This week, more than 800 international delegates were in the Arab nation of Yemen for a major conference on democracy and human rights.
Munir Al-Mawari was not among them.
A U.S. journalist born in Yemen, Al-Mawari was invited, then disinvited. The reason? He wrote an article that appeared on an Israeli Web site and criticized Saddam Hussein.
So much for freedom of expression.
"I thought my country was going through change and now suddenly I found they still are the same, they don't want to change," Al-Mawari says. "In Yemen they're having a conference for democracy and they cannot tolerate a journalist having a different opinion."
Al-Mawari's case is just one example of a depressing reality: With the exception of a few daring souls, Arab journalists are far from being independent voices in a part of the world that badly needs them.
Yemen, a nation of 20-million bordering Saudi Arabia, is best known to Americans as the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and the site of the deadly USS Cole attack in 2000. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Yemen's president was among the few Arab leaders who didn't support the U.S.-led coalition against Hussein.
Growing up in Yemen, Al-Mawari had some exposure to the West because his father was a sailor who spent half the year on America's Great Lakes. As a college student in Jordan, he broadened his horizons by reading English-language newspapers on the Internet.
Al-Mawari wanted to be a journalist, but realized the opportunities would be greater in America. He emigrated and became a citizen on July 4, 1995. In 2000, though, he returned to the Mideast to work on the Web site of Al-Jazeera, the upstart TV network founded by Qatar's progressive emir.
"Al-Jazeera started out as a liberal channel and I thought this is going to be the right place for me where I can express myself. But when I got there, I found out they were either nationalists or Islamic fundamentalists, so they reflect what's going on in the Arabic street."
Although Al-Mawari once admired Hussein, "he was going the wrong way, he was creating wars and doing bad things to his own people, so he was not going to be beneficial to other Arabs."
In October 2002, Al-Mawari wrote an article entitled "Yes to liberating Iraq" in which he said Hussein should resign. He offered the piece to newspapers in several Arab countries, but none would publish it. Finally, he offered it to the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, which put it on its Arabic-language Web site.
The reaction from other Arab journalists was swift and angry. They blasted Al-Mawari for writing for a "Zionist newspaper" and accused him of advocating the normalization of relations with the Israeli "enemy."
In January 2003, Al-Mawari went to work in Washington for the Voice of America's Radio Sawa, the Arabic-language station aimed at young people in the Middle East. He translates news from English and does on-air reports.
Earlier this month, Al-Mawari got a call from the head of the Yemeni Information Center in London inviting him to attend the conference. He gladly accepted, only to get a call later that day rescinding the invitation.
It seemed the Yemeni journalists' union was still fuming over the article on the Israeli Web site, as well as other pieces Al-Mawari had done criticizing Arab dictators and calling for genuine democracy.
Al-Mawari, 37, was flabbergasted: "The Europeans who are in the conference have normal relations with Israel and I didn't have any relations with Israel at all, only one article. And I'm American anyway."
Despite what happened, Al-Mawari remains hopeful that change will come to the Arab world. "I think those dictators will realize they cannot continue to do what they are doing. For example, if I criticized them in the 1980s, they might kill me. Now they are very careful of doing that."
In the meantime, he teaches his children, 6 and 9, to respect other cultures and religions.
"The Arab world has to learn about diversity," he says. "That is a failing in the Arab world, they don't accept diversity."
