Michel Kilo is such a sensitive topic in Syria right now that his friends turn up the volume on the television set before they talk about him.
"The regime is really annoyed with him this time," Akram al-Bunni says, his low voice partly obscured by a loud news broadcast. Turning up the television to thwart the state's eavesdroppers is a tactic used regularly by dissidents in this country ruled by fear.
The latest trouble for Mr. Kilo stems from an article he wrote in May for the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. In it, the 66-year-old writer made the seemingly innocuous observation that there were two types of obituaries in his hometown of Latakia, a port city that also happens to be the ancestral home of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
On the one hand, he wrote, there were the obituaries of the urban, largely Sunni Muslim population who lived and died as civilians, working in "liberal professions." And then there were the rural folk. They were mainly Allawites, like Mr. Assad, members of a sect of Shia Islam. And their careers were spent largely in the military and the security services. This division, Mr. Kilo wrote, "threw a clear light on the social demarcation lines and the politics of one city."
It was a carefully thrown literary dart, aimed at bursting the balloon of the Syrian Baathist regime's claims to be a secular democracy that represented the entire country. Without writing it in so many words, Mr. Kilo was shouting what few in Damascus dare say out loud: that the Syrian regime was a military dictatorship that concentrated power in the hands of Mr. Assad's fellow Allawites, a sect that makes up just 12 per cent of Syria's population.
On May 14, one day after the article, entitled Syrian obituaries, was printed, Mr. Kilo was jailed for "inciting religious and racial divisions" as well as "defaming the President." When a judge ordered him released two months ago on lack of evidence, the regime responded with new charges of "inciting civil rebellion" and "exposing the country to the threat of aggressive acts."
But the harder the regime has tried to silence him, the more he's grown into a hero for the repressed liberals of the Arab world, and a cause célèbre on pan-Arab satellite television channels. Some have hailed him as the writer who just might become the Vaclav Havel or Alexander Solzhenitsyn of his benighted country, breaking through the cone of silence that the regime relies on to preserve its rule.
"He criticizes the government directly, and not in the zigzag fashion that we usually do," said Hussein al-Odat, another dissident journalist and a close friend of Mr. Kilo's. "They jailed him . . . because he was disturbing the authorities."
Mr. al-Odat was one of the signatories on another audacious document that Mr. Kilo helped draft and circulate shortly before his jailing: the Beirut-Damascus Declaration. Signed by nearly 300 Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals, it called for Syria to fully recognize the independence of its smaller neighbour, to finally demarcate the border between the two countries and to open an embassy in Beirut, all in stark contrast to the Assad regime's policies toward Lebanon.
Mr. Kilo, who entered politics in the 1950s as a Communist, has been jailed several times before -- including a stretch of 2½ years in the 1980s after he gave a speech to Baath Party members in which he called for urgent reforms -- but the charges this time are far more serious and could result in life imprisonment. U.S. President George W. Bush recently called for his release.
"I believe in every word he writes," said his wife, Wadia Awadh, sitting in the book-lined study of their apartment in a Christian neighbourhood of Damascus that twinkled with Christmas decorations.
Three small pictures of Mr. Kilo, his oval face framed by jowls, thick black eyebrows and receding grey hair, surround the work area. Before he was jailed, her husband, who speaks four languages, used the cramped room for his part-time hobby of translating the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and other German philosophers into Arabic.
Ms. Awadh's eyes were wet through much of the interview, which happened a day after her weekly visit to see her husband in prison, but her voice was firm and even. "He doesn't want any power or authority," she said of a man who many now see as the de facto leader of the opposition. "He's just calling for human rights and freedoms and for this country to be better."
That's a dangerous thing to do in Syria. Mr. al-Bunni's brother, Anwar, was attacked by thugs last year the day after he met with a Globe and Mail reporter. Anwar al-Bunni, a prominent human-rights activist in his own right who also signed the Beirut-Damascus Declaration, was jailed the same day as Mr. Kilo.
Dissidents say the latest crackdown is more proof that Mr. Assad is not the reformer many had hoped he would be when he succeeded his father as President in 2000. After a brief period of openness in the first years after Mr. Assad's accession, Syrian politics is now as closed and controlled as ever.
The country remains a one-party military state, with the media under strict government control, making it almost impossible for democrats to get their message out, especially beyond Damascus. Many in the opposition blame Mr. Bush's decision to invade Iraq three years ago -- a move that was accompanied by thinly veiled threats that Syria could be the next one up for "regime change" -- for the crackdown.
Mr. Kilo's colleagues say he's been urging them from behind bars to continue their struggle.
"He's been doing this since long before Solzhenitsyn or [Soviet dissident Andrei]Sakharov. He's been doing this since the 1950s," said Ali Abdullah, another oft-jailed dissident who was drawn into opposition politics after hearing Mr. Kilo give a lecture nine years ago.
"He told me once that if the situation changes and gets better, he will go home to Latakia and retire by the sea and go fishing. But not before the people of this country live better lives and gain the rights they deserve."
The Globe is profiling people poised to rise to international prominence.
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Ultimate dissident
By the time Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn reached Michel Kilo's age of 66, he'd been jailed, banned from publishing in the Soviet Union, exiled, won the Nobel Prize for literature and was living in Vermont writing what The Boston Globe said at the time was "to be the crowning achievement of his literary career -- a massive historic work covering the fall of the czarist regime and the advent of the Bolsheviks."
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Sozhenitsyn went back to live in Russia in 1994. Last November, the 88-year-old released the first three volumes of what is to be a 30-volume Russian publication of all his writings.