Syria – The Brave Women Activists

    It’s not easy being a human being in Syria at the moment, but it’s particularly tough being a women who doesn’t tow the party line.   Razan Zaitouneh is only 34 but she last year won the Anna Politkovskaya Award which is awarded to a defender of women’s rights in a conflict zone.
Her focus in Syria has been in a reporting role, through a network of activists and human rights organisation Razan was an important source of information on the crimes being committed by the Syrian regime and it’s forces.  It is a dangerous job though, here she explains about the day she went into hiding in 2011.



“On March 23, after the massacre at the Omari mosque in Dera’a, to which protesters had retreated. That day security forces surrounded the mosque and brutally attacked it. I gathered information from Dera’a and passed it on to international media. Subsequently, Syrian state television defamed me as a foreign agent. So I knew they would come to get me soon. I gathered the most necessary things and left my apartment”.
Razan has been reporting on these issues for many years however.  In 2005 she established the Syrian Human Rights Information Link  which has been reporting human rights abuses conducted by the Syrian Government.
Of course as she is now in hiding her information flow has stopped.  She is reportedly in Damascus and conducted a brief report for Democracy Now in January 2012.  It was obviously difficult to contact her and required a complicated network of proxies in order to protect her location – to learn more about these try a privacy security site like this one.  These technologies are essential as they prevent the IP address of the user being located, if the Syrian Government had this information they would have been able to pin point her exact position.
The interview relayed a depressing tale of life in Syria at the moment with deaths of ordinary people rising daily.   Her report also relayed a sense of disillusionment with the UN council and International efforts to prevent the bloodshed.  The Syrian people feel they’ve been abandoned to their fate by the World.