Bangla2000 | International News - Clinton worried about violence if summit fails

Residents surround the car of Bashar Assad in a Damascus street, Monday, July 10, 2000, after he had cast his vote. Bashar Assad is the only candidate in a nationwide presidential referendum following the death of his father. The poster of Bashar reads " Yes for a new hope". (AP PHOTO)

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - For most of his 40-year career, comedian Douraid Laham got to do what no other Syrian could: criticize his government and get away with it.

Dissent was not tolerated during the 30-year rule of President Hafez Assad, who died June 10. Hundreds, maybe thousands, were jailed for publicly opposing the regime.

But Laham, who is something of an icon to most Arabs, never saw the inside of a Syrian jail. In fact, Assad himself joined the audience on several occasions to watch plays that tackled thorny issues like Syria's defeat by Israel in 1967, corruption and government inefficiency.

Officials "could have told me and others to shut up," Laham said. "To them, it is better to praise the regime than to talk about its shortcomings.

"The mere fact that I stand on stage, speak daringly about mistakes - and I find encouragement to do so - entitles me to believe that there is a margin of freedom. That margin can widen day after day."

Part of Laham's secret may have been knowing how far to go, and knowing where to use his sharp wit.

"My plays were not critical of the regime itself, but rather of the mistakes of civil servants and officials, no matter how senior they are," he said in an interview.

His most daring criticism came in the theaters, where he played to the elite, not the masses. Over the years he has had seven series on Syria's state-run television, but the TV material was never as

During a 1979 performance of "Cheers, My Country," a three-act play that stingingly criticized Syrian economic policies and the inadequacy of services, Assad sat in the audience with several Cabinet members, Laham recalled with obvious pride.

"Every time there was criticism of something or other, he turned to one minister and said, 'You're the one meant by that,' Laham said. "He never tolerated mistakes."

The comic may have been spared a taste of the harsher aspects of Assad's regime because of his popularity at home and in the rest of the Arab world. Allowing him to criticize - so long as he never

touched the president himself or the ideological basis of the regime - may have also been useful to Assad to argue that Syria allows freedom.

Laham rejects the idea that the regime might have used him as a safe vent for the frustrations of his fellow Syrians. But he can sound like a government apologist.

"We, without a doubt, dream, like any human being dreams, of complete freedom and complete democracy," he declared before employing a line used by most Arab governments to justify the absence of genuine freedoms and political pluralism.

Syrians stand in line outside an election center in Rmaileh, near the southern port city of Sidon on Monday, July 10, 2000, to vote in the referendum to confirm Bashar Assad as Syria's new president succeeding his late father, Hafez Assad, who died on June 10. There are 35,000 Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon and around one million Syrian laborers work here.(AP PHOTO)

"These things need steps to become stable. Any nation you look at and think it is democratic did not become so overnight, but over generations."

Syria has for decades been a fixture on the lists of countries accused of human rights abuses. Laham's first play that criticized government policies - "The Theater of Thorns" - was produced in 1969.

Thirty-one years later, the country's media are under strict state control, parliament is a rubber-stamp body and the ruling Baath party has a monopoly on power. Assad consistently was given more than 99 percent of the votes cast in the five presidential referendums in which he was the sole candidate from 1971 to 1999.

Assad legacy is strong even in death. The party and government machine he created are following his last wishes by anointing his son Bashar as president even though the former eye doctor is a political novice with little experience in the military, Syria's main power broker.

"I am reassured because in fact Dr. Bashar is a good student of Hafez Assad," Laham said. Laham, a 66-year-old grandfather whose father was Syrian and mother Lebanese, has taken his art around the globe. He has performed for Arab immigrants in Chicago and Los Angeles and in Australia and Abidjan and has had shows in most Arab capitals.

After a series of performances in Los Angeles in 1993, the California state Senate issued a certificate of merit that dubbed Laham as "The Bob Hope of the Middle East." He already is often billed as the Arab world's funniest man.

In a short and self-effacing autobiography, he wrote: "I never had the looks or the money to dare to court women, so I chased after art instead."