Cartooning for Peace

No laughing matter

Cartoon: such a simple yet wonderful word, vibrant and magic, evocative and innocent. Think of this word  and it is quite likely that it will immediately bring images of your favourite cartoons, those that made you laugh out loud, think and even cry. Think of a world without cartoonists and...well, I won't even dare.
Cartoonists, armed with their brilliant minds full of ideas and their pens, produce work that for all their simplicity manage to provoke the most varied reactions; sometimes these reactions are quite extreme and we all have in mind cases in which cartoonists land in trouble due to some 'controversial' cartoon.
To support and ensure that cartoonists work remains independent, a fantastic initiative to support and encourage cartoonists was created a few years ago, under the supervision of French cartoonists Plantu (Le Monde) and former UN Secretary General and Nobel Prize winner Kofi Annan.
As you may imagine, Cartooning for Peace (http://www.cartooningforpeace.org/) aims to promote a better understanding between people from different cultures as well as fight and defend cartoonists right to freedom of expression.
This is all more interesting when we think about the massive cultural gap when cartoonists tackle issues related to religion, as the editors of French weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo know too well, whose headquarters were bombed after publishing a special issue featuring cartoons of Mohammed.

I was reminded of this whole issue concerning cartoonists' rights and freedoms while reading the graphic novel An Iranian Metamorphosis by Mana Neyestani; a personal account of the hell he went through after publishing a seemingly innocent cartoon and then becoming the scapegoat for a tyranical  and farcical regime.
Neyestani's story is a timely reminder of the prospects faced by cartoonists all over the world.

A Kafkaesque nightmare