Sawt Falasteen - Famed cartoonist Chappatte calls medium a 'barometer' of freedom

"If you want to know the state of democracy in any nation in the world, just look at how satirists and cartoonists are treated," he told AFP at the opening of an exhibition in Geneva celebrating political cartooning worldwide.

"Autocrats detest ridicule and satire. So press cartoonists are on the front line," said Chappatte, who heads the Freedom Cartoonists Foundation.

At the exhibition, sponsored by Nobel prize-winning US economist Joseph Stiglitz, the foundation awarded its "courage in cartooning" prize to two artists who Chappatte said are "risking their lives" to do their work: Palestinian Safaa Odah and Ugandan Jimmy "Spire" Ssentongo.

Odah, a displaced woman living in the Khan Yunis refugee camp, makes drawings depicting the daily difficulties of life for Palestinians under Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza.

She draws with whatever materials she can find -- her family's plastic tent, for example -- and posts her work on social media.

Ssentongo, an academic and self-taught cartoonist, publishes his vitriolic drawings on X, and is regularly targeted with threats, in a country ruled for more than 40 years by President Yoweri Museveni.

"I'm afraid, humanly, knowing that anytime you can be picked up, but it's all about managing that fear," Ssentongo, 47, told AFP at the exhibition, "Cartoons for Freedom", presented at the Quai Wilson gallery on the shores of Lake Geneva.

"The fact that I'm scared is not enough to stop me... How can you keep quiet? I continue not because I'm not afraid... but just because I have a stronger push from within. Despite the fear, you have to do something, you have to continue speaking."

J.AbuHassan--SF-PST