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Thursday, March 24, 2016

Creative dissent in Syria

The Syrian regime has gone to great lengths to silence the satirical commentary of Ali Ferzat. But the celebrated cartoonist and Index award winner has no intention of letting the censors keep him down. Malu Halasa reports


Three months before the start of the Syrian revolution in March last year, Ali Ferzat broke with his own satirical convention: he stopped using symbolism in his cartoons to criticise the regime and began to target identifiable individuals, including the president himself. He describes the shift as pushing through “the barrier of fear”. The first cartoon in Ferzat’s new series showed President Bashar al Assad agitated at seeing the traditional day of mass demonstrations against the regime, Friday, marked on a wall calendar. Another had him hitching a lift from Gaddafi making his own getaway in a car. The third featured the “chair of power”, one of Ali Ferzat’s iconic symbols, with the springs popping out of the cushion and Bashar hanging onto its arm.
Drawing the president, Ferzat admits, was a personal and political breakthrough — if not foolhardy. “It is quite suicidal to draw someone who is considered a godlike figure for the regime and the Ba’ath party, but still I did it and people respected that courage and started carrying banners with caricatures in the protest to show how they feel about things.”
Ferzat must have anticipated that his actions might lead to violent repercussions. Last August, pro-regime forces viciously assaulted him and broke both his hands. During the attack, one of the assailants yelled at him, “Bashar’s shoe is better than you.” Article 376 of the Syrian penal code makes it an offence to insult or defame the president, and carries a six-month to three-year prison sentence.
The most lauded cartoonist of the Arab spring, Ferzat has won countless international prizes — including this year’s Index Freedom of Expression Award for the Arts. For more than 40 years, he has been delivering his own scathing messages to dictatorship. Published daily in al Thawra (the Revolution) newspaper in Damascus for a decade, he was a thorn in the side of Hafez al Assad. In the early noughties, the launch of his satirical newspaper al Doumari (the Lamplighter) was considered a hopeful sign in the nascent presidency of Hafez’s heir. Last December, when Bashar al Assad was asked about the attack on Ali Ferzat by the American news commentator Barbara Walters, he responded, “Many people criticise me. Did they kill all of them? Who killed who?’”  Such comments made little sense and attest to Ferzat’s power, whether convalescing in a hospital bed or through his drawings.
There are two cartoons by Ferzat embedded in my own visual consciousness of Syria during years of visiting and writing about the country. The first is a drawing of a man whose head has been sliced and popped open at the airport. Instead of searching the luggage on the rack, a uniformed authority figure inspects the contents of the man’s brain. The other is of a dismembered prisoner hanging in a cell, body parts everywhere, while the jailer sits on the floor, sharp implements to hand, crying over a television soap opera. Both of them were a comment on the secret life that routinely takes place in Syria, the self-censorship that is sometimes needed to survive and the ongoing activities inside prisons that are rarely officially acknowledged in the state media.
Speaking the truth
In a recent exhibition of Ali Ferzat’s work at the MICA gallery in London, there were numerous examples of his coded messages: the armchair of salat (representing ruling power), the shortened ladder to suggest the gulf between the political elite and the nobodies (sometimes in a hole) or the ever busy authority figure waving a roll of toilet paper like a flag. The messages are inescapably clear but their target is not always what one might expect. In one colourful drawing, a man is trying to pluck fruit from a tree, but the three ladders on which he is standing have been laid horizontally, not vertically. Pausing beneath this picture, Ferzat points out: “Yes, I always speak truth to power. Sometimes it’s not only the president to be blamed but the people too.” The gallery, usually closed at the weekend, was filled with Syrians and their families within minutes of its unscheduled opening. Everyone, from grown men to children of all ages, photographed the cartoons on the walls with their mobile phones.
Ferzat’s unique visual vocabulary, developed in extreme circumstances, has had an unexpected reach:
To survive and get around censorship, my caricatures had to be speechless and rely instead on symbols. That gave them an international aspect I did not intend in the first place. So I managed to get the voice of people inside Syria to the outside, through channels of common human interest.
