On a chilly early March evening in  Benghazi, staff at the recently formed newspaper Libya worked furiously under the dim light of two dangling bulbs. Notebooks, hard drives, empty water bottles and tangled cords covered the news desk as writers’ faces glowed blue from the light of their laptop screens, their eyes tired from long days of hard grind.

Operating out of a former state security building on the Mediterranean waterfront, the newsroom walls were covered in colored caricatures criticizing Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi. One poster showed him as half of a two-headed dragon and another with Michael Jackson’s nose. Like other writers, journalists and activists that have mobilized in the midst of Libya’s uprising, the volunteer team has embraced newfound media freedoms after nearly 42 years of repression. 

For the first time in more than four decades, radio broadcasts relate accounts of events across the country uncensored by government authorities. While rebels battle Qadhafi’s forces on the front lines, press warriors back in Benghazi’s media bastion armed themselves with the power of the printed word, waging their resistance with computers and notebooks. As Executive went to press, more than half a dozen new publications had been founded in rebel-liberated eastern Libya since the revolution began on February 17.

“This paper allows us to get out the depression we’ve been storing within ourselves for years,” said Libya editor Mohammad Sader Mousa. The head of the media department at Garyounes University in Benghazi came up with the idea for the paper just before midnight on February 22, in the early days of the anti-Qadhafi uprising. He worked furiously throughout the night making calls to colleagues whom he thought would be willing to help.

“I was here in the media center and I told people about the significance [and] the role of media in revolutions,” he said, sporting a button of the red, black and green pre-Qadaffi Libyan flag on his navy blue coat. “The only way we could communicate locally was by making a newspaper and then try to have it reach the world outside through the Internet.”

That night, electrical engineers moved in to the soon-to-be news bureau to set up a satellite Internet connection. All other networks across the country had been cut. While writers hastily gathered to flesh out reports, a publishing house volunteered to print the paper for free. By 10 am that morning the first edition was printed.

“When it was finished we couldn’t believe it,” he said. “We looked at it and thought, ‘How come?’” Neither Mousa nor anyone else on his team has spent a penny on the publication, which has a print run of 1,500 papers a day and a team that quickly grew to 62 members.

“Freedom is the sweetest thing,” said 47-year-old volunteer Amal bin Ghazi as she tapped away on her silver laptop – one of nine personal computers spread across the table, all used by writers and editors nearing deadlines. “Because I’m working with this group there is a feeling of liberty within me.”

“I always saw the truth but I could never talk about it. There was no freedom of speech, no real journalism”

A print-run repressed

If it weren’t for the uprising, another Libya volunteer, 25-year-old Ousbah Awami, would have been pounding out words in the office of a newspaper with much different stripes; for years Awami worked at Qurayna, a paper created in 2007 by a company owned by Saif al-Islam al-Qadhafi, one of Colonel Qadhafi’s sons. While Awami did occasionally write articles for the paper that were critical of the regime, his editor consistently prevented them from being published.

“I always saw the truth but I could never talk about it,” he said. “There was no freedom of speech, no real journalism.”

But the tide changed for Awami and his colleagues when Libya followed Tunisia and Egypt in revolt. He and a handful of others spent nights sneaking into the Qurayna office to send pictures and videos of the uprising — not yet widely covered by international press — to news agencies outside of the country, as at the time, the newspaper had one of the country’s only working Internet connections. In doing so they were not only at risk of being attacked by Qadhafi’s supporters, said Awami, but also from rebels if they were mistaken for supporting the dictator.

Operations at the newspaper took a turn after a bloody Benghazi battle left scores of anti-Qadhafi protesters dead. Members of the staff decided to write and run a story documenting the events and announced they had sided with the rebels. “After that we stopped calling Qadhafi a leader and called him a criminal, a murderer,” said Awami. But this didn’t come without risk. “One by one, every staff member received a phone call from someone saying, ‘We can kill you. We can kill your family,’” he explained.

When the newspaper’s editor fled the office shortly thereafter, Awami claims he took 100,000 Libyan dinars ($83,194) with him, swindling the 120-person staff of two months’ salary, although this could not be independently verified by Executive. Awami added that their Internet connection was subsequently inoperable. For two weeks the employees worked without pay, but have since been receiving funding from Libya’s Al Khaleej oil company, allowing them to continue to print 10,000 copies per week under a new editorial committee and the new name, Bourniq, after an ancient city northeast of Benghazi.

