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| Youssef Abdelke |
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s mouthpiece in
Beirut today amazingly decries in the strongest terms the arrest by his
security services of internationally acclaimed Syrian artist Youssef Abdelke.
Ibrahim al-Amin, editor-in-chief of the Lebanese
daily al-Akhbar, which speaks for
Assad and Hezbollah, describes Abdelke’s Thursday arrest at a government
checkpoint in Tartus as “foolhardy, hypocritical, mindless and brutish.”
Amin
writes on the front page of al-Akhbar:
What’s going on in Syria? Whose mind assumes the
army’s advances against the armed gangs justify reemergence of some regime figures’
mindset -- a chief trigger of Syria’s current crisis?
Who is the genius – I mean jackass – who decided to
arrest Abdelke?
How can he convince himself, his family, his
neighbors and the people of Damascus, the coastline, Aleppo, Homs, Deraa,
Idlib, Raqqa, Hasaka, Deir Ezzor, Quneitra and Sweida that one man named
Youssef Abdelke personified danger and had to be arrested?
How can the head of a security branch, or someone in
decision-making circles, take such a decision? Is he afraid of a statement penned
by the artist, activist and man with a sense of ethics – ethics that some
regime people in Syria lack?
Which security branch took this measure as a matter
of unsupervised and unaccountable routine?
Who chose to face up to Youssef and his colleagues,
who are Syrian citizens striving for regime change without advocating or
endorsing its prevailing concept? Their position against all shapes and forms
of foreign meddling in the Syrian crisis preceded the positions of many.
Who chose to execute the opposition qualified to
rehabilitate Syria as a strong and coherent state liable to rise again and
return to life?
Even a name mix-up does not justify Youssef and his
colleagues’ arrest, which can only be described as foolhardy, hypocritical,
mindless and brutish.
All that can be said is “shame” to whoever thought of
taking this criminal step.
Any delay in setting Abdelke free gives a negative
signal that some people in regime circles only want a heart-eating and
heartless opposition.
We know which road leads Syria to peace.
I suspect Abdelke’s arrest
follows his signing of a statement by Syrian intellectuals.
The statement carries
the signatures of 100 intellectuals, university professors, artists,
journalists, actors and cinematographers.
The document calls for a
political solution featuring regime change and a transitional governing body
with full executive powers.
Surprisingly too, al-Akhbar carries the statement in full and the names
of its 100 signatories.
Abdelke, 62, of the banned Communist
Labor Party, has long criticized Assad and his late father, Hafez Assad, who
ruled Syria for 30 years until his death in 2000.
Two party colleagues, Tewfik
Omran and Adnan Abbas, were arrested along with Abdelke and taken to an
undisclosed location. All three had served previous jail terms for political
dissent.
A native of Qamishli in northeastern
Syria on the border with Turkey, Abdelke graduated from Damascus University’s
Faculty of Fine Arts before spending the best part of two years in jail ending
in 1980, when he moved to Paris.
In 1986 he received a
diploma in Etching from L’École
Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and three years later a
PhD in Plastic Arts from Université
Paris 8.
Protest had been part of
Abdelke’s upbringing. His father had been imprisoned many times during the
1960s and 1970s.
Abdelke moved back to
Syria in 2005, after living a quarter of a century in a kind of self-imposed
exile in Paris. He returned above
all because he missed home and because he is, in the end, a Syrian artist.
“There’s
a false image of openness now,” he
told The New York Times in November 2010. “The authorities are still
controlling everything, and you can’t even hire a cleaning woman without the
security services’ permission. Today the world media knows when a dissident is
jailed, which wasn’t the case when I was imprisoned. But this creates an
impression that there’s less of a problem, when actually things are just as bad
or worse. The market contributes to the problem.”
His subjects tend to be still-lives,
benign seeming at first: fish, birds and other animals, ambiguously dead or
alive. “To be dead but to refuse to be dead,” was how he described them.
A
respected engraver and master draftsman, he is a great observer of living
phenomena, and while he is precise and methodical in his approach, there is
also a poetic side to his work.
Abdelke
has worked in different areas of graphic art, and is known for his posters,
logos and book covers in addition to his etchings and collages (see photo albums on his Facebook page here).
He also has authored over 30 children books and has published several manuscripts
on the history of caricature in Syria and the Arab world.
Abdelke
has exhibited throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe and his
artworks can be found in the British Museum, the National Museum of Kuwait, the
National Museum of Damascus and many other public institutions.
Opposition groups say
several other civil rights activists have been arrested this week, in what they
say is a sign that the Damascus government is ramping up pressure on those who
eschew violence and advocate peaceful resistance to Assad.
"Assad's forces
are intentionally targeting the groups that are not associated with the armed
revolt. They want to make them feel the only choice is the rebels or the
regime," Samer Aita, a member of the Syrian Democratic Forum, told Reuters in Beirut.
