SYRIA: Newly freed opponents of the regime have pledged to continue Campaigning, writes Lara Marlowe in Damascus
White party lanterns light up the garden and facade of Mamoun Homsi's Damascus apartment building. Night after night, a steady stream of smiling visitors come and go. The open door on the second-floor landing leads to a large room where more than 100 men are seated.
"Congratulations on your liberation" and "We thank God you are safe", say the satin banners on the floral arrangements lining the walls.
Being freed from a Syrian prison is good cause for celebration, and days after he was released by President Bashar al-Assad's regime on January 18th, Mamoun Homsi still seems giddy. A member of parliament until his arrest in August 2001, Homsi owns several car dealerships.
His "crime" was going on a hunger strike in his office to protest against corruption and the meddling of Syrian intelligence services.
"I had ideas about improving things, about building the country," he says. "I realise it wasn't possible."
Syria's year-long "Damascus Spring" ended in the late summer of 2001, when 10 politicians and intellectuals were convicted of threatening state security. Four were released earlier; five more, including Homsi, last week. US president Bush, the European Union and Amnesty International had pressed for their freedom.
Only one of the high-profile prisoners, the economist and university professor Dr Arif Dalilah, remains in jail now. Isolated since the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri - for which Syria is the prime suspect - Assad apparently gave in to pressure.
Pride and saving face are of paramount importance here, so Assad portrayed the prisoners' early release as a favour to the Arab Lawyers' Union, which held a congress at the weekend in Damascus. One of the freed prisoners is a member of the union.
But there are limits to the Baathist leader's generosity. Assad's address to the union on Saturday was billed in advance as a landmark speech in which he would announce wide-ranging domestic political reforms.
He accused Israel of assassinating Yasser Arafat, praised the Arab nation and "resistance" against Israel. There was a vague promise of future changes to electoral and political party laws, "but reforms cannot be imposed from outside", the president said.
Nor have Syrian jails been emptied. Anwar al-Bouni, a human rights lawyer, says he represents 650 political prisoners, some of whom have been held for a quarter of a century. They include leftists, Kurds and men accused of being Islamic fundamentalists. Bouni says another 1,000 are held secretly by the intelligence services.
Riad Turk (76) is known as "the Nelson Mandela of Syria". Turk's health was destroyed by more than 20 years in Syrian prisons, and the longtime secretary general of the Syrian Communist Party will undergo surgery in Paris this week.
"The terrorism of the Assad regime over the last three decades has turned the country into a prison of the mute," he said last year.
Until now, the opposition has lacked a strong-willed, charismatic leader. Western embassies and politicised members of the middle class place high hopes in Ryad Saif, the owner of the Adidas franchise in Syria who was imprisoned a month after Homsi, and who was also freed last week.
Both Saif (59) and Homsi (50) seem tempted by the idea of becoming Syria's first democratically elected post-Assad president.
Both businessmen lost their status as independent members of parliament when they were convicted of endangering state security. Both suspect their most serious offence was denouncing the attribution of the cell-phone monopoly to the president's cousin, Rami Maklouf; they paid for it with 4½ years in prison.
Since his release, Saif has spent seven hours each day receiving supporters in a modest flat in a dusty suburb of Damascus. His boasting can be grating. ("I am well known all over Syria for treating my workers well... I felt I was in prison as a sacrifice for the people... I have never lied... Ryad Saif showed more courage than the others... I am a mother to the little Syrian people who have been badly cheated...") But it seems to go down well.
Saif has a politician's talent for captivating an audience and making them laugh.
Before their release, Saif says he and Homsi were brought into a room in the prison, before a television camera. "I faced the camera and I said, 'I have a message: Saddam Hussein's regime and the Syrian regime are twins. The days of these regimes are over. In Iraq, the change was painful. We too want a democratic election with 70 per cent participation, but we don't want to pay the price Iraq paid'."
Such language would have been unthinkable in Syria a few years ago. Bouni, the lawyer, attributes the new outspokenness to the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000: "He put fear into people, with his bloody past."
Internet - introduced by Assad's son - and satellite television make it possible to remain informed and carry on political dialogue. And the attitude of the international community changed after September 11th, 2001. "The mood has turned against dictatorship and totalitarianism," Bouni explains.
There may be less to Syria's political opposition than meets the eye. The Muslim Brothers have been so severely repressed that it is impossible to assess their strength within the country. The "Damascus Declaration" which demanded the end of Syria's "totalitarian, sectarian regime" in October represented perhaps 280 individuals. Opposition supporters admit that the average Syrian is unaware of these ructions and has been "brain-washed" by the regime.
That doesn't stop men like Bouni making strident statements. "The death certificate of the regime is on the table," he says. "If they sign it, it will be better for them and the people. If they don't, someone else will sign it for them."
But why would the regime willingly sign its own death warrant? Bouni admits it's a long shot. "They built their system on human rights violations," he says. "They know if they open the smallest window, it will be the beginning of the end. They know it, and we know it."