In 2007, Radwan Ziadeh left his native Syria. His latest book on human rights and the Syrian government had drawn the regime’s ire, and he’d been threatened with arrest.
Mr. Ziadeh obtained permission to travel to Jordan, where he stayed for one night, then left for America to take a fellowship with the U.S. Institute for Peace.
But there were consequences. The government issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Ziadeh and imposed a travel ban on all his family members. His sister and her husband, who was working in Saudi Arabia at the time, have not been able to see each other in four years.
“It’s been hard,” he said. “I worry about them.”
In Syria, which has operated for 40 years under a dictatorship led by the Assad family, human rights violations are widespread, said Mr. Ziadeh. “They restrict all basic freedoms--freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom to communicate with others.”
Protests, sparked by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, escalated in recent months, and government reaction has been brutal, he said, including opening fire on unarmed civilians and torturing and killing those arrested.
“These are crimes against humanity,” he said. More than 2,000 have been killed since the uprising began earlier this year.
Mr. Ziadeh became passionate about human rights in Syria as a college student. He wrote his first book about human rights in the Arab world. It was banned in Syria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. Along with other activists, he formed one of the first organizations focused on Syrian human rights in 2001.
Four years later, Mr. Ziadeh founded the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies in Syria, which he continues to lead. Last fall, he joined the Elliott School of International Affairs for a yearlong appointment as a visiting scholar in its Institute for Middle East Studies.
This year, Mr. Ziadeh will travel to Turkey, Russia, South Africa, Germany, Lithuania, India and Brazil. As part of a group of dissidents, he is lobbying governments to take stronger measures against the Syrian regime, including a U.N. Security Council resolution sanctioning it.
“It hasn’t been easy, but hopefully it will help the Syrian uprising,” he said.
Mr. Ziadeh believes the Syrian regime can’t survive in the long term. “The demonstrations have gotten bigger,” he said. “Last week we had a million on the street.”
Democracy is not new for Syria, he said. The country was a parliamentary democracy starting in 1946 and was the first Arab country to give women the right to vote and participate in the political process.
“We want to return to that tradition with a democratic constitution, political parties and free and fair elections,” he said. “We want freedom.”