During his stay in London in the spring, Ferzat received good news. There is an interest in reviving al Doumari, with plans to publish it in exile in Dubai and, ultimately, hopefully back home as well. One gets the impression that no matter where Ferzat is — he currently resides in Kuwait because his family thinks it is too dangerous for him to be in Damascus — living away from the revolution has been frustrating. He spends most nights watching the Arabic news channels and drawing until the early hours. His right hand, which was fractured in the attack last summer, remains a little stiff, although that is not evident in the first two cartoons he drew when he was able to move his fingers. One shows an armoured Trojan warhorse with marauding tanks for hooves. The second is, again, a tank poised on its back wheels, ready to crush a lone green shoot sprouting from the ground.
False springs
The Syrian people are a major influence on his work. “Drawing is first of all a means and not a purpose in itself,” he says.
The artist is always the one who produces an idea, but if that person is not living within his community then how can he reflect what his community is going through? Art is about being with your own people and having a vision of what they need. You can’t sit in your room isolated behind your window and draw about life — it doesn’t work like that.
The revolution was sparked in March 2011 when young graffiti artists in Deraa, between the ages of nine and 15, were arrested and tortured for writing government slogans on the walls. The sale of spray paint is now banned in Syria unless ID papers are shown.
There have been many false springs in the country’s turbulent political history. A decade ago, and just a few months after Bashar al Assad assumed the presidency, Syrian artists and intellectuals were hopeful that change was possible in their country, a sentiment that began in Ferzat’s case when Bashar al Assad, a “tall dude with a large entourage”, walked into his exhibition filled with censored cartoons. (Ferzat always shows banned cartoons in his exhibitions.) When the new president asked Ferzat how he might be able to gauge popular opinion, the cartoonist urged him to simply talk to the people. Eventually Bashar telephoned him and said he was having a Pepsi with ordinary folk in the street. This was during the so-called Damascus spring of the early noughties, when the regime was courting artists and intellectuals. Imbued by optimism in 2001, Ferzat started his satirical newspaper al Doumari, but as the mood of the political elite reverted to tried and trusted methods, so did the fortunes of his weekly. By the time it closed in 2003, 105 issues later, he had survived two assassination attempts that were never investigated. Thirty-two court cases had been filed against the newspaper and advertisers had stopped advertising.
An incredible heritage: satire in the Middle East
Historically, cartoonists have been astute in their circumvention of censorship. As Fatma Müge Göçek has shown, under the Ottoman press laws of the early 1900s, they sent erasable drawings to the censors and, after approval, substituted other images in their place. Newspapers at that time also appeared with black boxes where a cartoon had been censored. As the gap widened between official pronouncements and reality – or as Václav Havel once said, ‘People know they are living a lie’ – caricatures became an important means of expression in the Middle East. Now cyberspace provides a comparatively safe haven for pictures and ideas that cannot be expressed in print.
Editorial cartooning, like journalism, is considered a western invention, but the convention of satire in the Middle East is as old as the stories of Alf Laila wa Laila (A Thousand and One Nights). Ferzat’s peers include the Egyptian Baghat Othman, who parodied Sadat, Palestinian Naji al Ali, creator of the Palestinian barefoot boy Hanzala (with his back always to the reader in rejection of the world around him) and Algerian Chawki Amari, now in exile in Paris after serving a three-year sentence in his country for drawing the country’s flags in a cartoon that was seen as ‘defacing’ a national symbol. The Syrians also bring something new to the mix, which springs from a sense of humour coloured by the experience of dictatorship, coupled with sexual innuendo. This blend is nicely demonstrated by a joke from the 1980s that is still pertinent, as recently told to me by a political activist.
A guy used to talk about the president. The mukhabarat, secret police, picked him up and started beating and torturing him. They told him, ‘Stop making jokes about the president. Stop talking about the president. You can tackle whatever issues you want, but in the end you always have to say: this has nothing to do with the president. The president is not aware of this.’ So the minute the guy is released, he sees his family waiting by the door and says, ‘Have you heard, the wife of the president is pregnant and the president has nothing to do with it. He’s not even aware of it.’
