Healing Pains

Healing Pains
Health officials want it shut down, but Al-Nadim Center is carrying on its mission to help victims of torture rebuild their lives
By Manal el-Jesri



For Dr. Abdallah Mansour, July 11, 2004 began like any other work day. It was another quiet morning at Al-Nadim Center for the Psychological Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, the only facility of its kind in the nation, when a committee of three health inspectors stopped by for a visit.




The quiet was quickly shattered.


“They were officials from Cairo governorate’s department of health, and their job is to monitor private medical centers,” says Mansour, the center’s chief psychiatrist. “They are to make sure that patients are not abused, that prices are not exorbitant, and that the person in charge is a licensed physician. It’s not their job to look at what this doctor is doing, so long as he is not doing something he is not supposed to like finding me performing an operation.

“They must also check the building’s safety and hygiene. As you can see, the place here is fine on both counts, while the department where they work is swamped with underground water and street vendors,” Mansour growls.

Used to a certain standard of professional courtesy between physicians, Mansour is still livid that the three barged into the center “as if they were the police” and declared they had judicial authority.

“They did not ask for our license, did not look at the apparent safety of the place, but declared right away that they wanted to search the premises,” Mansour alleges. “I wanted to close the door because there were patients outside, but one of the two female doctors panicked and flung it open. As if I would attack them. Their third member was quite a strong man to begin with. I tried to explain the fragile nature of victims of violence, who are easily intimidated by the mention of police or by the mere occurrence of any kind of clash. But they simply said, ‘We do not really care about your patients’,” he claims.

According to Mansour, the three men began rifling through the drawers of his private desk, sifting through family photos and correspondence with other NGOs, including the Egyptian Association Against Torture, which the committee kept referring to as “a foreign entity”.

“They looked under the chairs and went through our filing cabinet although I asked them not to look at patients’ files. They kept mentioning the police and said they were going to close down our center. Whenever I tried to take my papers away from them, they said I could pick them up from the police station later. Then they started writing their report, and when I tried to sign after each statement, they would not allow me to,” he claims.

A routine inspection? Not likely. Mansour says it was a threat the first overt one the center has experienced in its 12 years of operations.

“We are used to less direct messages reaching us, informing us of authorities’ displeasure. Never before had we been threatened or treated like this,” he says.

Although health inspectors refused to comment, senior members of Al-Nadim Center released a press release that claimed to quote from a Ministry of Health letter outlining the alleged violations. It read: “The center is run for objectives other than the ones for which it has been registered, the establishment does not have the shape of a medical establishment, absence of first aid measures, and the absence of the medical director.”

In the wake of the visit, the center was ordered closed for 30 days.

“We went to the Prosecutor General and started our campaign,” Mansour says. “We were questioned, but I do not know what the final outcome is going to be. A few days ago [in mid-September] a new committee came, and Dr. Suzan [Fayyad, a Nadim staffer] took one of the inspectors by the hand and led him to see the first aid cabinet. Although as a psychiatric clinic it is not our job to carry out regular first aid, we do have first aid. One of the doctors tripped on our fire extinguisher on his way out. This new committee was much more polite and declared our violations had been eliminated, although we had done nothing to change the way the place looked.”

Two days later, Dr. Fayyad was called in for questioning at the district prosecutor’s office. She was informed that the first committee has also alleged that the center was in violation for having on its premises T-shirts belonging to the Egyptian Association Against Torture (in a sealed box that one of the first inspectors opened with a pocket knife without a warrant); a questionnaire about methods of torture; “prisoners’ files” (Mansour says the files were not of prisoners, but of torture victims who have sought help at Al-Nadim); books on human rights, books stored on a balcony.

Al-Nadim’s press release posed a number of questions: “Has the Ministry of Health lately taken charge of the mandates of other ministries? Has it taken charge of searching victims’ files on behalf of the Ministry of Interior, and of the center’s internal affairs on behalf of the Ministry of Social Affairs?”

Mansour claims the harassment began a few days after a highly publicized march against torture on June 26.

“It also came after we opened the files of a number of cases, including the group torture in Helwan [which allegedly took place near the end of 2003] and the case of child abuse [the Maadi nursery case]. This could be the reason why we were targeted at this time in particular.

“[The] authorities are not used to anyone saying, ‘No.’ The main aim of torturers is to turn their subjects into trivial things. The victims are not allowed to say anything. If only one person were to do so, to express pain, seek help and pursue justice, then this means they are failing in their job. The same applies to the child abuse case. They do not want our self-image [as a gentle nation] to be shaken. They want people to accept abuse, because if they stop it at this level, they will then move on to another level.

“But every time victims seek support and help, we will seek to heal their wounds. Our center is open for whoever seeks its help, at any time, no matter the extent of violence he or she has been subjected to, no matter who the violator is, and no matter how much they try to stop us. This is our commitment.”

At press time, Al-Nadim Center’s case remained open at the Prosecutor General’s Office. Officials there and at the Ministry of Health have consistently declined requests from media, Arabic- and foreign-language alike, to discuss the case.