the United States told me he “reads computer magazines as his
bedtime literature”), the best evidence for his desire to expand Internet use
in Syria was the addition of Amr Salem—a senior program manager at Microsoft’s
U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Washington, from 1998 until 2005—to his
cabinet in February 2006. After a cup of strong coffee in his vast air-conditioned
office across the street from the Syrian Parliament, Salem, whose wife and
children still live in the United States, told me he was in Damascus to use the
technology revolution as a vehicle for the reforms Assad publicly promised six
years ago.
“Human
development is a key goal for this government,” he said, adding that “access to
information is a key factor in accelerating human development.” I agreed and,
settling into the cushions on his office couch, probed him about the issue of
censorship, mentioning news releases from groups like Reporters Without Borders
and the Committee to Protect Journalists condemning the jailing of Syrian
cyberjournalists.
“Basically,”
Salem told me, “Syria is currently under attack, we have to admit that, by
several powers, and if somebody writes, or publishes or whatever, something
that supports the attack, they will be tried.” I asked what he makes of the
journalist rights organizations that list Assad among the world’s leading
suppressors of free speech. “It’s a stereotype,” he said, claiming that Assad
does no more than U.S. President George W. Bush when it comes to battling
journalists and activists. Such judgments, he said, are made “without taking in
the whole context and understanding the dynamics at play and who these people
are.”
Salem’s
words rang in my head a few days later when I met Ammar Qurabi, head of
the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, who surprised me by saying
that “some of the opposition members in Syria publicly portray the arrests of
these journalist-activists as actually arrests of just journalists because they
know it will make the regime look worse.” Thankfully, he doesn’t defend the
detention of nonviolent activists, but he recognizes that if watchdogs describe
the arrestees as “journalists,” the government’s image falls even lower.
Qurabi
also gave me a lengthy list of people jailed by the government for things they
put on the Internet, some detained for years simply for writing their thoughts
in emails. “In Syria, we do not have any laws regulating the Internet or
websites,” Qurabi said. He didn’t mean that people are free to use the Net as
they please. He meant that the limits are constantly shifting with the rulers’ subjective
whims, so ordinary people are never sure where those limits are.
Mafia-Style Dictator or Likable Modern Guy?
Several
Syrian journalists told me media freedom has increased in Syria in recent
years, especially on the Internet. But they said it’s not clear that there are
fewer forbidden topics today; it may just be that the Web has made it harder
for the government to regulate speech. “In the last seven years, the margin is
wider, but it’s riskier because you don’t know where the red lines are and you
don’t know the punishment for what you are writing,” said Ibrahim Hamidi,
Damascus bureau chief for the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat. “The
lines are always changing and are now very vague. Being a journalist here, you
need to know about the political climate to be able to write your own story. You
have to know the limits.”
Even
veterans like Hamidi, a writer for Al-Hayat for 16 years, can unwittingly cross
the line. His credentials have been stripped and returned by the government
seven times over the years, and at the start of the U.S.-led invasion of
neighboring Iraq he was detained for six months for writing that the Syrian
government was “preparing itself for war.” “The red lines are different from
one medium to another,” Hamidi said, adding that authorities are most concerned
about “internal public opinion.”
To
begin to understand censorship in Syria, sources inside and outside the
government told me, you have to consider the environment within which Assad has
ruled. After his father’s death in June 2000, media freedom blossomed on the
Internet and in new private magazines. Known as the Damascus Spring, the period
was initiated by Assad’s inaugural address, in which he announced, “There is no
doubt that transparency is an important thing.”
The new freedoms were crushed when it became clear that the U.S. would
enter neighboring Iraq. Assad,
apparently fearing for the stability of his regime, swiftly reintroduced the
practices of closing magazines and jailing journalists, activists, and
opposition figures. After the invasion, the authorities braced for the
possibility that Iraq’s turmoil could spread into Syria. The clampdown on media
and public displays of opposition to the president tightened last year with
the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and a subsequent
United Nations probe that suggested Syria was to blame.
