Syrian activist and documenter of rights violations Razan Zeitouneh was kidnapped on 9 December 2013, alongside her husband, Wa’el Hamade, and colleagues Samira Al Khalil and Nazem Al Hamadi. ‘The Douma Four’ have been missing ever since.<\/p>\n
Years before the 2011 Syrian revolution, the name of Razan Zeitouneh was well-known within activist circles in Syria.<\/p>\n
In 2005, she founded the bilingual (Arabic and English) website\u00a0Syrian Human Rights Information Link<\/a>\u00a0(SHRIL), which became one of the earliest sources documenting human rights abuses by Syrian regime forces when the revolution started in 2011.<\/p>\n Her activism had already resulted in a travel ban in 2002, just two years after Bashar Assad took over from his father, Hafez.<\/p>\n Despite threats and ongoing risks, Zeitouneh did not want to leave Syria. In a 2005 interview, she stated \u201cI will never leave this country \u2013 never\u201d. She also said that she was psychologically prepared to be arrested at any moment, adding \u201cI\u2019m not afraid\u201d.<\/p>\n Shortly after the initial 2011 protests, Zeitouneh co-founded the\u00a0Local Coordination Committees<\/a>\u00a0(LCCs) to help organise demonstrations and document the protests as well as the brutal crackdown inflicted upon protesters by regime forces.<\/p>\n Then, in June of that year, she co-founded the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC)\u00a0to help document<\/a>\u00a0\u201call kinds of human rights violations in Syria\u201d.<\/p>\n The VDC was originally an offshoot of the\u00a0Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression<\/a>\u00a0(SCM), (an organisation that later joined the IFEX network), but became independent in 2012 when SCM was raided by security forces and 16 staff members, including the head of the organisation,\u00a0Mazen Darwish<\/a>, (later named the 2015 recipient of the UNESCO\/Guillermo World Press Freedom Prize) were arrested.<\/p>\n To this day the VDC operates throughout Syria at great personal risk.\u00a0As they explain on their website<\/a>, the VDC\u2019s \u201cactivists take great risks to document human rights and international humanitarian law violations committed by the Syrian government and other armed actors in the conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n For her work, Zeitouneh was awarded the\u00a0Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought<\/a>\u00a0in 2011, the\u00a0Anna Politkovskaya Award<\/a>\u00a0in 2011, the\u00a0Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought<\/a>\u00a0in 2012, the\u00a0International Women of Courage Award<\/a>\u00a0in 2013, the\u00a0International Leadership Award<\/a>\u00a0in 2014, the\u00a0Petra-Kelly by Heinrich B\u00f6ll Foundation<\/a>\u00a0(to the VDC) in 2014 and the\u00a0Martin Ennals Award<\/a>\u00a0in 2016.<\/p>\n She was also one of the witnesses of the 2013 chemical massacre by the Assad regime in Eastern Ghouta. At the time,\u00a0she said that<\/a>\u00a0she hadn\u2019t \u201cseen such death in my whole life\u201d and that \u201cpeople were lying on the ground in hallways, on roadsides, in hundreds.\u201d<\/p>\n Later that year,\u00a0she accused<\/a>\u00a0Western governments of exchanging their \u201cmoral ethical obligations for the legal ones.\u201d This referred to\u00a0United Nations Security Council Resolution 2118<\/a>, adopted unanimously on 27 September 2013 which,\u00a0according to Zeitouneh<\/a>, \u201cimplies that Bashar al-Assad will continue to rule Syria for at least one more year\u201d.<\/p>\n By the end of 2013, Zeitouneh had reported several times receiving threats related to her work documenting the abuses and atrocities committed on all sides.<\/p>\n This culminated in\u00a0her kidnapping<\/a>\u00a0on the night of 9 December, 2013, alongside her husband Wa\u2019el Hamade and colleagues Samira Al Khalil and Nazem Al Hamadi. The four activists, since called the \u2018Douma Four\u2019 after the city in Eastern Ghouta in which they were working, have been missing ever since.<\/p>\n Although no one was officially accused,\u00a0it is widely believed<\/a>\u00a0that the rebel group Jaysh Al-Islam (Army of Islam, or JAI) was behind the kidnapping.<\/p>\n Mona Zeineddine, communications manager for the SCM, explained why JAI is highly suspected of being behind the abduction:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, she saw the need to meticulously document violations being committed by the regime and founded the Violations Documentation Center. The VDC documented atrocities committed by all sides, regardless of political affiliation. And for this reason, Razan posed a threat to Jaysh Al Islam, the armed group in Eastern Ghouta highly suspected of forcibly disappearing her, along with Samira, Wael, and Nazem.\u201d<\/p>\n Furthermore, a JAI official confessed in a local court to having sent Zeitouneh a note, on orders of the rebel group\u2019s command, threatening to kill her just weeks before she was kidnapped. The official was later released when JAI\u2019s leader, Zahran Alloush, intervened.<\/p>\n Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, a noted Syrian intellectual and husband of Samira Al Khalil, wrote a piece in 2014 entitled\u00a0Why Zahran Alloush Stands Accused<\/a><\/em>. In the piece, Al-Haj Saleh argues that Alloush \u201cbarely denied\u201d their responsibility, attempting instead to deflect the issue by saying that more attention should be given to those kidnapped by the Assad regime.<\/p>\n Al-Haj Saleh further argued that as the Douma Four were kidnapped from a territory held by JAI, and not ISIS or the regime, it falls upon JAI to explain it. To date, no investigation of the crime has been carried out.<\/p>\n A few months after the kidnapping,\u00a0a statement signed<\/a>\u00a0by hundreds of activists and written by the families of the kidnapped called for their unconditional release and held the perpetrators responsible for their well-being. The campaign has since become known as\u00a0Free #Douma4<\/a>\u00a0in English.<\/p>\n Asaad Al-Ashi, one of the coordinators of that campaign,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that their aim was to \u201cdemand that [the international community] exert pressure on their allies in the Gulf, who may be able to pressure the armed opposition in Syria for the unconditional release of the detained\u201d \u2013 a reference to the fact that JAI\u00a0was funded and supported<\/a>\u00a0by Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\nThe \u201cDouma Four\u201d<\/h3>\n