Journalists under fire

Despite the new tastes of freedom in parts of Libya, concerns loom large for local and international journalists. As the momentum of the uprising shifted in the favor of pro-government forces through mid-March, conditions deteriorated for reporters. Al-Jazeera cameraman Ali Hassan al-Jaber was killed and another wounded on March 12 on the outskirts of Benghazi when gunmen opened fire on their car; on March 19, Mohammed Nabbous, founder of the recently-launched independent Libya AlHurra TV (and one of the founders of the Benghazi media center) who provided video coverage of the rebellion, was shot in the head by a sniper while covering a government attack on Benghazi.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented more than 50 anti-press attacks that include assaults, detentions and threats. Some 13 journalists are either missing or in government custody, according to the CPJ. The missing include four from Al Jazeera and two from Agence France-Presse. In addition, six Libyan journalists are unaccounted for, the group said. The tense situation prompted at least three Bourniq reporters to resign from the paper for fear of losing their lives. “I don’t sleep at home anymore; I don’t use my own car; everyday I’m concerned for my safety,” said Awami.

“We will fight back with media. We are going to destroy him”

Warrior poets

To enter the rebels’ political headquarters, inside an old courthouse in North Benghazi, one must pass a short interrogation by armed guards and walk through a metal detector at a side entrance. Tucked into a small corner room of the courthouse last month was 21-year-old Ash Mohamed Zagogo, writing poems about the liberation of Libya. Judges’ robes hung from a coat rack to Zagogo’s right and law books lay dusty in a bookcase behind him. The former break room is now the operating base of Libya Al-Hurriyah, Arabic for “Free Libya.”

“I write these words not from my mind, but from my heart,” Zagogo said, after reciting a poem he wrote for the paper, which publishes both articles and art. Like other start-up newspapers here, donations cover the operation costs of running Libya Hurriyah, printed every other day and distributed in cities all the way to the Egyptian border. Most of the people on the staff are female lawyers and students. “They volunteer because they feel the injustice that people are living,” said Warida Bernawi, the 35-year-old director of Libya Hurriyah.

While she bustles about the room, a group of young women hunch over a single computer across from where Zagogo and two others quietly write. Although night had long fallen over the Mediterranean town, it would still be hours before the staff went home for a few hours rest.

“Do you know Qadhafi called us rats?” Zagogo asks, his face stiffening as he quickly sat up. “He crossed the line, so we will fight back with media. We are going to destroy him.”

In setting targets for foreign investment in Syria during a speech last year, the country’s then-Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, Abdullah Dardari, admitted that there was “a long way to go.”

“A competitive economy is a mindset, a new way of seeing things,” he said. “This is the real challenge. But the political determination is unquestionable. There is no going back.”

That, however, was before regional unrest in recent months spread to the home front and spurred a reshaping of Syria’s policy direction. The government’s almost decade-long embrace of an economy-first model unraveled as events unfolded in Tunisia and Egypt; to keep the wolf of revolt from Syria’s door, a slew of small appeasement packages and limited social reforms were implemented — sometimes in complete reversal of long-term economic strategies. This strategy initially appeared to have kept investor confidence high and popular unrest at bay but in the later half of March, previously unthinkable public demonstrations of dissent began in cities across Syria.

As Executive went to print a clampdown by state security forces had killed at least 61 in the southern city of Daraa and dozens more elsewhere, while hundreds had been injured and arrested throughout the country. Needless to say, Syria’s social and economic future seems somewhat uncertain. At least one major foreign investment was halted on March 23, according to Reuters, the same day stocks on the Damascus exchange dropped an average of 3 percent across the board.

In need of help

Syria’s economy is in bad shape. Ten years of reforms aimed at moving the country toward a free market system — such as opening up the banking sector, lures for private investment, a nascent stock market and cutting subsidy programs — had begun to nudge the economy into recovery after 50 years of centralized, national socialist policies.

