After the Damascus Spring

Syrians search for freedom online.

Guy Taylor from the February 2007 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

 

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 ([e-mail]), 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.

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