From correspondents in Beirut, Lebanon | March 20
STIFLED by heavy-handed censors, a dozen Arab cartoonists have spirited to Lebanon drawings banned in their own countries and have put on them on display in Beirut as their way of fighting back.
The cartoons from Sudan, Syria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq and other Arab capitals provide a satirical view of an Arab world eaten by totalitarianism, corruption, rampant unemployment and chronic violence.
One shows a military general decapitating a pen, another depicts an Arab leader showering his people with the word "democracy'' while yet another, from Bahrain, shows the cartoonist's traditional pen being replaced by a knife.
They are among 100 drawings deemed "inappropriate'' by censors and on display until Sunday at the Samir Kassir foundation in Beirut, according to organisers of the show.
Hassan Hakem from Sudan brought to the exhibit a drawing that shows a courtroom in which the defendants are represented by nails and the judge, getting ready to read the verdict, is a hammer.
"Rather than denounce the censors by issuing press releases, these cartoonists decided to fight back in a less traditional way,'' said Elias Khoury, a veteran Lebanese journalist.
The drawings on display bear the names of such artists as Saad Hajo of Syria, Amr Slim of Egypt, Khaled al-Hashemi of Bahrain and Abdel Rahman Yasser of Iraq.
All of them have triggered the wrath of the censors in their native countries.
"We mulled ways of going around the censors and we decided to try to do it by publishing in another country a drawing censored in its country of origin,'' said Slim.
According to Slim, it is not only the politicians who are doing the censoring.
"It is impossible to publish caricatures that touch on religion in Egypt because of the pressure exerted by the Muslim Brotherhood,'' he said of the country's main Islamist opposition group.
Deriding religion is considered taboo in Arab countries, even in Lebanon which is often viewed as representing an oasis of freedom of the media in a region known for its ultra-conservatism.
Violence broke out in Beirut and Damascus in 2006 in protest at the publication in Denmark of cartoons deemed offensive to Islam's Prophet Mohammed.
Source: The Australian
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