BAGHDAD, 29 September 2004 — Iraqi cartoonist Muayed Naima had to wait 35 years before he could draw what was on his mind.
But since Saddam Hussein was toppled, he has faced new pressure from militants who have threatened him because his work mocks their violence. He is not put off.
“Oppression is our past. This is about democracy,” Naima said. “I must continue.”
One of his recent cartoons depicts a militant measuring the neck of a bound victim and choosing from an array of numbered knives with which to behead him.
“It shows that killing is the only concern of these people,” Naima said. “When you mock the people who are undertaking these acts, you are making others aware that these acts are illegal and immoral.”
Cartoonists, like other artists, intellectuals and writers, worked within tight constraints under Saddam, who jailed Naima in 1979 for membership of the Iraqi Communist Party.
“There was a policeman in the mind of every Iraqi,” he said.
Since Saddam was ousted, Naima has made up for lost time in airing the brutality of the ousted president’s regime. One of his cartoons depicts Saddam as a butcher chopping meat next to a sign reading: “We specialize in mass graves.”
But militant violence, such as car bombs and the beheading of both foreigners and Iraqis, now dominates Naima’s work, which appears in the newspapers Al-Mada and Al-Nahda.
“Beheadings, killings and mutilation. No nation would accept that, so I had to concentrate my ideas around this subject,” he said.
He has depicted violence since US forces overthrew the government as fanged snakes emerging from the base of a Saddam statue, whose toppling in central Baghdad last year by American troops was beamed live to televisions around the world.
Iraqi cartoonists under Saddam had to fall in line with the government’s views. George W. Bush and his father George Bush, US presidents who both led wars against Saddam, were frequent targets of derision in state-owned newspaper cartoons.
Iraqi cartoonists are now freed from government control, but America is still the object of scorn.
Abdel Khaleq Al-Hubar’s cartoons frequently bring Washington to task for what he sees as its failures in Iraq.
“They’ve lost a lot of credibility,” said Hubar, whose work is published in the Al-Mutamar newspaper of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.
One of his cartoons depicts a clumsy club-wielding US soldier trying to catch an insurgent but inadvertently thumping a bedraggled Iraqi on the head.
US tardiness in rebuilding the country has also drawn his criticism. Hubar portrays the Statue of Liberty as a weary Iraqi holding aloft a fading oil torch, symbolizing patchy electricity power supply.
“I draw for the poorer classes, not for the educated because they know what’s going on,” said Hubar, who under Saddam used to sketch in secret and send his work abroad for publication.
He hopes his work will help build political awareness.
“Without political understanding, there is no democracy,” he said. “We have accumulated political naivety because 35 years of dictatorship is enough to forget everything,” he said.
“Satire gives a type of education to the citizen and raises their ability to understand political changes. It’s essential.”
But Iraq’s newspapers must build the trust of people who have little faith in the media because of years of state control.
“When they see a cartoon in line with their thinking and which raises their concerns, hopefully that will build trust in the media,” Hubar said.