Despite
his public calls for reform, Bashar al-Assad grew up in the confines of his
father’s Ba’athist system. Even if you believe his rhetoric is sincere, he’s
surrounded by men who ascended to power under that system. And pro-Assad Syrian
nationalism remains very much alive. While it burns hottest among the nation’s
wealthy elite, public support for the Assad family and its rule is arguably
widespread.
An
anecdote: One evening last summer, I found myself at a Damascus nightclub whose
speakers cranked out such Western pop hits as “Gasolina” by the Puerto Rican
pop star Daddy Yankee. Around 3 a.m. a pro-Syria, pro-Assad pop song suddenly
blared over the speakers. The tune drew shouts and cheers from the crowd, with
some singing along to the Arabic lyrics: “Syria is our country and Al-Assad is
our leader.”
There
are several possible explanations for what I witnessed. Assad may enjoy a far
greater degree of popularity among his people than is comfortable for
Westerners to admit. Then again, the drunken songs of partiers at a disco
serving $6 whiskey shots may not offer the most representative sample of Syrian
public opinion. The song may also have been a way for the nightclub’s owner to
stay open late while avoiding trouble with the authorities.
The
ambiguity of the government’s stance toward the Internet and toward freedom of
the press reflects the generally ambiguous nature of Assad’s regime. The young
president seems to dance a tight rope between appeasing hard-line allies of his
father in Syria’s vast security apparatus and permitting technology such as the
World Wide Web to undermine the government’s control of speech and opinion.
“Bashar
is not simply a Ba’athist thug,” argues Ammar Abdulhamid, a Syrian author who
has lived in the Washington, D.C., area since last year, when, he says, he left
Syria after being threatened for criticizing the regime in print. “He is a
member of a family that has imposed itself on the country and that conducts
policy for its own purposes.” According to Abdulhamid, who now voices his
opinions on the English-language blog amarji.blogspot.com, these circumstances
mean that the “mafias of the ruling elite” try to co-opt anyone pushing for
reform in Syria. “We’re talking about the Internet, but the same rules apply for
any reformers,” he said. “Either you get neutralized, you get destroyed, or you
get sucked into the game.” Assad, Abdulhamid added, “is part of the game.”
The
Assad family’s determination to hold onto power helps explain the brevity of
the Damascus Spring. But the expanding availability of the Internet has made
it impossible for the government to completely control information in the way
it did in the pre-Internet age. Instead, authorities play a sort of cat-and-mouse
game with Web freedoms, cracking down at times, easing up at others. The result
is a culture of fear among Syrian Web surfers that has persisted since the
early days of Syrian Internet access—in 2000 and 2001, as Bashar al-Assad was
coming to power—when there were only a few thousand people online and rumors
swirled about government reprisals against ordinary citizens who knowingly or
unknowingly emailed “offensive” messages to each other.
One
notorious incident involved May Mamar Bashi, who was jailed for five
months in 2001 for forwarding to a friend a cartoon that showed Bashar al-Assad
sodomizing Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. Although that was five years ago,
Bashi, who now runs the ornate Beit Mamlouka boutique hotel in Damascus’ maze-like
Old City, clammed up when I asked her about the incident. “Believe it or not,” she
said, “I really want to stay in Syria, so I prefer not to talk about this.”
Bashi
told me the government’s attitude toward the Web has changed significantly in
recent years. “There’s a lot of freedom in Syria now,” she said. “Five years
ago we were barely having Internet at all in Syria, which is not the case any
more.” Bashi reasoned that surveillance of Syrians has decreased significantly
as the number of Internet users has gone up. “They cannot watch every little
thing,” she said.
