A Conversation with Amal Al Nasin, founder of Amal Healing and Advocacy Centre - Part 1

In October of this year we sat down for a conversation with Amal Al Nasin, the founder of Amal Healing and Advocacy Centre (AHAC), one of Synergy for Justice’s main partners. We had a great conversation about how she became involved in this work, the needs she sees in the communities she serves and the impact their work is having on people who have experienced arbitrary detention, torture, and sexual violence.

Below is part one of our conversation, we will share part two in January.

What motivated you to establish AHAC??

I found refuge in Turkey in 2012– I was a lawyer in Syria for 13 years, so in Turkey, I also  started providing legal services. I first started with documentation (of human rights cases) with a group of judges. During this time, I met with a lot of survivors, former soldiers, and women survivors of detention. Their situations were very bad, and they needed a lot of services. But the organisation I was part of provided documentation services only.

I founded AHAC without any funding in 2014 to provide other needed services for survivors. I started holding outreach meetings with women survivors of detention and survivors of violence. This was  voluntary work using all the knowledge and skills I had learned over the years. A group of women joined my initiative and started working with me. With time and networking, we were able to provide capacity building sessions to these women as well as psychosocial support sessions.

We did all of this without funding, until one day, my Austrian friend helped me financially, and I was able to start a women’s clinic providing medical services, specifically for Syrian women. This clinic served the Hatay area and the villages in Hatay region of Turkey. We were providing prescription medication as well as medical consultations for free. Then we saw the need for pediatric services, so we started providing those too. In addition to these medical services, we were also providing legal, psychological, and social support services, as well as conducting advocacy efforts and documenting cases of enforced disappearances and torture in detention.

Our beneficiaries trust AHAC and our staff. Now AHAC is the legal reference point for women in Hatay. They can reach out to us for any type of legal services they want, including human rights documentation, or if they need legal counselling in Turkish or Syrian law or international law.

Through our partnership with Synergy for Justice, doors began opening  for us. Synergy worked with us on developing and strengthening our organisation in all areas, including finance, human resources, donor compliance, data security, and more. We were a very simple organisation, but now AHAC is more professional, and I have trust that we will develop into an international organisation and it will provide services inside and outside of Turkey.

Synergy also helped us reach women in remote areas. Every day we receive women in our centre, most of them survivors of detention and torture. Five to six women come every day to the centre, and this does not include the number of women that come for group sessions. Group sessions are for 20 people four to five times a month. They include women survivors of detention, families of the missing, and women that are facing violence because of their gender.

Our programme, funded by Synergy, covers a lot of services that women need, and specifically, Syrian women need. We provide legal counselling for establishing legal residency and we have built a good relationship with the immigration office in Turkey and other governmental agencies across sectors. They even invited women from our centre for discussion sessions, to improve collaboration between civil society organisations and the Turkish government and improve relationships between Turkish citizens and Syrian residents. We always share the challenges and problems that Syrian women and Syrians in general are facing with the immigration office in Hatay.

We have a hotline, and we receive calls requesting  counselling for legal issues all over Turkey, not just in our region of Hatay. We get calls from Istanbul, Adana, and Bursa with questions regarding Syrian or Turkish law.

We have built this trust with our beneficiaries.

 Can you describe the situation in the communities where you work? How does the social situation in the communities affect survivors?

The category of people we work with in Turkey are refugees, and some of them don’t have a  male family member to provide for their needs. So the situation is very hard for these women as they have to be the breadwinner in addition to struggling with the burden of being refugees.

Coming to Turkey as a refugee already presents its set of challenges, the most important one being stigma. Stigma follows survivors in Syria and in Turkey. People in Turkey would look at women survivors of detention as weak and easy to exploit. This is the reason why we meet a lot of women, most of them with children, who rush into  marriage without thinking it through and end up in a lot of marital problems. These problems are multiplying because women are isolated.

Spouses of disappeared and missing people are being exploited, even when they are being given relief boxes.

I can tell you a story about this, actually.

At the beginning of my work in Turkey, a group of women reached out to me. They were all spouses of missing individuals. They were being exploited sexually to receive food relief boxes. I couldn’t stay silent. I asked the manager of the organisation to meet with me in my office. At first, he did not believe the story. However, when we gave him the details with the names of the staff, he apologised to these women and reported the people who exploited them to the authorities. But this only happened because I was with them, so they felt strong.

We always work in that sense. We try as much as we can to empower survivors to be part of society. Society is never easy on them. There is also poverty in these communities, and work opportunities are very limited. Which means the situation is stark  for Syrian refugees. It’s hard for them to pay their rent. All of this has a big impact on survivors and women survivors. There are also educational problems. Survivors should have access to education.

In Hatay, there is no other organisation that works like us. Which is why there is a big need for the services we provide.

The survivors know and trust that we are conveying their voices to others.

This interview with Amal provides a lot of context and insight into the situation Syrian refugees and former detainees are facing as they work to rebuild their lives after the atrocities they have experienced in war. We encourage you to read part two of this conversation in January, to learn more about the work Amal Centre is doing and the impact it is having in Syrian communities.