“We still have some way to go before reaching the professionalism that’s needed,” said Shakeeb al-Jabri, a Syrian activist based in Beirut. “But it’s changed the Syrian landscape.”
This, Jabri added, is an impressive achievement given the environment in which reporters on the ground operate. Syria ranked 173 out of 178 in the Reporters Without Borders group’s most recent index of press freedom, even before the government crackdown on protesters began.
Risks to journalists
Now, journalists documenting the uprising are prime targets of the security forces, said Mohamed Abdel Dayem of the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York.
“They are snatched from their homes, off the street or place of employment and held incommunicado,” he said. Although the contributors to Syria Wants Freedom and Hurriyat have not been arrested, he said, all kinds of media workers have been detained, including those who worked as reporters before the revolution, bloggers such as the activist Razan Ghazzawi, and people who are not journalists in the traditional sense but have documented protests on mobile phones and uploaded the footage online.
“We have documented 28 cases of this happening,” Abdel Dayem said. “They are held for days or weeks or months, more often than not subjected to abuse, more often than not released without being charged.”
In more sinister cases, media figures have been kidnapped and been beaten or killed. Ali Ferzat, a veteran political cartoonist, was reportedly seized in August by masked men, who beat him and broke his hands. Ferzat Jarban, a dissident who filmed protests and uploaded the footage online, was reportedly arrested in November near the restive city of Homs and found dead the next day, his eyes gouged out.
Secret paper distribution
Because many Syrians have limited or tightly controlled access to the Internet, the editors of Syria Wants Freedom and Hurriyat say that their colleagues inside Syria are secretly printing a few hundred copies of their publications and leaving them around the major cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. A video uploaded by Lailah, the editor of Hurriyat, shows masked men stuffing copies of the publication in mailboxes in Damascus and running away.
It was not possible to independently confirm Lailah’s assertion that the newspaper had been distributed. But Abir Saksouk-Sasso, an architect in neighboring Lebanon who supports the anti-government movement in Syria, said she contacted Lailah after reading his Twitter feed and distributed copies of the newspaper at a sit-in in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
“The Syrian revolution is about the conflict between the discourses,” she said. “The regime has presented one scenario . . . in newspapers, state media and TV,” supporting the view, widely held among Assad supporters, that if Assad falls, the country will be engulfed in civil war and that the unrest is the result of a foreign conspiracy.
“So it is important that the revolutionaries articulate their version of events,” she said.
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