But with declining oil reserves, inefficient and decrepit industries, weak and arbitrary trade and competition regulation, high inflation and an unemployment crisis looming, the economy still desperately needs more fixing. Reforms were recognized as being potentially painful for ordinary Syrians in the short term — especially in regards to an increased cost of living — but unavoidable if the country was to develop economic security, improve its standard of living and raise foreign investment to the targeted $55 billion.

The question now is, with unrest erupting across the country, how severely will short-term efforts to assuage the public derail the long-term plans to revamp the economy?

In the barrel

With Syria’s oil reserves diminishing rapidly, the cost of extraction rising and demand skyrocketing, the country has been looking to its neighbors to secure lucrative oil and gas pipeline deals and shore up domestic energy supplies. The country’s crude production peaked at 583,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 1996, but by last year had dropped to 390,000 and the country will deplete existing reserves within 18 years, according to its reserves-to-production ratio, as calculated by British Petroleum (BP).

Foreign investment is necessary to enhance old, inefficient oil refineries, such as those in Banias and Homs, which together have a capacity to refine 240,000 bpd — well below domestic demand of nearly 350,000, according to a 2007 study by Syrian economist Ziad Arbash. Syria worked hard to position itself as a regional transit hub for gas into Europe through proposals to extend the Arab Gas Pipeline — linking Egypt, through Jordan, to Syria — to connect to a pipeline between Syria and Turkey; an idea that was plugged during a recent presidential tour of Turkey and Eastern Europe.

Plans for a second auction of offshore exploration rights (the first failed to attract any investors) were also announced by Oil Minister Sufian Alao in February, covering a total of more than 5,000 square kilometers across the Mediterranean. Despite relatively lower yields and unfavorable production-sharing contracts, until now Syria’s political stability, as compared to other more oil-rich countries like Iraq, had worked in the country’s favor. But the ambitious plans to develop an extensive gas transport infrastructure now look uncertain. With instability across the region and the breakout of revolt at home, it is likely that the endeavors will be put on pause as nervous investors wait to see what unfolds.

These are long-term plans with the goal of increased price stability, easier access and less waste to meet demand. More immediately, Syria is looking to cut the costs of inefficient energy handling without unsustainably increasing the financial burden on households, and that means one thing: subsidies.

How severely will short-term efforts to assuage the public derail the long-term plans to revamp the economy?

Subsidies setting back the clock?

 On January 16 — one day after the Tunisians forced president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country — the Syrian government announced plans to reinstate fuel subsidies for public workers by 72 percent, up to the equivalent of $33 a month. Shortly after came the announcement of a $250-million package for 420,000 families, to combat poverty. Currently, approximately 14 percent of the population is below the poverty line. Last month, the state also reduced the cost of many imported food items.

These moves appear to be a complete reversal of a policy in recent years of repealing subsidies. Beginning in 2007, with subsidies costing an estimated $2 billion annually and artificially lowering retail prices, the government embarked on a three-phase plan to eradicate them. By doing so, it was reasoned, the government would not only allow fuel and electricity prices to meet international market levels, but make more funds available for public investment.

The plan had begun to yield results. The initial 2007 hike in gasoline prices succeeded in reducing fuel consumption by more than 50 percent per household, but electricity consumption shot up by an average 10 percent each year. Nonetheless, direct energy subsidies still cost Syria around 5 percent of gross domestic product.

But households were feeling the pinch. With energy and food previously subsidized by around 50 percent, under the new system food and energy were adding up to an average of 10 percent of monthly household income. Inflation, stable but high at around 3 percent between 2010 and 2011, after spiking at 15.7 percent in 2008, has still not been matched by an increase in wages, with the average family income sitting at 13,000 Syrian Pounds ($260) a month.

Following the 2011 National Household Survey, which showed overall higher living costs and a growing gap between rich and poor, sources told Executive that plans were already underway to use the results to implement a secondary study to assess how removal of subsidies affects popular approval of state policy.

But even if temporary and relatively modest reintroduction of subsidies may go some way to quell unrest, reversals might be hard to undo. “The size of the subsidy is not the important issue here, especially in the short-term,” explained Said Hirsh, Middle East economist at Capital Economics in the United Kingdom. “My concerns will be on its impact on medium-term structural reforms and economic policies. We don’t understand yet whether this will divert money away from more important investments, for instance, or if any are to be shelved/delayed due to this.”

