Conversation with Amal Al Nasin - Part 2
This is part two of our conversation with Amal Al Nasin, the founder of Amal Healing and Advocacy Center (AHAC) based in Turkey. Amal has been working with survivors of arbitrary detention, torture, and sexual violence for many years as well as supporting the advocacy efforts of families of the detained who are still missing. She is constantly working to increase the breadth of support offered to the communities that Amal Center serves and improve the quality of care they provide to survivors and their families.
What does transitional justice mean to you, and what does it look like for these communities where you are working?
I am a lawyer, I believe in justice. I believe everybody should have equal access to their rights. For me, this means accountability and justice for victims of war and human rights violations. Justice is reached through accountability. The women we work with are trying to find the family members who have disappeared. They want to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes; this is the main thing they are focusing on.
How are you working to elevate women to leadership to have a voice in these processes?
At AHAC, we focus on gender sensitive transitional justice. We prioritize involving women in this process and raising awareness of women’s needs post conflict. We are advocating for reparation, institutional reform, and women’s inclusion in these processes. They should be able to talk about all the violations they were subjected to and be a part of reconciliation committees. We need to involve women in the justice process and raise their voices until the decision makers can hear them. Syrian women must be leaders to drive change and make a difference.
A few years ago, I formed a group for families of the disappeared. I gathered 60 families of the missing persons and taught them about democratic principles before anything else. Then we met to elect leaders to represent these families. We held a formal election with a lawyer present to ensure that the process was very transparent. The candidates explained their programmes and their agenda and the group elected 15 women to represent the 60 families. This was a very important step in establishing democratic leadership. Now, years later the group has grown to 120 families and this leadership structure and democratic process are still intact.
We then held workshops where we trained the 15 women on international law and advocacy and capacity building. We trained them, listened to them, and gave them everything they needed to successfully lead in their communities. Now they can, to a certain extent, represent the cases of missing persons very well.
How do these programs change the quality of life for survivors and improve their ability to participate in their communities?
I am an advocate for women survivors. Now, we are providing them with medical, social, psychological, and legal aid services in Hatay, Antakya and even in Istanbul. That’s why Amal Center was able, through these years, to gain the trust of the community.
We are seeing more initiative from women survivors who participate in our programmes and from those who hear about them. Some women hear about our programmes and our services from women who have participated in our activities and they feel empowered to improve their own lives by joining us.
During the legal awareness sessions for the Aswatuna project with Synergy, we met a lot of survivors who have not documented their cases because they do not believe in justice. It has been a long time since the conflict started, and nothing has happened. So by raising awareness of ongoing justice efforts, we were able to break this barrier and help them overcome their hesitation. Now both women and men are asking to have their cases documented by Amal Center.
For forensic medical documentation, we are referring these cases to Lawyers and Doctors for Human Rights (LDHR) after we have obtained informed consent and established trust with the survivor.
We have a group of 20 women who approached us to help them start a network. They want us to support them by involving them in workshops and training. They see how involvement in activities that build their skills, increase their awareness and knowledge about their legal rights, and increase their awareness of the psychological effects of what they went through impact their lives. These activities help our participants reintegrate in their community and diminish the stigma they are feeling.
Other survivors were able to find jobs in different places. I know two of them who are still in touch with us. We also help some survivors manage their own websites. The Aswatuna “Listen To Us” campaign was conducted by 10 -15 women who became leaders and conducted their own advocacy campaigns with support from Amal Center. During the campaign some survivors were not cooperating with each other, so we were able to strengthen the personal relationships among women and help them focus on improving lives. Now they know that they have a bigger cause that is more important than their individual differences. As a result, many women are sharing their stories now, and are advancing the advocacy campaign.
We are also still working and communicating with women survivors inside Syria, and we are working with the families of missing persons. We represent the voices of those people authentically, providing them with the tools and training that they need to raise their voice effectively.
How has Synergy’s training helped you implement this program?
We recently completed a training on case building with Synergy, and are working on building our own capacity as a legal team at Amal Center. We are learning how to improve written documentation for cases, because initially we had some weakness in writing reports and documenting violations. Synergy also provided us with training on human resource management, as well as safety and security. They helped us a lot to use the training and tools to improve our institutional effectiveness and plan for the future. Synergy also helped our individual staff members develop their skills and bolstered their capacities. So we are working to export these skills to other organisations. We teach these skills to others, to other institutions and organisations who are working with us so that they can train their own staff.
Can you share a story about how the training has helped one of your staff care for survivors?
The psychological training we received from Dr Dina Al Shafie on the many aspects of psychological evaluations and how to develop those aspects of our work was very valuable. We are currently implementing her recommendations.
We have a psychosocial worker who was not dealing directly with survivors but acted as a main referral point. With Dina’s help, this woman is now able to provide care for some survivors. Some of her clients came to see me and thank me for supporting her to expand her work. They were happy with the psychological support they received from her and how she created a safe space for them to speak. Dr Dina helped our psychosocial team improve their skills to provide psychological support to survivors and their families.
I especially feel the impact of our partnership with Synergy in our legal work because we are working on some proposals for how to expand our legal programmes. We have an action plan and we are already doing good work solving legal problems for Syrians with the immigration office and the Turkish government.
We were able to help someone who was going to be deported from Turkey by resolving his issue with the Turkish immigration office. As a result of our work, a man and his family are able to return to their lives here, and remain safely in Turkey without fear of being deported. This is a success story.
Is there anything else that you would like to share?
Yes, I would like to talk about the challenges we are facing at Amal Center. The only significant long term grant we have received is the grant from Synergy for Justice. It has helped us a lot, it’s expanded our scope of work, and helped us have programmes for the future. We continue to apply to many different donors but it’s a challenge to expand our funding. I am afraid, after all these achievements, that lack of funding will be one of the obstacles to undermine our work.