Even in his comic strips for juveniles, Ferzat has challenged traditional sensibilities in Syria, a country known for channelling propaganda through state-sponsored children’s publications. Ferzat was 26 years old when he created ‘The Travels of Ibn Battuta” for the popular Usama magazine, published in 1977. In the strip, the famous medieval Arab traveller Ibn Battuta is depicted with a moustache and beard, wearing a turban in the shape of the globe. Ferzat demystifies Ibn Battuta by drawing Muhammad Ali, Omar Sharif and the pop singer Abdel Halim Hafiz, with a turban globe on their heads; as avatars of Ibn Battuta, they respectively box, hug a leading lady and sing. Later in the strip, as the historic traveller pulls his donkey into the present day, his size shrinks, suggesting he is overwhelmed by modern life.
A letter sent to the editor of Usama complained about this portrayal of Ibn Battuta. Ferzat did not use one of the traditional Arab figures of ridicule such as the poet Abu Nuwas or the folk character Juha as his fumbling protagonist, but instead a notable historical personage, which the letter writer found highly insulting. This was at a time when the magazine was already starting to change, and was publishing less controversial material, as Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas show in their study of Arabic comic strips.
Self censorship, survival and living without boundaries
Originally from a Sunni Muslim family in Homs, Ferzat describes freedom of the press as “a responsibility”. He stresses:
It’s not as if I should do whatever I feel like doing, regardless of the consequences. It is a matter of moral commitment at the end of the day and varies between countries, depending on the culture and civil liberties. You have to find the right balance. Some newspapers have no obligation, not even morally, and they refrain from nothing and then call it ‘freedom’. Meanwhile other newspapers censor human interest stories. I see both as bad — whether too much suppression in the name of commitment, or too much unethical commitment in the name of freedom. They are both the same.
During prolonged periods of dictatorship, there have been unexpected chinks in the wall of silence, which Lisa Weeden outlines in her tour de force Ambiguities of Domination. One way ordinary Syrians thwarted the cult of Hafez al Assad that pervaded their daily lives was in their choice of newspapers. Throughout the 1970s, al Thawra published a daily editorial cartoon by Ferzat. When he was dropped from the newspaper, al Thawra experienced a 35 per cent drop in sales and was forced to ask the cartoonist to return. Ferzat’s stories about his days there are particularly amusing and they reveal just how much leeway can exist in what at first glance appears to be a monolithic system. In some instances, the offending cartoon would be published in the paper. Then the abusive phone calls from the minister of information would begin.
Ferzat continues:
They came with this new procedure. First the editor-in-chief had to look at the caricature. If he approved it, he had to send it to the general manager. If he approved it, or if he found it controversial and difficult to understand, he had to send it to the minister of information. Take into consideration that the minister of information was a bit of an ass, he would say ‘Yes’ because he didn’t understand it and the next day the people would get the meaning because it only took commonsense. Suddenly the angry phone calls would start all over again.
According to Italian visual critic Donatella Della Ratta, Bashar al Assad’s Syria is ruled by what she calls “a whispering campaign” waged by competing elites, the secret police, the official media and finally the president and his inner circle. All of the different factions are involved in censorship: it takes many pillars of society to control the flow of information and ideas in a totalitarian state.
In such a society, what is the difference between self-censorship and survival for someone like Ferzat? “What I can tell you is that I have no boundaries,” he says.
I don’t have a censor or a policeman in my head before I draw. However, it is not requested of fedayeen — freedom fighters — to be suicidal. As an artist, I’m not going to go and find a landmine and sit on top of it. I invented the symbols that actually manipulate the censor and survive the dangers of punishment. I put simple codes and symbols in my drawings, and anyone who has the capacity to notice things would understand them. That is what I do to secure myself and not be suicidal.
He concludes: “At the end of the day, my drawings and caricatures are part of the daily culture of the street. I want to represent the consciousness of the street, of the people, and I do, and that gives my work value.”
As Ferzat and the graffiti artists of Deraa, who sparked a revolution over a year ago, have shown: Sharpie pens and spray paint can be the most effective tools against a brutal regime.

