… What is going on now is a lot of testing of “red lines,” as everyone in Damascus seems to call them. People are saying things and publishing things. But many of them, like al-Bounni and Ammar Abdulhamid, who heads the minority-rights Tharwa Project, are engaged in a harrowing pas de deux with the government. Al-Bounni and Abdulhamid are both barred from leaving the country. Intelligence officials have interrogated Abdulhamid three times since January. Al-Bounni has seen his siblings and friends thrown in jail for peaceful political speech. No one testing the limits knows when the next crackdown might come or what will provoke it. Continue reading “Syria Squeezed: Are We Free Yet?”
Tag: Civil Society
New openings for Arab democracy
By Nicholas Blanford and Gretchen Peters, The Christian Science Monitor
In a surprise announcement Saturday, Egypt’s long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, ordered constitutional changes that would open the door for the first-ever multiparty presidential elections in the world’s most populous Arab country. The move is the latest indication of a cautious democratic shift under way in the Arab world. Continue reading “New openings for Arab democracy”
Syrian media reform: a glass half full or half empty?
Special to The Daily Star
The Syrian media have not shown any serious signs of change since the Baath Party assumed power in a 1963 coup. Indeed, Syria’s media sector is one of the most tightly controlled in the Arab world. Most publications are state-owned, and rarely express nonconformist opinions. The coming to power of young President Bashar Assad in 2000 raised hopes that the regime would loosen the reigns significantly. But after a brief period of decompression in 2001 known as the “Damascus spring,” Assad enacted a publications law that consolidated government control; he allowed the licensing of just one “independent” political magazine, owned by the son of the minister of defense; and he cracked down hard on dissent. Continue reading “Syrian media reform: a glass half full or half empty?”
In Syria, Building a Civil Society Book by Book
The Chronicle of Higher Education
BYLINE: KATHERINE ZOEPF
Damascus, Syria
Leave it to others to devise grand programs for bringing democracy to the Middle East: Ammar Abdulhamid wants to lay the intellectual foundations of citizenship one book at a time.
Two years ago, with a small group of Syrian writers and academics here, Mr. Abdulhamid, a 38-year-old American-educated historian and novelist, founded DarEmar, a nonprofit publishing house dedicated to making canonical works of Western philosophy, social science, and literature available in Arabic. His goal, he says, is to print books that will foster “debate on a broad range of issues pertaining to civil society and democratization.” Continue reading “In Syria, Building a Civil Society Book by Book”
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 