Already, implementation of the value added tax has been delayed indefinitely, but the real test, according to Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, will come on April 1 when subsidies for heating fuel were supposed to be lifted.

“If the government cancels this, we can safely say that it is due to the mood of revolt in the Arab world,” said Landis.

Hirsh expects the short-term political gains to have long-term costs. “There is no doubt that these measures are targeted at short-term political survival,” he said. “They are dangerous in the sense that it is very difficult to reverse these policies, especially if there are no changes to living standards and an end to economic hardship. Syria is amongst the poorest countries in the region and there is still a big gap to fill before it is able to improve economic conditions.”

Looking to finance

In a secondary attempt to reduce the budget deficit and diversify its sources of finance, Syria last month announced its second ever offering of $63.9 million in treasury bonds.

Following the first bond offering in December, February’s offer was oversubscribed in a sign of optimism in the country’s political stability.

But with the sale only open to 14 local banks, and with yields well below the rate of inflation, analysts warned that such optimism is premature. For bonds to become a substantial source of funding, Hirsh said, the government will need to issue more and at longer maturities.

And, while traditionally opposed to dependence on foreign players, Syria may also need to consider extending the offer to foreign banks, a measure the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has long urged, if results are to have any real impact on treasury finance. Current yields will likely be unacceptably low to international investors, and recent events may make the prospect even less appealing.

“Although Syria’s government appears stable, this position may change very quickly given events elsewhere and Syria’s political and economic conditions,” said Hirsh. “Any international investor is likely to take this into account more than local banks.”

Selling debt locally may cover costs in the short term but, according to Landis, “it means little because the alternative for Syrian banks is to keep their money earning no interest… It is an expression of the lack of alternatives,” he said. “The below market interest rates make clear that Syria does not yet have a free market, which will have to be encouraged to up foreign investment.”

“Although Syria’s government appears stable, this may change very quickly given Syria’s condition”

The youth

If there is one thing that Arab governments should have learned by recent events, it is that securing youth employment and satisfaction is a priority. There is little doubt the protests are primarily linked to a failure of the country to secure jobs and growth. In many ways more so than elsewhere, the demands are particularly urgent. Amid falling oil revenues, the population has soared to 22 million since the mid-1980s. Birth rates are skyrocketing at a 2.7 percent annual increase. Syria already has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world and with 50 percent of the population under 30 and over 30 percent under 14, it is only likely to get worse, presenting a potentially disastrous youth unemployment bubble unless jobs can be created.

Aside from curbing population growth rates, the real challenge to this is encouraging the private sector and increasing youth job skills.

While the Syrian government has engaged in initiatives to promote entrepreneurship and business development, the 2010 “Silatech Index Report: Voices of Young Arabs” found that despite the growing need to shift a greater share of the country’s workforce from public sector to private sector jobs, 54 percent of young Syrians say they would still prefer to work for the government at a time when public sector jobs are increasingly scarce.

As a result, increasing private investment and job opportunities, has topped the government’s to-do list for the last two ‘Five Year Plans,’ but private investors still grumble about significant obstacles to entering the market. Despite the introduction of foreign banks, relaxed bans on trade and the opening of the Damascus Stock Exchange, private investment has remained low in the face of poor competitiveness ratings, inefficient industry, unsupportive legal frameworks and the perception of dogged corruption, not to mention the renewal of United States sanctions.

As of last year, foreign direct investment was expected to reach just $2.5 billion. Infrastructure investments, especially funds targeting agriculture, are going ahead, but without a specific timeline, such as the recently announced $2.1 billion irrigation project to pump 1.25 billion cubic meters of water from the Tigris to irrigate some 200,000 hectares (2,000 square kilometers) of land in the northeastern governorate of Hassakeh, the home of the country’s struggling drought-afflicted oil, gas, wheat and cotton industries.

Half way up and half way down

While investment plans plod along, the fundamental problems with the economy-first model are emerging in sharp relief. Stuck half way between a free-market economy and national socialism, Syria risks losing on both political and economic fronts by sitting on the fence.

