Summary
Al-Haq fieldwork coordinator — a Kiev graduate who recalled human rights being viewed locally as “a new form of colonialism, or imperialism, a western discourse” — and later head of the fieldwork unit (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.43, p.141).
Details
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He recalls the board deliberately bringing in committed, “strong clean people” from different factions (PDF p.98).
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He opened “grave breaches” files in Ramallah in an early attempt to collect documentation for use in criminal cases against alleged perpetrators, at a time when the organization’s understanding of evidential and other requirements was rudimentary (PDF p.154-155).
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An enthusiastic member of the Enforcement Team, he says the Enforcement Project work was “not among the known alphabets” of human rights work at the time (PDF p.161).
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His piece on al-Haq’s work on autopsies and deaths in detention, written some two decades after he left al-Haq, opens with a tribute to all the martyrs of the uprising, “especially those whose skin was split by the autopsy razor. […] At the time of the autopsy, they felt no pain, but I felt pain [then] and I still feel it” (PDF p.141).
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He notes Palestinian society did not accept autopsy for religious and social reasons, the family’s overriding concern being to bury the dead swiftly — “to honour the dead is to bury them [swiftly]” (PDF p.141).
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He visited the house-arrested field-worker Zahi Jaradat once a month to deliver his salary (PDF p.170).
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In his “Memories” of the al-Haq fieldwork unit written for Welchman’s study, he cites examples where good fieldwork revealed “alleged violations which upon investigation had nothing to do with the occupation”, and says of documenting such a case in error: “I would have resigned” (PDF p.169).
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The strategy, according to Batrawi, was that “al-Haq was looking for the truth, and no more than that” (PDF p.169).
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In Welchman part 5, as fieldwork coordinator he proposed at least one female field-worker each in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with a thematic remit on violations particularly affecting women, such as the effects of tear gas on pregnancies, since male field-workers found it hard to ask the questions that had to be asked of released women detainees (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.172).
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He gave training courses on fact-finding in different international fora (PDF p.178).
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He recalls the many and specific challenges of investigating and documenting torture for Torture for Security: usually no witnesses, detainees held incommunicado and hooded, torturers using code names, no investigation of complaints, and techniques that did not leave marks (PDF p.197).
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Recalling the 1989 discussions on the killing of collaborators, he asked: “Do we talk from a nationalist discourse, or pure human rights?” — adding that if it is pure human rights then no-one has the right to deprive anyone of their life (PDF p.204).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, Al-Haq, Enforcement Project