Ali Ferzat: In His Own Words

Art and satire play an important role in the current situation in Syria. Ali Ferzat, cartoonist, has become the voice of the Syrian people and the revolution. His drawings and caricatures transcend barriers of language and nationality and encourage new insights into the abuse of power, corruption of state control and aspirations for freedom. At once amusing and disturbing, Ferzat’s distinctive imagery displays a visual vocabulary long sharpened from decades of avoiding the censor.

Already in 2002 he was recipient of the Prince Claus Award in recognition of the way he fuses artistic creativity with courageous commitment to moral principles. Until 23 November 2012, the Prince Claus Fund Gallery in Amsterdam presents the exhibition Culture in Defiance: Continuing Traditions of Satire, Art and the Struggle for Freedom in Syria unblocked school. Cartoons of Ali Ferzat, cyber puppet plays of Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator, cell-phone cinema, art, songs of a revolutionary hit parade, graffiti and writing show the non-violent creative dissent of the Syrian revolution.

This statement of Ali Ferzat is published in the exhibition's accompanying publication, which analyses the creative expressions of dissent taking place in Syria today as well as essays and interviews with prominent Syrian intellectuals.

I think I was five when I started drawing cartoons and making up satirical stories about what was taking place in my own house. I didn't choose to be a caricaturist. I was born like this. When I was twelve years old, I had my first cartoon published in Al Ayyam ('The Days'). The owner had no idea I was only in the sixth grade!

My cartoons touch on people's lives, and people trust them. They became like a lantern that people look to. My caricatures were devoid of speech and used symbols, and because of that I could survive censorship in my country and publish some of them freely. This approach also gave my work an international appeal since it relied on images anyone could understand – without the barrier of language intervening. So while I was trying to avoid censorship at home, I unintentionally gave my cartoons wings that made them fly off to the rest of the world. In this way I managed to get the voice of the people inside Syria to the international community, basically through shared channels of human interest.

My early cartoons showed actions and behaviour based around a general theme, like hunger. Little by little my cartoons became very popular and people bought the newspapers for the cartoons. From the early to late 1970s, I published a daily editorial cartoon in the official newspaper Al Thawra ('Revolution'). Sometimes the managing editor failed to understand the symbolism in the cartoon, and after it was published, he would get a shouting phone call from the government. So a new procedure was put in place. First, the editor in chief had to look at the cartoon. If he approved it, he had to send it to the general manager of the newspaper. Whether or not he approved it, or found it too controversial or difficult to understand, he had to send it to the minister of information (in charge of media). At that time, the minister was a bit of an ass, and he would say 'yes' because he didn't understand it. The next day people saw the cartoon and immediately comprehended its meaning because it was just a matter of common sense unblocked games online. Then the angry phone calls would start all over again.
One time, the general manager sat for a long time contemplating one of my cartoons, unable to detect exactly why he should censor it. But he felt he needed to, simply because he didn't trust it, so he looked at me and said, "Just promise, swear to God, there is nothing bad in this." In 1980, I had a meeting with a former prime minister who said, "Can we give you a salary so that you will stay and do nothing. Your cartoons undo all of our work on the first page."

