Honors for the Unsung Heroes of Human Rights

The people who packed the ballroom of the Park Plaza hotel got to see Joan Baez, Peter Gabriel, Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne. They heard Kerry Kennedy Cuomo quote her father, the late Robert F. Kennedy.

But they had come not for celebrities but for Akram Mayi, Sha’Wan Jabarin and David Moya--men few Americans have heard of. The three were honored by Reebok International for fighting on the front lines of the human rights movement.

Mayi, 29, works on behalf of thousands of fellow Kurds held in Turkish detention camps; Jabarin, 30, is a Palestinian human rights worker on the West Bank, and Moya, 24, has advocated reforms in Cuba since he was in high school.

For three years, Reebok has recognized young people who, “against great odds,” significantly raised awareness of human rights violations.

The company received a record 60 nominations this year. The top winners, who were selected by a panel of human rights representatives, each received $25,000. Moya was released from prison last month, but was not permitted to attend last week’s awards ceremony.

Many Westerners may have been surprised when Iraq invaded Kuwait. But not Akram Mayi and the 25 million other Kurds worldwide.

“Nothing of what Saddam Hussein did in Kuwait could surprise us,” said Mayi, named for May, his family’s native town in Kurdistan, a mountainous region in northern Iraq that includes border regions of the Soviet Union, Iran, Syria and Turkey.

“For many years we are talking about Saddam Hussein--what he did, how he killed thousands of people daily, burned Kurdistan, destroyed villages, bombed us with chemicals,” Mayi said. “But no one listened. No one believed.”

Mayi was born in Baghdad in 1961, two months before the people of Kurdistan started a rebellion against Iraq. As a child, Mayi often returned to his family’s village, and while studying agriculture at the state-run university in Baghdad, determined he would “spend all of my life in the villages of Kurdistan.”

But “before I completed my studies, the Iraqi regime destroyed my village.” Saddam Hussein viewed the rebellious Kurds as his enemy, Mayi said. “It was the aim of his regime to remove the geography of Kurdistan from the map.” Between 4,000 and 4,500 Kurdish villages were bulldozed at the time that his own village was destroyed, Mayi said.

Mayi completed his university studies in 1983. He moved to an area in Iraq where many of the displaced Kurds had resettled and began teaching agricultural techniques to adults, and reading and writing to children.

Then, in 1988, the Iraqi government used chemical weapons to bomb the remaining villages of Kurdistan. In a single day in March, Mayi said, more than 5,000 civilians were killed and more than 6,000 injured. Additional chemical bombings in August of that year killed thousands more.

“The Iraqi government effectively declared war on its own people,” Mayi said.

A day after the bombing stopped in August, Mayi visited three of the villages that had been hit.

“I saw in each village a lot of people who were killed. I saw them as if they were sleeping,” he said. “I saw all the animals--the cows, the sheep, the goats--all dead, like stones. I saw the birds. All died. I saw the color of the plants, changed from green to dark blue.”

After that, Mayi said, many Kurds began trying to escape Iraq, “traveling to some places near the eastern border of Turkey.” Despite government roadblocks, about 80,000-100,000 Kurds reached the Turkish border, “by walking, only by walking,” Mayi said.

Others, injured by the chemicals, tried to make the journey, but died along the way. “Nobody could take them,” Mayi said.

Half of those who made it into Turkey were sent to Iran, he said. The remainder, including Mayi, were divided into three camps. Mayi, an elected official in one camp, calls them concentration camps.

In Mardin camp, nearly 12,000 people live in tents that fail to block the sun or the rain, Mayi said. Mayi is a council member in Diyarbakir camp, where from 25 to 30 people live in each 40-square-meter flat. Mush camp houses its nearly 5,000 internees in buildings “better than Mardin and worse than Diyarbakir,” said Mayi, who in his role as a council member acts as a liaison between the Kurdish refugees and Turkish officials.

Short and compact, wearing a bright cummerbund and a colorful scarf twisted into a turban, Mayi looks older than his 29 years. His large brown eyes seem tired, as if they have seen too much.

He said one reason he has not married or had children is that having a family might keep him from his pro-Kurdish activities. He has been threatened, beaten and isolated, he said. Journalists or government representatives who come to interview him must meet with him outside the camp.

Mayi said he was surprised to be allowed to come to the United States, but welcomed the opportunity to “explain the situation of my people, and to seek a solution for this difficult situation.”

