On a rare balmy evening in Brussels, nine of the world’s leading political cartoonists are sitting around a large table shooting the breeze. Like children, they include the shy, the noisy, and the thoughtful – though all are clearly excited to be here. A cameraman from the Franco-German television channel Arte is filming the group for a documentary about Ali Dilem, an Algerian cartoonist who spends much his time in and out of court for his attacks on the country’s generals and its leader, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. (“He has a very good lawyer,” someone explains.)
“The thing about us wogs,” says Dilem, leaning intently towards Thembo Kash, a cartoonist from the Congo, “is that we borrow the coloniser’s pen, don’t we? Drawing is not part of our tradition.” Kash, a milder man, agrees. He works for Le Potentiel, a daily in Kinshasa, and says he had to learn caricature, how to distort features and figures. “At first, I just drew big heads on small bodies.” How, then, does he draw the smooth, monolithic-featured President Joseph Kabila, I ask him later? “With shaven head, bags under his eyes and lots of eyelashes.”
The cartoonists are in Brussels to take part in Cartooning for Peace, the fourth meeting of a project launched by Kofi Annan and Le Monde’s famed scribbler Plantu. “Our job is to annoy everyone,” says Plantu, gazing at me with falsely innocent, round blue eyes. The meeting comes little more than a year after cartoonists did more than annoy; in February 2006, a Danish newspaper’s decision to print a page of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed prompted rioting and recrimination around the globe. These “journalists with pens”, as Plantu puts it, suddenly became the subject of the news rather than its arch commentators.
Arch might not be quite the right word. As Danish cartoonist Lars-Ole Nejstgaard describes his fellow artists: “we have the same way of being very childish and very serious at the same time. We’re the guys looking through the window, and our duty is to attack the government in power. That’s the name of the game for all of us.”
And yet, it is clear that the issues these artists tackle, their freedom to express themselves, and the way they do it are as varied as the countries and cultures from which they come. Jeff Danziger, an American, draws intelligent anti-Bush cartoons; Egyptian Bahgory’s work is whimsical and poetic; the comic strips of Belgian Pierre Kroll, who works for the big French-language daily Le Soir, are obtuse political drawings – except to Belgians. “Being a Belgian cartoonist is unique,” says Kroll, “because no one is interested in Belgium.”
Meanwhile, Danziger, a self-proclaimed news addict, keeps tabs on the government in Washington. At the moment, many of his widely syndicated drawings concern the treatment of soldiers. He tries to keep his work one step ahead of the news stories, so that his pictures can be used on the opinion page. The other goal is to find the visual metaphor that sticks.
Unlike the French cartoonists, who steer clear of politicians’ private lives, Danziger thinks they’re fair game. “Their private lives are a rich source of material, certainly if they don’t practise what they preach or if they say something odd or interesting, like when Hillary Clinton said that Clinton was a ‘hard dog to keep on the porch’.”
Israel’s Michel Kichka, meanwhile, argues that, personal or political, “the 21st century is a very visual century, and people who pick up a newspaper turn to the cartoons first.” Kash agrees; in the Congo, cartoonists play an essential role in explaining to a widely uneducated population stories that are written in dense, often incomprehensible language. “We weren’t used to democracy,” he says. “People didn’t understand the articles in the newspapers. The drawings helped to make things clearer. To explain budget cuts, for instance, I drew a minister with his belt buckled so tightly that it trailed on the ground.”
In the Congo, it is editors, not cartoonists, who get in trouble if drawings offend, but Plantu argues that the degree of freedom of political cartoonists is a good indicator of press freedom in a country. But he also says we should never underestimate the ingenuity of cartoonists who want to get their message across, evoking one Moroccan satirist who circumvents the ban on drawing the King of Morocco by depicting him as a talking hand with the royal ring on it.
Although one might assume Cartooning for Peace was born of the Mohammed cartoon debacle, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is its true father. He was shocked that Arab cartoonists used anti-Semitic Nazi imagery to depict Israelis, and that Israelis mostly drew Arabs as suicide bombers. Annan asked Plantu whether he would like to put together a conference and exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in New York to “unlearn intolerance”. The first event took place there last year, followed in March by a similar meeting in Geneva and a reunion in Paris in April. The Brussels get-together was timed to coincide with World Press Freedom Day on May 3.