For me, drawing is a means to an end and not a purpose by itself. The artist is always the one who produces an idea, but if that artist is not living within his own community and going through what the people there are going through, then how could he understand what's going on and reflect it? To be a good artist or painter, you have to express the feelings and experiences of the people. Art is all about living with your own people, and having a vision about what they need as well. You can't sit in your own room isolated behind your window and draw about life. It doesn't work like that.

The concept of red lines depends on the culture and the level of civil liberties achieved in a country. Europe and America are definitely different from the Middle East. Freedom of the press should imply a responsibility rather than something undertaken chaotically. It's not like I do whatever I feel like doing at whatever moment I feel like doing it, regardless of the consequences. It is a matter of moral commitment. It's relative; you always have to find the right balance. Some newspapers refrain from nothing and call it 'freedom', while other newspapers even censor human interest stories. I see both as bad. Too much suppression in the name of commitment is not good, but by the same token too much unethical commitment in the name of freedom is not wise either. They are both the same.

At the beginning of Bashar al-Assad's presidency, I used to communicate directly with him beyond the control of the mukhabarat, the secret police, and I was happy about that. I tried to get him to meet other artists. I remember when he first walked into my exhibition at a cultural centre – a tall dude with a large entourage. He asked me how he could access what the people were thinking and I told him to just talk to them. When he asked me what my plans were for the future, I said I was going to start a satirical newspaper and wanted to tackle every aspect of the government. He said I might as well go after the parliament as well.

When the Ba'ath Party initially came to power in 1963, it closed all private and independent newspapers and publications. My newspaper, Al Doumari ('Lampl ighter'), was the first independent newspaper in nearly twenty years. One of our themes was corruption. A scandal had erupted with IV serums because they were out of date and yet they were still being used in a hospital in Damascus. So I drew serum bags filled with fish. The newspaper was allowed to publish for two years and three months exactly. Then it was banned. During this period, there were two attempts to arrest me and 32 cases were filed against the newspaper in the courts. Pro-Ba'ath students demonstrated in front of the offices of Al Doumari. People were prevented from advertising in it. By then, I was never able to reach Bashar, and when I finally did get through, he told me to handle my own problems. Now we're working on publishing a new Al Doumari outside of Syria that will complement the coverage of the revolution from within.

Breaking the barrier of fear

Although my cartoons always used symbols to focus on behavioural patterns and rarely portrayed identifiable persons, three months before the revolution began I wanted to help break the barrier of fear in the hearts of the people. I considered this to be my duty, as well. So I put on my website, "We have to break the barrier of fear that is 50 years old," and I drew first Prime Minister Adel Safar; then (the wealthy businessman and cousin of Bashar) Rami Makhlouf; recognisable figures from the security apparatus and finally the president. It was a decision that took a lot of guts, but I felt it was time. No one could take their corruption anymore. Admittedly, it was nearly suicidal to draw someone who is considered a god-like figure for the regime and the Ba'ath party.

As a cartoonist, it is not my position to discuss politics, but we have been explaining our cause and bleeding for over a year. We will be bleeding and explaining our cause for the next ten years. I haven't seen the British, Dutch or French demonstrating against what's happening in Syria in the way they demonstrated against the Vietnam War. It is a massacre and I am upset by the world's silence.

When I was living in Damascus, the US ambassador and other officials visited me and asked the following question: "We support the revolution, but do you know who the people in the streets are?" I told them, I don't know them one by one but I do know their conscience. Every Friday is dedicated to a theme. The first Friday was 'No to sectarianism'. Then there was Azadi Friday, which means 'freedom' in Kurdish; Great (Good) Friday to acknowledge the Christians; 'Free Women of Syria' Friday and 'The Syrian Revolution Is for Everyone' Friday. Now we are seeing certain sides breaking these pledges of freedom, and there are conflicting sides within the anti-government opposition. Despite all that is going on, I have a request: Don't confuse the politics with the diplomacy.