Mayi was nominated for his award by the British-based Kurdistan Workers Assn. He was featured in a documentary on the Kurds shown on the BBC, and worked with a British journalist, Sheri Laizer, on her recent book “Into Kurdistan: Frontiers Under Fire.”

Because of the assault on Kuwait, “all the world is against Saddam Hussein,” Mayi said. But “daily in Kurdistan, hundreds were killed, and no one was asking about the Kurdistanis.”

His cause is for his people, Mayi said, but also for himself.

“I know I am Kurdish,” he said. “But I have no country. I have no village. I have left everything behind me, and I have no place in the world.”

The first glimpse Sha’Wan Jabarin had of his baby son came in a newspaper photograph smuggled into his Israeli jail early this year. The picture showed former President Jimmy Carter holding the 4-month-old child. The baby’s name was Muntasser, meaning “victorious.”

Arrested a month before Muntasser’s birth, Jabarin had not been allowed a snapshot of his son. In his 11 months of detention, he said he received only two of the 25 letters his wife sent him.

“The administration of the detention center was very keen on ensuring that the solitary nature of the detention be complied with,” he said.

Nor was Jabarin, permitted an explanation for his arrest. Speaking through an interpreter, he said, “As you know I am an administrative detainee, which means they don’t have to have a reason, let alone an explanation.” Because there is no official explanation, only an order of detention, and no official charges or trial, “that exposes everyone to the risk,” Jabarin said.

By “everyone,” Jabarin means fellow members of Al-Haq, the West Bank human rights organization that is an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and its sympathizers. As a field worker for Al-Haq, his job is to gather and report accounts of human rights violations from Palestinian victims and eyewitnesses.

It was such an incident that brought Jabarin into Al-Haq three years ago. Jabarin was watching a demonstration on the West Bank led by young Palestinian girls. He said he saw an Israeli settler shoot and kill one of the girls. “From 150 feet away, he took a pistol and shot her.”

On his own, Jabarin reported the shooting to authorities. An Israeli military hearing later vindicated the settler. But even with that result, Jabarin said, “The point is that this account is unique in the Occupied Territories because we are not used to the process of law.”

Jabarin said his activities brought him to the attention of Israeli authorities. He was stopped at a roadblock in March, 1988, arrested and placed in administrative detention for nine months. While in custody, he said he helped report to the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights the circumstances surrounding the shootings of two other Palestinian detainees.

His subsequent arrest, in October, 1989, came when Israeli agents showed up at his home in the West Bank. Jabarin said he was so severely beaten on that occasion that he required hospitalization. He was eventually transferred to the Ketsyot Prison in the Negev Desert, from which he was released last month.

Jabarin is tall and bearded, with a deep scar that slices down one side of his face. He speaks evenly, almost dispassionately of the conditions in his homeland.

“I would have to assume that Americans do not really know what is going on in the Occupied Territories,” Jabarin said. “If I assume that the American people do know what is going on and they don’t do what they are supposed to do, then the American people must be a kind of aggressive, evil people. I have to assume that they don’t know, otherwise they would do something.”

Jabarin continued, “I’m certain that even inside Israel itself, some people don’t really know the details or the extent of the kind of behavior the soldiers exhibit, or the intelligence officers.”

For Jabarin, “the strength of my conviction really comes from the strength of the righteousness of the cause.”

He is seeking international protection for the residents of the Gaza Strip, and, he said, “support in the form of a voice, a true voice, that would rise up and demand the application of laws.” Jabarin gave a thin smile. “That is all we ask.”

Jabarin was nominated for the Reebok prize jointly by an officer of the Ford Foundation in Cairo, by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, by a professor at Brooklyn College and by the Carter Center of Emory University.

“President Carter had become involved in helping to free Sha’Wan,” Susan Casey, a human rights program associate at the Carter Center, said. “President Carter made appeals on his behalf,” and while in the Middle East, met with Jabarin’s wife, Lamya.

Jabarin said that during his stay in the United States, he would meet with groups of Palestinians in this country, and also with representatives of the Jewish community. He said that despite the beatings and the detentions he remains hopeful, “and expecting that the humanistic conscience of the world will really wake up.”

As he stood to leave for a day’s worth of appointments, Jabarin hoisted his sleeping child onto his shoulder. His arms wrapped around the baby in a gesture of love and protection.

“That’s why we do it,” he said, and gazed at Muntasser. “For them.”