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Source: http://www.bday.co.za/bday/content/direct/1,3523,1164037-6098-0,00.html
Syria Jails Three Dissidents for Incitement
(Business Day - South Africa) - Three Syrian dissidents who expressed their views in private meetings were convicted of incitement and sentenced to prison terms of between two and five years. The three dissidents - a lawyer, a doctor, and a professor of economics - were the last of 10 government opponents arrested in September 2001 during a crackdown on "salons," political discussion groups held in private homes. The salons sprang up after President Bashar Assad took office in 2000 and began to ease the totalitarian rule of his late father, Hafez Assad. The best-known of the salon dissidents are the MPs Riyadh Seif and Mamoun Homsi, who were stripped of their parliamentary immunity and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.