by Alexandra Sandels 
The selection of Damascus as the Arab cultural capital 2008 by UNESCO is overshadowed by the imprisonment of dozens of members of the political opposition. While President Bashar Al-Assad states "Damascus is the capital of resistance culture by symbolizing Arab culture - the culture of freedom and defending freedom," an increasing number of journalists, writers, poets and artists enter Syrian prisons.
When Damascus was crowned the Arab cultural capital of the year 2008 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), President al-Assad praised the honour, saying in his speech on the opening of the one-year long celebration on 10 January that the selection is an acknowledgement of the city's 'resistance culture'.
"Damascus is the capital of resistance culture by symbolizing Arab culture - the culture of freedom and defending freedom," said Al-Assad. But as hailed Lebanese singer Fayrouz, an emblem of Arab culture, took the stage in Damascus in late January to give her first performance in Syria in 20 years, accommodation for a number of prominent new guests from Syria's political opposition, including writers, poets, and sculptors, were made in the jails of Damascus.
APN spoke with Ammar Abdulhamid, an exiled Syrian lawyer and Executive Director of the Tharwa Foundation, a web portal for bloggers and activists in the Arab world.
"It's ironic that Damascus is being celebrated as the Arab cultural capital this year. What is there to celebrate when the Syrian culture is censored or put in prison? The writers, the intellectuals, the journalists...they're all gone. Is culture about crackdown and totalitarianism?" he said.
The new wave of alleged clampdowns on Syrian opposition activists caught fire in early December last year when more than a hundred members of the National Council of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change, an umbrella group comprised of a wide array of activists from the Syrian opposition advocating democratic reform in the country, gathered to elect a new executive committee.
More than forty of the signatories were arrested by state security shortly following the meeting on 9 December. Many of arrestees were released a few hours later while ten high-ranking members were kept in custody.
The detainees include some of Syria's leading opposition players including Akram Al-Bunni, Secretary-General of the Damascus Declaration, Fida'a Al-Horani, President of the Executive Bureau of the National Council of Declaration, and members Ahmad To'meh, Jaber, Al-Shufi, Mohammed Darwish, Marwan Al-Aashi, Walid Bunni, Mohammad Yasser. Two journalists, Fayez Sara and Ali Abdallah, are also being held.
On 28 January, the group was charged before a Damascus court with 'publishing false information', 'membership of a secret organization aimed at destabilizing the state' and 'attacking the prestige of the state'.
"The authorities viewed the movement as a real threat. It was developing and spreading quickly," said Abdulhamid.
Riad Seif, President of the General Secretariat of the National Council of the Damascus Declaration, was also arrested a few hours after attending the court hearing under the same charges as the detainees.
Most recently, Dr. Kamel Maowil, an Islamic activist who also attended the December meeting, was detained on 21 February. Mohamad al-Abdallah, son of the arrested journalist Ali Abdallah, told APN that Maowil's arrest has been confirmed but that there are no further details regarding his detainment.
Several of the detainees have told of beatings and assaults while in custody. Al-Abdallah claims that his father suffered hard beatings to the ear and was prevented from seeing a doctor. Seif was arrested despite the fact that he suffers from severe prostate cancer.
According to Al-Abdallah, Al-Horani was hospitalized on 24 February upon request of the prison doctor. He said that the 51-year old physician and grandmother had been prevented from seeing her lawyer and family at the hospital.
"The arrests did not come as a surprise, but it was shocking to find out that they detained a woman. Al-Horani marks one of the first times the Syrian authorities detain a woman from civil society," said Al-Abdallah.
Continuing in this fashion and the risk is that Damascus will be more remembered for its clampdowns on opposition activists rather than the spectrum of cultural and art events the city is putting on throughout the year 2008 in honour of its title as the Arab cultural capital.
The arrests of December 2007 have been referred to by analysts and activists as the third wave of crackdowns since the 'Damascus spring' in 2001, the time of intense socio-political debate following Bashar al-Assad's succession to the Syrian Presidential post.
The period witnessed the emergence of numerous Muntadat, or forums, where various like-minded political groups, such as the Riad Seif Forum and the Jamal al-Atassi National Dialogue Forum, met at private residences and discussed political and social issues.