After I was assaulted and my hands were broken, someone asked me: could I still find the courage to draw? I told them I had been ashamed by the suffering of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib (whose body was badly mutilated, returned to his family and prompted nationwide protests in Syria). I am humbled by the culture and heart of people who cannot draw or write but who are sacrificing their lives for freedom. It's not about being well read, it's about how you behave. I don't want to sound extremist, but Syria is the birthplace of the world's culture – your home before your home. It is where the alphabet was created.

Has the revolution inspired me to draw more? Your enthusiasm to produce varies, according to how you're feeling psychologically – what's going on around you – and how well you are physically. I just started drawing after healing. Now my hands are better and I've begun to come back.

Ali Ferzat: Revolution redefines art in Syria

Ali Ferzat's hands sweep and glide and conjure shapes as he sits in a small art gallery behind Sloane Square in London unblocked school where his sly deconstructions of authoritarianism are on show.

These are the hands that pricked and provoked the mukhabarat - the security police - in Syria into trying to smash them into silence.

It was last August when he was attacked by masked men in what he describes as one of the most secure parts of Damascus.

"I was beaten here, here and here," he gestures. "My arms were black from the beating."

He was dumped by the side of the road. The attack made headlines across the world.

Getting personal

Wiry and angular like Ferzat himself, his hands are now almost 90% back to normal, he says.

The beating came as his style changed from general ridicule of the political system in Syria to specific caricatures of President Bashar al-Assad and his circle.

Ferzat says the switch had begun several months before the protest movement erupted last year.
"I started to get personal," he explains. "Before, I made sure not to draw any official that could be recognised, even though my cartoons were based on real people. And even if someone in power felt they were being targeted, they wouldn't say anything, because that would be like confirming it really was them."

The change is evident from looking at one of his best-known cartoons where a brutish - but generic - apparatchik scrawls a smile on the bandaged face of a beaten prisoner.

Compare that to one of the drawings he did just before his beating.

It shows President Assad himself sweatily clutching a suitcase as he tries to hitch a ride with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who's furiously driving a getaway car.

Stinging wasp

Another shows the Syrian president again - this time flexing in uniform in front of a mirror which reflects back a dominant, muscular image that contradicts the far punier reality.

Image caption Ferzat has adopted a new more personal style
That cartoon reveals unblocked games online Ferzat's own dealings with President Assad, where he soon found the rhetoric of change fell far short of the reality.

He recalls that when Mr Assad first came to power, the artistic community in Syria tried to win him over to its side.

Ferzat himself was allowed to start his own satirical magazine - the first independent paper to be licensed for decades.

But he soon ran into trouble with the security services.

He broached his problems with Mr Assad at one of the photo opportunities designed to show that that the new leader was more open than his austere, authoritarian father.

"He told me that when you provoke a wasp into stinging you, you have to pull the sting out by yourself. No-one else can do it for you."

That - he says - was when he realised that Mr Assad was incapable of backing up his talk of reform with action.

The magazine was soon closed down, despite or perhaps because of its popularity.

But the cartoonist continued with his mockery of state repression in the state newspaper, Tishreen.

Huge cultural change

Two Syrian activists sitting in the London gallery with him describe how they grew up studying his cartoons in the otherwise stultifying party-line paper, decoding their messages.

Image caption Ferzat was unable to draw after being beaten by police
One of them says he was actually arrested for printing and distributing one of the cartoonist's pictures. He leans over to shake the cartoonist's hand as he jokes how it was thanks to him that he spent four months in prison.

Since his beating, Ferzat has remained outside Syria. For some time, he was unable to draw. He says he began writing his satirical sketches rather than drawing them.

The past year, he says, has witnessed a huge cultural as well as political change in his country.
"The uprising has redefined art in Syria," he says. "It's exposed the gulf between real artists and mercenaries in the pay of the state. Most - many of them my colleagues - have failed that test. It's changed what Syrians see as art.

"There's a new revolutionary art in what people have been writing and drawing and singing in the protests - true to the pulse of the street. It's unleashed a new creativity among ordinary people - allowing them to speak and express themselves in ways they never could before."