“I think the economic reforms that Syria has started are important,” said Hirsh. “Nonetheless, it is still very slow and it is very difficult to see how the political class will handle the economic changes without any major political reforms or changes… At least, Syrians have to be prepared for major, and in some cases painful, re-adjustments to their way of life.”

As in Egypt, said Hirsch, this may provoke social and civil unrest. “Not everyone will be a winner through this process.”

If it weren’t for people like Malath Aumran, the video showing Syrians mourning over the bloody corpses of demonstrators killed by state security forces in Sanamein would never have reached the outside world. Nor would detailed documentation of demonstrations, arrests, injuries and deaths end up on the breakfast table in morning newspapers around the globe. If the Internet is the information highway, Aumran and his ilk are the on-ramps.

Anti-regime demonstrators are up against a litany of barriers, within and without: a brutal and pervasive secret police force, a stunted political culture and the international community’s near-universal dread of an unstable Syria were it freed from the iron grip of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. And for the most part the press, too, have abandoned those on Syria’s streets; most notably Al Jazeera, the ‘voice of the people’ during the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan revolutions, has — when it gives Syria coverage at all — increasingly settled for interviews with pro-government officials and police, and reports disproportionately from pro-Assad rallies.

In their stead, citizen journalists like Aumran are putting their lives in danger to present a different reality of Syria to the world.

The birth of activism

Aumran is a fitting representation of what can happen when a social and political consciousness converges with the power of the Internet. Today, he is a cyber activist working under a pseudonym, but not long ago he was, in his own words, “like any other Syrian.”

“I thought that we had the best country, the best regime, and all of that,” he said. It was in 2006 that his worldview changed, with the honor killing of a friend who had been caught having sexual relations with a man her family disapproved of. The killer, her brother, was sentenced to just six months in prison, in accordance with Syria’s permissive laws surrounding honor crimes. It would be a moment that wed the future activist’s sense of social justice with alternative information sources, and which would lead him on a beeline toward the “Arab Spring.”

“My friend told me about this thing, the Internet,” he said. “I searched for information about honor killing and it was all there.” He became involved with Syrian women’s rights groups, while at the same time developing his awareness of the other issues that plagued his country. “I started to be aware that we had a bigger problem — not just women’s rights: human rights and political rights.”

Some friends accompanied Aumran on his ideological awakening and others were picked up along the way. Eventually, they had developed a small activist community. At this time he was still working under his real name, and in order to protect his identity Executive cannot reveal his specific activities.  “The problem is that our people are not political at all, especially our youth,” he explained. “Four decades of regime have taken them out of public life.”  So Aumran and his friends set out on a campaign to “poison their milk for them.” One of the primary, and most successful, initiatives was called “Proxy to your inbox.” In 2009, 10 people, including Aumran, sent an email out to their contacts with a link to a program called UltraSurf that facilitated users’ connections to a “proxy server,” an intermediary online gateway that allows users to bypass censorship restrictions. Thanks to the viral nature of the Internet, it quickly spread, and with it the Syrian Facebook community grew. Aumran isn’t sure of the exact number but, he said, the fact that the email has ended up back in his inbox nearly 100 times is an indication of its mileage.

“Before recently, our role was to organize protests, but the role now is to cover them [and] develop media attention”

The Arab Spring

Though cyber activism in Syria was making some headway by 2010, it wasn’t until the Tunisian uprising that the youth population awoke. “After Tunisia, hundreds of young people began to get Facebook accounts under nicknames and call for change,” Aumran said.

But the Syrian “day of rage” planned on Facebook for February 5, by whom Aumran doesn’t know, failed to gain popular support and was a step back for those who hoped Syria would follow Tunisia and Egypt’s example. The streets were even quieter than on a normal day, apart from the secret police milling about.

Again, on March 15, another Facebook-led “day of rage” passed without results. Aumran and other activists watched as the expectations of most were seemingly confirmed: President Bashar al-Assad’s state apparatus was untouchable. But the next day something changed. Small groups, usually linked together by the Internet but under no central organization, began to stage small but much more successful acts of civil disobedience than the prior attempts of pulling off an instant mass protest.