The Mohammed cartoon tumult occurred shortly after Annan and Plantu began their discussions; 50 people died in related riots in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, casting a harsh spotlight on the power of the satirist’s pen to unleash violence. Not long after that, a cartoon exhibition in Tehran showed drawings making fun of the Holocaust; this was not the art’s finest hour.
The Mohammed cartoons had been commissioned by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 as a test of limits of censorship and political correctness; it was a flip experiment that went horribly wrong. The 12 cartoonists who took part in it “are sick to death of it now”, says Carsten Graabaek, a Danish cartoonist attending the Brussels meeting. They are still under police protection, and it is unsafe for them to travel to Muslim countries. “It was a conflict between freedom of expression and Muslim sensibilities, and we should just forget about it because the two are irreconcilable. We’re sorry we hurt your feelings, but we’re not sorry for doing it, that basically sums it up.”
Plantu says that there’s no point in drawing Mohammed (“Why do something that can cause death and suffering?”), but he did draw a cartoon in which the hand-lettered statement “I won’t draw Mohammed” appears over and over again, the lines forming the shape of the bust of the turbaned prophet. He quips that one reader of Le Monde thought the figure represented Leonardo da Vinci.
Dilem admits that in Algeria, where Islam is the state religion: “It is very hard to attack religion head-on.”
Nejstgaard tells me: “It was strange for us Danes to become the world’s cartoon monsters. The French are much more rude, bloody and sexual. In Denmark, we tend to be very prudent before we say anything about our Muslim neighbours.”
But while he says Jyllands-Posten’s call to satirise the Prophet was “a stupid thing to do”, he thinks it gave the cartooning world a beneficial shake-up. And the affair certainly drew the world’s attention to the craft of these men and a few women who choose to attack the high and the mighty.
It is true that for most, the worst that can happen is to see one of their drawings turned down. Danziger speaks of one publisher who asked him not to draw dead bodies because no one wanted to see them. For others, it can mean putting their own lives in danger, like Dilem, whose drawings of furiously yelling army generals have brought him to court 24 times.
For Kichka, much of what he does is obviously about the Palestinian conflict, but also about how to avoid inflammatory cliches. “I try not to show blood,” he says. “Reality is much more cynical and cruel than our drawings.” It’s often just a question of obvious tact, he says, referring to one of his cartoons which showed Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas sitting stiffly outside the office of a marriage guidance councillor. “One of them had to be a woman and it obviously had to be Olmert,” he said.
Kichka has friendly relations with a few of his Palestinian colleagues, although he’s not always comfortable with the way they depict Israelis. “I’ve talked to them about that,” he says. Some of the caricatures during the spate of suicide bombings and reprisals were so savage, he says, that they were almost unbearable for Israelis to look at. “Sharon with a Nazi armband, or drinking the blood of Arab children, we can’t look at those. I suppose the Palestinians might retort that their own reality was quite as unbearable.”
But he says his argument about the inappropriateness of Nazi imagery is slowly being heard. He recalls a conference he organised in Israel with participating cartoonists from the Arab world. “One drawing depicted the Israeli-built security wall in the shape of a swastika, with a Palestinian child trapped inside. It was a shocking image for Jews, but no one got up and left.” Rather than a stunned silence, Kichka interpreted that as an expression of a desire to open up to dialogue, which is what happened. The artist explained his drawing to the audience.
However diverse the cartoonists’ styles, and the latitude they may or may not have to draw as they want, Plantu advises his colleagues to attack censorship and cliches “mischievously and with intelligence and artistic rigour”. He knows how lucky he is to be working in a democracy, but he argues that they all have to skilfully “slalom” between editors, readers, politicians and religious leaders in order to hit the target slap in the middle. “I tell my Arab friends, for instance, that it’s all right to criticise Israel, but it is not smart to depict Israelis with hooked noses. Nor is it necessary to draw Mohammed in order to attack fundamentalism.”
Norio Yamanoi, a Japanese cartoonist, meanwhile, says he feels free to criticise Buddha. Why? “I’m very little and he’s very big.”