Silenced


Image caption Another cartoonist paid tribute to Ali Ferzat's defiant response to the beating
Some have paid a far heavier price than he has.

Ibrahim Qashoush is an example. He produced an anti-Assad song that became one of the great rallying cries of the protest movement. He was killed - and his vocal cords removed.

But Ferzat says that one of the great differences between the way the uprising is perceived inside Syria rather than outside is the question of fear.

Syrians in the diaspora are still fearful, he says, but those inside are free of that once crippling burden.

"What I want to tell people who say they are afraid of what may now happen in Syria is that there is no such thing as a sanitised revolution," he says.

"Everything that has been done to the country - however negative - will have to come to the surface in order for us to deal with what has been done to us over the past 50 years.

"Things will have to take their course, but that is not a reason to be afraid."

Syria unrest: Famed cartoonist Ali Ferzat 'beaten'

One of the best-known cartoonists in the Arab world has been beaten up by Syrian security forces, activists say.

Ali Ferzat, whose work is critical of the government, was forced from his car in Damascus and badly beaten.

The attack comes after 11 civilians and eight soldiers were reportedly killed in different incidents across Syria.

The UN says more than 2,200 people have been killed as security forces crack down on anti-government protests that began in mid-March.

The demonstrators are demanding the removal of President Bashar al-Assad, whose family has been in power for 40 years.

In one of his latest cartoons, Ali Ferzat shows President Assad sweatily clutching a suitcase while he tries to hitch a lift with the Libyan leader, Col Muammar Gaddafi, who is furiously driving a getaway car.

The Syrian cartoonist has produced a stream of images like this in the past few months that have directly attacked the Syrian leader, says the BBC's Arab affairs analyst Sebastian Usher.

Mirror-image cartoon

In one, President Assad is shown patiently white-washing the shadow of a huge security thug on a wall, while the real man stands untouched. The caption reads: "Lifting the emergency law".
Another shows Mr Assad flexing in uniform in front of a mirror that reflects back a dominant, muscular image, overshadowing his puny figure.

Syrian activists say Mr Ferzat was forced out of his car before dawn in Damascus, beaten and dumped at the side of a road.

Pictures of Mr Ferzat in hospital showed his face bruised and heavy bandages on both hands.

Mr Ferzat's beating shows that he has hit home and that the authorities have no more tolerance for dissent, says our Arab affairs analyst.

Activist groups say Syria's military have renewed their focus on anti-government protesters in the east of the country, with tanks entering the cities of Shuhail and Deir al-Zour.

"Initial reports by residents describe tens of tanks firing randomly as they stormed the town [Shuhail] at dawn," Reuters quoted a local activist as saying.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 11 civilians were killed across Syria on Wednesday, most of them in Homs province.

State news agency Sana said eight soldiers were killed in two attacks on the military, also in Homs province.

UN visit

Most foreign journalists have been barred from Syria, making it difficult to verify reports from local activists and officials.

A UN humanitarian delegation is winding up a five-day assessment mission - the first of its kind in Syria - that has visited many of the country's trouble spots.

In some places, the team was mobbed by demonstrators, says the BBC's Jim Muir, reporting from Beirut in neighbouring Lebanon.

Activists said security forces opened fire on crowds in the city of Homs on Monday and in Talbisa on Wednesday after the UN team left, killing several people in Homs.

The UN team's visit was not reported at all by Syrian state TV, our correspondent says.

As well as civilians, human rights groups say 500 soldiers have been killed and thousands arrested since March. The government has blamed the unrest on "armed criminal gangs".

Western nations have called on the UN to impose sanctions against Mr Assad and his ruling circle.

Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat turns spotlight on UK’s failure to take in more refugees

The Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat has spent four decades on the front line of satire, skewering the evils of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime, but now the Middle East’s most famous living satirist has turned his pen on the British Government’s failure to help more than a handful of Syria’s most vulnerable refugees.