Younger
Web surfers are less sure. Amr Faham, one of the multitudes who frequent cyber-cafés,
told me he avoids putting anything overtly political on his two blogs—amrfaham.blogspot.com,
which deals with his personal life, and syrianhiking.blogspot.com, about
his experiences as an outdoorsman. Faham, 25, regularly gives tours and even
offers his couch to foreigners he meets online. But over a bowl of fool (a
creamy and delightful local bean dish) in a Damascus café, he said in a low
voice that even though he blogs in English and doesn’t write about issues that
would be censored, he still worries. “Sometimes you talk about whatever you
want, and suddenly you disappear,” he explained. “We don’t know the limits.”
In
the months since then, Faham has been more willing to criticize the government
on his personal blog. On October 10, he wrote of how he had attempted to load
the site for three days, only to find a “forbidden” sign. When he phoned the
ISP that he uses, Faham wrote, an employee told him that “Syrian ‘intelligence’”
had ordered them to block every page on blogspot.com. In his post, titled “Forbidden,”
Faham openly challenged the government: “Will it take years till someone from
them discover that it’s also impossible to block the blogs as hundreds of free
blogging services are born each few months? Or to find out that not all
bloggers should be considered ‘dangerous’? So hey you, there in your dark room,
making people, whether deliberately or accidentally, your favorite game; give
me back my personal free space!”
What Good Is a Window If You’re Blind?
The
uncertainty has not stopped a growing number of Syrians, both supporters and
detractors of the government, from making the Web an unprecedented haven for
public discourse on news in general and repression in particular. “I think the
whole Internet came to Syria because they can’t stop it and they want to use it
to promote the new era,” said Maan Abdul-Salam, a pro-democracy
dissident in Damascus whose women’s rights site, Thara (thara-sy.org/English/arabic/index.php), has operated without
interference.
Authorities
tolerate Thara’s exposure of stories that might never have seen light 10 years
ago. Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the site carried a feature on
Iraqi girls, some as young as 12, fleeing to Damascus to work in the city’s
growing prostitution trade. International media outlets, including the cable
channel Al Jazeera, picked up the story, as did Champress and syria-news.com.
A subsequent Thara feature detailed the circumstances of several female
political prisoners. “Again, they didn’t do anything,” Abdul-Salam said. “They
didn’t shut it down.”
But
while the site has been allowed to push state limits on freedom, a separate
operation that Abdul-Salam runs—a feminist literature distribution group called
Etana Press—has not. Etana initially operated with impunity, even
holding a human rights conference in November 2005 at Damascus University. Shortly
afterward, however, it helped circulate a small number of copies of the controversial
book Let the Veil be Removed, by the Iranian writer Shahdarut
Javan. In an illustration of the Internet’s role in Syria, Abdul-Salam said he
learned by reading a news posting on Champress that Syrian Islamists angry
about the book’s distribution had complained to the security authorities. As a
result, Syrian Prime Minister Muhammad Naji Al-Otari ordered Abdul-Salam to
keep quiet about the book and to stop circulating it.
The
Champress post, in January 2006, generated a flood of reader feedback on both
the subject of the veil and the issue of whether Abdul-Salam and Etana were
being wrongly restrained by the government. One anonymous reader said, “Now
where do you think Mr. Otari that you live! We’re going to get the novel from
the internet. Or are you going to also forbid internet.” Another commenter,
posting under the name “a polemic reader,” wrote: “Get free of the forbidding
complex. Praise be to God, the intellectual forbidding policy can never be
changed!!! Leave readers to decide what’s accepted and what’s rejected. Why are
you dealing with people as if they are sheep?”
At
the end of our meeting, I asked Abdul-Salam if he feels the Internet is moving
Syria toward a more open society, given that his online activism has been
tolerated by the authorities while his activism beyond the Internet has not. He
thought about the question for some time, then responded, “The Internet is
really important, but it doesn’t make any change in the end, because the hand
of security is still so strong. People can get information now, but they can’t
do anything with the information. Maybe you have a window on the world, but you
don’t have a window on what’s going on inside, and that makes you blind.”
Guy Taylor (guyjtaylor@yahoo.com), a D.C.-based freelance journalist,
has received an International Reporting Award from the Stanley Foundation and a
reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118380.html