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Syria's Voices of Change

(Washington Post) Anthony Shadid - Last spring, Syrian authorities barred entry to reformer Ayman Abdel Nour's web site, all4syria.org - a forum for unprecedented dialogue among groups, parties, and thinkers in Syria - nearly a year after he had inaugurated it. Nour collected the 1,700 e-mail addresses he had and dispatched his daily update. Two days later, the government blocked e-mails from that address. The next day, he changed the address and transmitted another bulletin. Then that address was shut down. And so it went for nearly a month and a half until the censors finally gave up. Since then, Abdel Nour's e-mail list has grown to 15,200 subscribers. The opposition in Syria remains weak, but emboldened by mounting U.S. pressure, a measure of government tolerance that alternates with capricious crackdowns, and a sense of national crisis as deep as any in a generation.
2005-05-27 00:00:00
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