Eventually all the forums were closed down by the Syrian authorities although the Atassi forum was able to stick around longer than the other 'salons'. It was closed when one of its members read a statement from the banned Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, the concept of 'Damascus spring' seems to have become more like 'Damascus winter' in the minds of many Syrian activists.
"The margin of manoeuvring for activists in Syria has been shrinking over the past couple of years. The recent arrests just show how little space there is," said Nadim Houry, researcher at the Middle East and North Africa Division at Human Rights Watch (HRW) in an interview with APN.
Moreover, Houry argues that the aim of the Damascus Declaration's to bring people of different colours of the Syrian opposition together crossed of the red line in the eyes of the authorities.
"The Syrian government has always sought to divide and conquer with the country's political opposition. They try to keep the groups separated from one another. When the whole opposition gathers, the regime obviously views it as a threat," continued Houry. "Every time this kind of attempt has been made the regime has been harsh."
A similar incident took place in 2006 when efforts were made to link up Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals in the so-called 'Beirut-Damascus Declaration/Damascus-Beirut Declaration', a statement that called for improvement of Syrian-Lebanese relations. The petition attracted several hundred signatories as well as numerous prison sentences for the movement's high-ranking members.
Human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni was sentenced to five years in prison for 'spreading false or exaggerated news that weaken the spirit of the nation' shortly after he signed the declaration and writer Michel Kilo was handed a three-year sentence in May 2007.
Houry emphasized that the arrests are only 'the tip of the iceberg' in a larger and severely restricted civil society environment in Syria.
Syrian NGOs and human rights groups are supposedly consistently denied registration under arbitrary legal clauses. Activists and opposition players are subject to continuous monitoring and harassment from the authorities. Many are banned from travelling. Seventeen members of the Beirut-Damascus Declaration were allegedly fired from their jobs after signing the petition.
"None of Syria's existing NGOs are registered legally which makes them easy targets for the national authorities. If they want to silence the group, they can always accuse them of 'membership of an illegal organization", argued Houry.
While repressive laws are enough to make Syria's civil society chip for air, the state security services seem to play the largest role in the restriction of activist groups. "Even where there are restrictive laws in place, state security does not pay respect to them. They operate outside the law. They are the law," said Houry.
At the time Abdulhamid was still in his home country, he claims he was under the constant radar of the Syrian state security.
"I was interrogated by the various security services under a period of a couple of months. It's like a vicious circle. When the military security had called me up, the political security would contact me shortly thereafter and ask why I was interrogated by the military secret service and so on. The questions and the daily harassment - nobody reports on that," Abdulhamid told APN.
Internet activists have also fallen prey to the Syrian security services in recent time. Several bloggers were detained last year, including 29-year old Karim Arbaji, moderator of the online socio-political forum akhawia.net, who was arrested in early June 2007. Blogger Tariq Biasi was taken into custody shortly thereafter 'because he went online and insulted security services'.
Syrian blogger Ahed Al-Hendi says he was detained in December 2006 for posting comments on an opposition website from a Damascus Internet café, an incident supposedly filmed by the café owner who reported the matter to state security. Al-Hendi spent time in detention and then left the country.
In December 2007, Syrian authorities blocked access to more than a hundred websites, including email provider Hotmail, the blog platform blogspot, and the leading video-sharing site YouTube.
Last week's digest of cultural events in Syria included a performance of the renowned theatre play Carmen in Damascus. Chances are, however, that Carmen's familiar chant 'freedom above all else' rang a bit hollow in the Syrian capital at this point.
"Damascus is supposed to be the Arab cultural capital 2008. I think it's more appropriate to name the jails of Damascus the Arab cultural capital at this point because that's where our cultural players are located," Al-Abdallah pointed out.
Several members of the international community, including the European Union, have condemned the arrests. But Abdulhamid remains concerned about Syria's response to international pressures to release the detainees.
"They will disregard all international appeals. Syria's internal behaviour should be major concern on the international level, not only the country's international behaviour," said Abdulhamid.
Houry expressed concerns about the future of the detainees.
"We are worried that they will stand trial. These trials are usually sham trials where people end up receiving severe sentences," said Houry.
Alexandra Sandels is a Swedish journalist who lives in Beirut.
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