Former Seattle Guild Activist Freed After 19 Days Jailed in Syria, Iran

Friends and family of former TNG-CWA member Dorothy Parvaz used social networking to push for her freedom when she was imprisoned for 19 days in Syria and Iran.

For much of May, TNG-CWA members in Seattle and journalists around the world feared for the safety of reporter Dorothy Parvaz, who disappeared April 29 after flying to Syria to cover the latest Arab Spring uprising.

The former Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild and bargaining team member, now an Al Jazeera reporter, was grabbed in Damascus by Syrian secret police and dragged into a bloody cell as guards brutalized prisoners around her. Then it appeared to be her turn: They blindfolded her, took her into a courtyard and pushed her against a wall, execution-style.

"There's no way to prepare for that," Parvaz said, in an a lengthy interview with the online magazine, The Stranger. She knew that some captured journalists had endured mock executions but didn't know what was happening to her. "I was so completely overwhelmed by the noises I was hearing, by the sounds of the beatings that I didn't know what to think. My brain was in a frenzy."

It was an attempt to terrify her before subjecting her to interrogations about her travel and writings. After three days, the Syrians put her on a plane to Iran where she endured more interrogation and 16 days in a solitary cell, what she calls the "longest days of my life."

She didn't know it at the time, but her former Seattle Post-Intelligencer colleagues, her family, friends and other fellow journalists had created a "Free Dorothy Parvaz" Facebook page and were keeping her in name in the news. "It really helped my cause, the fact that so many people on the outside were getting my name out," she said. Her interrogator accessed the wealth of information and, it "reinforced, from multiple sources, who I was," she told The Stranger.

Parvaz is remembered with pride by colleagues in Seattle, where she was an active Guild member who served on the joint bargaining team when units at the P-I and the Seattle Times went on strike in late 2000.

Nineteen days after she was first detained, the Iranians sent Parvaz home to her family and fiancé in Vancouver, B.C. She said she was never physically harmed and was generally treated hospitably in Iran despite being held in a prison former inmates have described as a torture chamber.

She is deeply concerned about the hundreds of thousands of people detained without due process in such prisons worldwide, prisoners who don’t have Facebook pages and notoriety. And detaining journalists is one way some governments try to keep those stories from being told.

"Having a free press is one of the most vital things you can have in a country, and when you don’t have that, you downgrade your own culture, your own democracy and your own credibility," she said.

Click here to read the full interview with Parvaz or find it at www.thestranger.com.