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December 10, 2004
 The tragic business of cartooning in Iran

I hate to present myself as a victim, but I can't find any other description for my life as an Iranian editorial cartoonist.

Being imprisoned for a cartoon, and receiving death threats and appearing on different death lists can't be named healthy or peaceful at all.

Iranian cartooning is about 100 years old, and the ideas are mostly based on Iranian political issues, of course the ones that would be approved by the government or the judiciary as well.

Seven years ago, when president Khatami started his first term, we were experiencing a great change: criticizing the power without being scared, through our cartoons. This freedom wasn't an absolute one, therefore we were not permitted to draw the clerics, and they were our limits.

We couldn't draw anything related to the grand Ayatollah Khamanei who is the leader, and never talk about the military. The good part was that every newly published paper wanted to have it's own cartoons, and there weren't as many cartoonists who could draw editorial cartoons for them, so for instance, I had to draw three cartoons for three different papers a day.

Eventually, when the hard-liners felt their reduction of power in the political competition, they started to gain it again through the courts, by arresting journalists and political activists, that was a threat to the rest of Khatami's supporters.

When in February of 2000, I was arrested and sent to "Evin", the Middle East's most notorious prison, for a cartoon that had attacked the anti-Freedom-of-the-Press" hard-liners, I could predict the death of the freedom we experienced just for a short period of time.

Years passed, and jobs were lost, because many papers were banned. The newly published papers needed cartoons, but were scared of publishing political ones. The readers wanted more, and the publishers were offering less, which was the only way for them to survive. Before, we had to have our cartoons censored, but in this time, we were censoring ourselves, and that was very painful.

Last year when I had to leave Iran for Canada, there were more than 20 editorial cartoonists working for the press.

Today, a dozen of them have lost their jobs, this time not for the banning, but for the sake of fear. The publishers do not dare having hot shots working for them, and to avoid being shut down, they try not to publish political cartoons.
The only free cartoonist in Iran, is the one working for the hard-liner daily, "Keyhan," who has the freedom to attack reformists and liberals.

A few of us have had our websites to exhibit our cartoons without having them published in the papers, but recently when the judiciary started arresting bloggers and forcing them to announce their involvement in a conspiracy against the Islamic Republic and it's values, the independent cartoonists had to keep quiet again, and that has been their constant strategy.

Nowadays, self censorship has become the rule, and the Iranian cartoonists are respecting it, in other words, that's their only choice to remain in the business.

They have the rights to remain silent, of course without hiring an attorney (the attorney might go to prison as well!).

I could be an example for the newcomers in Iran, the one who was successful, and now in exile, working in a dry cleaners and losing his family and almost everything. It's not a good choice.

Nik Kowsar, e-mail Nik