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.”
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