Spring in Damascus

Much media attention is focused on last week's detention in Tehran of Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari. Her imprisonment has already become a cause célèbre with its own website. Human Rights Watch points out that her detention is part of a fresh crackdown on activists.

A similar crackdown is underway in Syria. Within the last month, Syrian courts have imprisoned several prominent Syrian human rights activists. One thing that the Iranian and Syrian activists have in common: they seem to be perceived by their regimes, which are strategic allies, as fitting into the Bush administration's regime-change agenda in the Middle East.

In Syria's case, the arrests are a muscular signal that President Assad's regime will brook no dissent as it grapples with U.S. efforts to isolate and pressure Syria, which include Washington's promotion of a U.N. tribunal for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. Assad's government is even expressing some satisfaction that its hard-line stance is winning; Damascus is gloating that it managed to break out of its isolation last week when Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice agreed to meet her Syrian counterpart in Egypt for a discussion about stability in Iraq. It was the first such high-level meeting since the killing of Hariri, which has been widely blamed on Syrian agents. Assad, incidentally, is certain to win a second, seven-year term of office in a presidential referendum on May 27.

Highlights of the Syrian crackdown:

On April 23, Anwar al-Bunni, head of the Damascus Centre for Legal Studies, was handed a five-year sentence for spreading information that could undermine the Syrian morale. In 2005, he signed the "Damascus Declaration", a courageous manifesto offering a blueprint for democracy in Syria.

On May 11, Kamal al-Labwani, a physician who founded the Democratic Liberal Gathering, was sentenced to 12 years in prison including hard labor. He was arrested after returning from a visit to the U.S. in 2005 and charged with "communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria."

On Sunday, a Damascus court handed a three-year sentence to writer Michel Kilo for questioning Syria's involvement in Lebanon. Kilo, a commentator in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat and the Lebanese paper An Nahar, was a co-signer of the Damascus Declaration.

Writing about Kilo's arrest exactly one year ago, Syria expert Joshua Landis called him "one of the most respected members of Syria's internal opposition" and said that Kilo's "arrest marks a new low for the regime in its present crackdown on dissidents and reformers." Landis noted, by the way, that Kilo was always careful to distance his democracy efforts from the Bush administration's plans. Check out Landis's essay on Kilo on his Syriacomment blog.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo