Razan Zaitouneh (Syrian human-rights lawyer; founder of the Violations Documentation Center; 2011 Sakharov laureate) — direct quotes to Reuters, 2011 (per Syrian Observer profile): insisting "maintaining a peaceful uprising is the best guarantee for its victory," and warning the regime deliberately pushed the revolution toward violence and sectarianism to kill it. Abducted in Douma (the "Douma Four"), Dec 2013.

I still insist that maintaining a peaceful uprising is the best guarantee for its victory.

From the first moment of the revolution, the regime has been pushing towards turning people to violence and turning the revolution into a sectarian issue. It knows that it could kill the uprising this way.

[Source is English (Syrian Observer "Who's Who" profile, reproducing her direct quotes given to Reuters in 2011); tier-2, confirmed verbatim against the fetched page. published_date left NULL: the quotes date to 2011 but the profile page is undated and the exact interview date is not established — not fabricated.] Declared positions of Razan Zaitouneh — Syrian human-rights lawyer, writer and one of the most prominent civil voices of the 2011 Syrian uprising. She founded the Syrian Human Rights Information Link (SHRIL, 2005) and, in 2011, the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), which named and counted the detained, executed and disappeared — documenting abuses by ALL sides; she co-founded the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), the civilian network that organized peaceful protests. She won the 2011 Sakharov Prize. A staunch advocate of NON-VIOLENT, civil resistance, she insisted that "maintaining a peaceful uprising is the best guarantee for its victory," and warned that "from the first moment of the revolution, the regime has been pushing towards turning people to violence and turning the revolution into a sectarian issue" — precisely in order to "kill the uprising." On 9 December 2013 she was abducted in Douma (Eastern Ghouta) along with her husband Wael Hamada and two colleagues — the "Douma Four" — reportedly by a jihadist armed group; their fate remains unknown. This is the SYRIAN SECULAR-CIVIL, NON-VIOLENT, ANTI-SECTARIAN, HUMAN-RIGHTS-DOCUMENTATION pole — the democratic-revolutionary current crushed between the Assad regime and armed Islamist factions, and a counterpart to Mazen Darwish's transitional-justice work. [Axes: democracy / civil-liberties (non-violent civil resistance; documentation; human rights; freedom), religion-state / sectarianism (anti-sectarian; a secular-civil vision against both regime and fundamentalism), women / gender (a leading woman activist), regime-stance (against the Assad regime AND against jihadist armed groups).]