Journalist's Journal: Drawing heat in Syria
By Ali Farzat Posted Jul 1 2003
On March 30, the Syrian daily Teshreen, which is considered a mouthpiece for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, devoted two full pages of commentary blasting my editorial cartoons that criticized Saddam Hussein and his regime. For years I have been criticizing the Saddam Hussein’s tyranny against his own people and his own country. Teshreen’s campaign was an attempt to libel me and question my nationalism.
The next day, I was surprised to see about 50 people demonstrating in front of the building where my newspaper A-Domari is located. The demonstrators held signs protesting my cartoon drawings.
Present at the scene was a BBC correspondent who asked one of the demonstrators why he was there; the irony is that the demonstrator said, “I do not know.” But the weirdest thing was when the man who led the demonstration came apologizing to me the following day and said he had taken a careful look at my drawings and found that they said the truth.
The campaign falls into the circle of continuous pressure, whether material or moral, directed at my newspaper in an attempt to shut it down. A-Domari is the only independent, private newspaper in Syria that has always been critical of the government.
Since its inception, A-Domari has adopted the viewpoint of those who have suffered and criticized the tools of President Al-Assad’s regime. As a result, a week would not pass without harassment from Adnan Omran, the current Syrian minister of information and his office.
A-Domari is the only newspaper that is under the personal censorship of the minister of information, and the drafts of it are usually kept in his office for three days before receiving his approval.
One of the steps he took was forcing my newspaper to work under the framework of a government distribution company that takes 35 percent of A-Domari’s revenues. In addition, the company deliberately delays the circulation of A-Domari until the next day in an attempt to affect the newspaper financially.
The minister also ordered the Syrian Advertising Institution to withhold all its advertisements and not send any to A-Domari. No official justification was given for this action.
The harassment went beyond that. There were times when the censors would tear out parts of the newspaper and cross out stories that tackled government corruption. On other occasions, the ministry had asked the printers not to deliver the newspaper to us. Later, the ministry demanded that no printer could print A-Domari unless they received approval. The ministry has not given its approval yet, and therefore the newspaper has not appeared for three issues as of May 19.
The irony is that the ministry is not allowing the publication of A-Domari. At the same time, if the newspaper is not published, its license will be canceled according to the Syrian Publication Law. We criticized the law in our newspaper under an article entitled, “The Publication Law: Was it Written in a Police Station?”
We have filed complaints with the Journalists Union in Syria, a union that is supposed to defend journalists, but unfortunately, our calls have been ignored.