DA BOMB:

Syrian Dissidents Find Their Voice As Lebanon Provides a Megaphone (CLAUDIA ROSETT, March 23, 2005, NY Sun)

With Lebanese democrats speaking up and Syria's occupying forces pulling out, it may sound unsurprising that one of Beirut's leading Arabic newspapers ran a searing critique this week of Baathist rule in Damascus, under the headline: "Why Lebanon Is Becoming Larger and Syria Smaller."

Except the author of this piece is not Lebanese, but Syrian, writing - at serious risk - from Damascus. Signing himself as Hakam al-Baba, this journalist goes on to identify himself as someone who has worked for the past 20 years for a Syrian state newspaper, Tishrin. And like the Lebanese who for the past five weeks have been tearing down posters of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, Mr. al-Baba of Damascus is saying he has had enough.

In biting metaphor and with blunt fury, he describes how, under 42 years of Baathist rule, Syria's media has performed as a tin pot press. Reporters and editors have been required to stage Orwellian stunts in which the cruelties and depravities of the Baath Party are described as glorious deeds, in which "their corruption is turned into achievements, and their profligacy into profits." Mr. al-Baba reminds his audience of the days before Baathist tyranny, when Syria had hundreds of lively magazines and newspapers instead of a few orchestrated, official ones. He calls for a press in Syria that would be free to "learn and make mistakes, get it right, fail and succeed" and write the truth instead of trumpeting on cue the party line.

And though he is publishing in a Beirut newspaper, An-Nahar, his audience is not only in Lebanon. An-Nahar editors say that while the print edition of their newspaper is banned in Syria, they have reason to believe their Web site is widely read. "It's a bomb in Syrian society," one Lebanese observer says.