In this cartoon, published exclusively in The Independent, Ferzat, 63, draws stark attention to the plight of 3.7 million Syrian refugees as he accuses Britain of lacking “the warmth of morals and humanity” by allowing just 90 refugees from the conflict region to come to Britain.

In a brazen act of defiance in 2011, his award-winning caricatures depicted President Assad as a broken dictator, sitting on a broken armchair over a broken country. The regime’s response was rapid and brutal; he is now living in exile in Kuwait after masked gunmen, who he describes as “Assad’s thugs”, attempted to silence his sharp satire by pulling him out of his car, shattering his hands and leaving his fingers broken.

Ferzat has not been silenced, and to mark the anniversary this week of the British decision to grant a limited number of Syrian refugees asylum, he has called on the UK to “carry out its duties” and live up to its promise of helping those affected by the “biggest tragedy in the world”.

assad.ap.jpg
Ali Ferzat works in his atelier in Damascus. He now lives and works in exile in Kuwait (AP)
 
Four years of conflict in Syria has created nearly four million refugees, and last January – following a campaign supported by The Independent – the Government committed to resettling 500 of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees. However, that pledge was reduced to a commitment to resettle “several hundred” Syrians over three years. And to the dismay of aid agencies, just 90 Syrians have arrived under the Vulnerable Persons Relocation (VPR) scheme.

Ferzat, who was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Peace in 2012 and named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine, said: “I do not think that the West in general [has] carried out its duties towards Syrian refugees… It has used the policies of the three monkeys: I do not see, I do not hear and I do not talk.”
 Ferzat is now working with Amnesty International UK and the London-based aid agency, Mosaic Syria, to bring attention to plight the 3.7 million Syrian refugees, some of whom are in their fourth winter in tented camps.

Tomorrow is one year on from when Home Secretary Theresa May bowed to pressure from Labour and the Lib Dems to establish the VPR scheme and this anniversary will see Amnesty International call for rich countries to resettle 10 per cent of Syria’s refugees by the end of 2016.

In November, the charity joined a call by 30 relief agencies for Britain to resettle up 10,000 refugees in response to a call from the UN’s Refugee Agency UNHCR.  Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK’s director, said: “Given the scale of the crisis on Syria’s borders, the UK’s response to the refugee crisis has been pitiful… History will judge the UK’s shameful lack of action on taking in refugees as unforgivable – we are talking about people for whom the chance of resettlement may be, literally, a matter of life or death.”

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Ferzat was beaten by a gang of what he calls ‘Assad’s thugs’, in 2011 (Getty)
 
Ferzat’s call for action comes as faith leaders in Britain have called on David Cameron to act. In a letter published on The Independent website, Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders, have called on the PM urgently to increase the number of Syrians being resettled in the UK.

A Home Office spokesperson said the UK has been at the “forefront of the international response” to the crisis and had pledged £700m in humanitarian aid. The spokesperson added: “We have granted asylum or other forms of leave to over 3,400 Syrian nationals and dependants. In addition, through our Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme, we are working closely with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to identify those most at risk and bring them to the UK.”

Arif’s story: ‘Life is better’

When 12-year-old Arif came to Britain this summer he was in urgent need of medical care. With his parents and three siblings he’d fled Syria for Lebanon in 2011 as civil war tore his country apart.
His parents, Nabil and Yara, said it was the “feeling of impotency” that forced them to flee from the “risk of arrest” and bombs that “fell from all sides”.

It was little better in Lebanon, where the family were forced to live in a room with no running water. An accident in the hut in October 2013 left Arif with terrible burns to his legs and, with little money, advanced medical care was hard to come by.

It was only last spring, when the family were selected to be resettled in Britain under the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme, that Arif finally got the treatment he needed. Now, his parents say, he’s “loving being back in school” and, for one family at least, “everything has changed for the better”.
 
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