In Damascus, 27 families of political prisoners marched to the Ministry of Interior to demand the release of their relatives. Within minutes they were set upon by secret police. Some were beaten. The organizer of the protest, a human rights activist who asked to remain anonymous, told Executive that she saw “mothers beaten and pulled on the ground.” According to her, there were 45 confirmed arrests and 32 will face trial on criminal charges of “weakening national feelings,” which carries a one to three-year sentence in prison. One of those arrested was Tayeb Tezeni, a prominent Syrian philosopher and intellectual, though he was quickly released. “His arrest was a clear message that nobody is safe in this country,” the organizer said.

Within days, protests were popping up in Daraa, Homs, Banias, Damascus and Deir al-Zor. For devoted activists like Aumran, long at the forefront of anti-regime activity but suddenly observing a movement without any centralized control, the playbook had to be revisited. “Before recently, our role was to organize protests,” Aumran said. “But the role now is to cover them, to develop media attention and to articulate demands.”

As events unfold in Syria, the lack of a traditional journalistic presence in the country has made activists and amateur videographers crucial; despite having no coverage on the ground, satellite television news outlets like BBC and Al Jazeera were able to show, for example, an attack by security forces on the Omari Mosque in Daraa on the night of March 22. The video was posted on a social media site and quickly did the rounds on the Internet. The original videographer is not known.

The contribution of blogs, social media and YouTube in the movements that have swept the Arab world has in many ways been overblown. To dub Hosni Mubarak’s ouster the “Facebook Revolution” discredits the blood and sweat of those who camped for weeks in Tahrir Square far from the glow of a computer screen. But the Internet does provide activists the unique ability to synthesize and disseminate information in the midst of an otherwise disparate campaign.

For example, last year at this time, for the Kurdish holiday of Nowruz, there were major confrontations in Syria’s northeast between demonstrators and security forces. This year, expecting a repeat on March 20, Aumran enlisted the help of a Kurdish friend living abroad to mobilize people he knew on the ground to develop a system by which information could reach the outside world. This involved two people shooting video and taking pictures on the ground and two others transporting the memory cards to safe houses where they would be uploaded to the Internet.

Activists in the crowd had Turkish SIM cards — common in this area of Syria — to avoid monitoring by Syrian state security, as colleagues outside the country periodically called in for updates, which they then typed into emails and tweets, spreading them across the Internet and to their contacts with the press. In the end, however, demonstrators this year did not face the same resistance from the authorities and the holiday passed without major incident.

On March 22, as Aumran spoke with Executive, he tweeted information as it came to him from all over Syria. He found out the daughter of Sultan al-Attrash, a legendary figure in Syria’s struggle for independence, had been arrested. “This will backfire for them,” he said emphatically. From Daraa however, where on March 19 soldiers fired on protesters from helicopters and killed at least six, there was only silence; the two activists sent to the city from Damascus hadn’t been heard from since. In a way, the group is unorganized; it is an unofficial network of friends (and friends of friends) each doing their own part. “Everyone works individually, but we cooperate as a team,” one activist, who focuses on documenting human rights abuses and informing the press and non-governmental organizations, said. “Usually all of us do everything, but some are more able to do certain things than others so we try to refer that kind of work to him or her… for example when we need something related to Internet expertise we ask [Aumran].”

As the demonstrations have gained traction, the online community has continued to expand and to splinter. In one case, on the Facebook page of “The Syrian Revolution March 15,” a wall post (a publicly viewable message) suggested using alternative protest tactics, such as, for example, demonstrating at a soccer game.

One day later, March 18, in the town of Deir al-Zor a small group of fans-turned-flash-mob stormed the field at halftime calling for their rights. The Syrian National Television broadcast of the game suddenly went black, due to “technical difficulties.” It is unclear who organized them but the original inspiration for the idea is likely that seemingly innocuous wall post. According to the human rights activist, “Every day there is a new group calling for a new movement on Facebook.”

For activists calling for regime change, there is a long and dangerous road ahead. As Executive went to press, 61 had been confirmed killed in Daraa, dozens in Latakia and Sanamein and, since March 1, hundreds injured and arrested throughout the country. Even if it were possible it is yet unknown whether the majority of Syrians would support the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Nonetheless, the “Sturdy House That Assad Built,” as a Foreign Affairs article dubbed it in March, is clearly showing cracks. In large part due to Aumran and his fellow artisans of information, its flaws are the world’s to see.