Missing in Syria: a brave journalist, a close friend

When the Al Jazeera reporter Dorothy Parvaz disappeared after arriving in Damascus more than a week ago, the sense of
shock was profound, writes her friend ROSITA BOLAND

MY FRIEND Dorothy Parvaz is missing. Of all the thousands of words I’ve written as a journalist over many years, these are the six I can hardly believe I am typing. They feel fictional. They feel wrong. And they are words I wish I never had to see published.

The hard fact is that, as I write, Dorothy is missing. A reporter for Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, she arrived in Damascus, Syria, on the afternoon of Friday, April 29th on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha. She was due to report on the protests in Syria – last month she was in Japan for two weeks, reporting on the aftermath of the tsunami.

Since Dorothy got off the aircraft there has not been one word from her. She never checked into her hotel. She is not answering her phone. She has made no contact with anyone: not her employers, her family – including her fiance, Todd Barker, whom she speaks to daily – or her friends.

On Wednesday, five days after she went missing, Al Jazeera released a statement to say Syrian officials had contacted it to confirm she was “being detained”.

There was no explanation why, no information about her location, nor any indication of how long more she will be detained. It is thought she is being held at the airport, but none of us knows.

But at least, on Wednesday, we knew she was alive.

I met Dorothy when we were on Nieman journalism fellowships at Harvard in 2008-09, with 27 others from around the world. A fellowship programme is an intense bonding experience, where you make friends for life. Within a week of arriving in Cambridge I knew Dorothy was going to be one of those friends.

D, as we call her, is ferociously intelligent, with a coal-black humour, a famously acerbic tongue and opinions so strong they could – and sometimes did — staple-gun one to the wall. She’s also one of the kindest, most thoughtful, smartest and funniest people I’ve known.

That year half a dozen of us never passed a day when we didn’t eat at least one meal together, call each other, attend an event together, go to class or just hang out in Cambridge, always endlessly talking.

Dorothy was one of them. We considered each other as sisters.

Dorothy was born in Iran, to an Iranian father and an American mother. She spent her childhood there, then moved to Canada. She also lived for a time in the United Arab Emirates when she was growing up. She holds three citizenships, of Iran, Canada and the US.

By the time I met her she had been based in the US for a decade, working in Seattle for the Seattle Post-Intelligencernewspaper, as a features writer and its youngest ever editorial writer.

Halfway through the fellowship Dorothy's Hearst-owned paper, a newspaper of record the same age as The Irish Times, unexpectedly announced it was closing unless it found a buyer within six weeks. It didn't. The paper ceased printing and migrated online, with a skeleton staff. Dorothy ended our fellowship year without a job. This is why she went to work for Al Jazeera in Qatar. It was hiring, and she needed a job, because she couldn't bear not working as a journalist. It's what she does, and she's very, very good at it.

When I heard on Monday that Dorothy was missing in Syria, and had already been missing for three days, I felt sick. I had had an e-mail from her only a few days previously. We were due to meet up at a Nieman reunion at Harvard next week.

It’s a surreal and horrible experience when it’s your friend who is missing. There’s shock, confusion and fear. It sounds daft, but even though my profession is journalism I was profoundly shocked when I started seeing Dorothy’s face and name carried on reports around the world.

I hadn’t initially thought of her disappearance as news, strange as that seems. She’s my friend, not a story. As journalists we write about these events, but now, suddenly, my friend is the story.

Above anything, Dorothy loathes being photographed. So much so that, by her request, there is not one image of her in the class yearbook we made. It is supremely ironic that her photograph has now been carried in so many countries and is all over the internet.

Effort are continuing around the world to lobby for Dorothy’s freedom from detention. Al Jazeera and the Iranian government have called for her immediate release, as has her fiance, in a televised appeal carried on several networks.

Authorities in her countries of citizenship are working on her behalf. There are two high-profile social-media campaigns. One is on Facebook, at facebook.com/FreeDorothy, with more than 7,500 members – and rising by the hour. On Twitter, people are using the hashtag #FreeDorothy to lobby for her release.

Please join them. I want my friend back.