Syria's Voices of Change

Ruling Party Reformers, Emboldened Dissidents Debate Their Nation's Destiny, Despite Dangers

DAMASCUS, Syria -- Ayman Abdel Nour's contest with censorship began with a term not uncommon in Syria: "forbidden."

Last spring, the word appeared on the screen of his Compaq computer, barring him entry to his Web site, all4syria.org. His computer was the problem, he thought at first. Perhaps the server was down. Then he realized the government had blocked his site -- a forum for unprecedented dialogue among groups, parties and thinkers in Syria -- nearly a year after he had inaugurated it.

Abdel Nour, a 40-year-old reformer from within the ruling Baath Party, lost little time.

The same day, he collected the e-mail addresses he had -- 1,700 in all -- and dispatched his daily update. Two days later, the government blocked e-mails from that address from entering the Syrian network. The next day, he changed the address and transmitted another bulletin. Then that address was shut down. Changed again, and blocked. And so it went for nearly a month and a half -- Abdel Nour devising new addresses, the government barring them -- until the censors finally gave up.

"I was always ahead of them," said Abdel Nour, a kinetic multi-tasker fond of reading e-mail, holding a conversation and answering a cell phone at the same time. "They couldn't read my mind. They couldn't ban the addresses in advance."

Since then, Abdel Nour's e-mail list has grown to 15,200 subscribers, including secular and religious dissidents, intellectuals, businessmen, party leaders, ministers and Syrian embassies. Through its content and as a symbol, the bulletin has emerged as a crucial interlocutor in the tentative, precarious space permitted to dissent in a country where nearly everyone suspects that change is ahead, even if they clash over the shape and direction it might take.

The opposition in Syria remains weak, riven by personality and principle and groping for a voice in a country of 18 million ruled for 42 years by the same party and more than three decades by a family that belongs to a powerful minority.

But emboldened by mounting U.S. pressure, a measure of government tolerance that alternates with capricious crackdowns, and a sense of national crisis as deep as any in a generation, dissidents and reformers have begun debating Syria's destiny on the Internet, in public forums and through frank conversation. The opinions are as diverse as the country itself -- a society no less complicated than those of neighboring Iraq or Lebanon. At issue are the role of the United States, the tactics needed to bring about change and the very nature of legitimacy.

On one side of the conversation is a generation of dissidents hardened by prison. At the core of their beliefs is a sense that a system driven less by ideology than by patronage and self-interest has begun to crumble. The sooner it does, they say, the better, even if they fear the aftermath.

Abdel Nour is on the other side. He is seeking to propel reform from within the Baath Party by creating dialogue in hopes of a national reconciliation -- what many view as the only alternative to chaos.

"No one single party, association or man can bring solution to all these challenges," Abdel Nour said in his home office, strewn with paper, pamphlets, books and compact discs piled on the floor, sofas and chairs. "We have to gather all Syrians together."

'You Have to Be Inside'

Abdel Nour's bulletin has made him something of a celebrity among Syria's intelligentsia. Even if some dissidents are uneasy about his Baath Party credentials -- the charge of working as an informant is often made within opposition circles -- they almost universally praise the role of his bulletin in airing debate and exchanging ideas that would have had no forum just a few years ago.