Justice for Dr Batarfi

A petition to seek to either have Dr Batarfi charged or released by the US military who have been currently holding him without charge for 6 and a half years in Guantanamo Bay, that is longer than the entire 2nd World War.

Some background to his case.

Guantánamo’s Doctor
By Clive Stafford Smith

No place on earth was more in need of humanitarian workers than Afghanistan in 2001. The Afghan people, among the poorest in the world, had suffered through two decades of brutal wars and three years of drought. The winter harvest was a near-total failure and five million Afghans faced potential starvation. The countryside was littered with landmines and unexploded ordnance. The hospitals were old and overwhelmed, and the medical infrastructure had collapsed.

Sixty-five percent of Afghans had no access to health facilities. Half a million people were internally displaced and tens of thousands were migrating, often on foot, to refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. Domestic health care workers were also leaving Afghanistan to escape the poverty and strife.

A few altruistic health care workers were going in the other direction. One was Ayman Saeed Batarfi, a young Yemeni orthopedic surgeon. Dr. Batarfi’s life had already spanned large sections of the Muslim world. He was born in Egypt to a Yemeni father and Egyptian mother. He attended high school in Saudi Arabia. He taught himself English and earned a scholarship to medical school in Pakistan. He graduated from Sindh Medical College in Karachi in 1995 and completed a one-year internship in general surgery. He then completed 3.5 years of post-graduate training in orthopedic surgery under one of the leading orthopedic surgeons in Pakistan.

Dr. Batarfi specialized in repairing wrist fractures with “external fixators,” a brace that screws into arm bones and allows injured patients use of their hands and wrists shortly after surgery. In the course of his practice in Pakistan, Dr. Batarfi operated on many Afghan children who had fled to Pakistan with untreated injuries. He came to believe, as a physician and a Muslim, that he had a deeper responsibility to these injured children.

In the Spring of 2001, Dr. Batarfi had a break in his post-graduate studies. He decided to offer his services directly to a charitable organization in Afghanistan. He traveled to Kabul and applied to both western and Arabic NGOs. Eventually he agreed to volunteer with a Saudi-based charity known as al Wafa. Al Wafa was in the process of renovating a hospital in Kabul and furnishing it with medical equipment and medications.

Dr. Batarfi was asked not only to assist in treatment, but to identify and purchase the equipment and medication that the hospital would need for full-scale operations. He made several trips to Pakistan to purchase medical supplies and equipment for transport back to Kabul, where they were so desperately needed.

The attacks of 9/11 came only a few months later. Before the end of September 2001, the United States announced that al Wafa was a supporter of terrorist organizations. Dr. Batarfi was shocked by the announcement. Al Wafa’s leadership emphatically denied the charge. Nevertheless, influenced by the allegations, Dr. Batarfi resigned from al Wafa and looked for other ways to help.

Within days of 9/11, many in Afghanistan expected retaliation by the United States. Humanitarian workers began leaving Afghanistan in large numbers. The absence of foreign humanitarian workers only worsened the crisis for the Afghan people. Dr. Batarfi, who had already stayed in Afghanistan longer than he intended, also returned to Pakistan. But Dr. Batarfi soon heard of horrible injuries inflicted on Afghan civilians by the bombing campaign, and he decided that he had an obligation as a doctor to return to use his skill to help the innocent victims.

In early November, he gathered a few medical supplies and traveled to Jalalabad. He quickly established a surgical clinic in connection with a local hospital. Only two weeks later, however, Jalalabad fell to Northern Alliance warlords, many of whom were hostile to any Arab in Afghanistan.

With nothing left that he could do, again Dr. Batarfi attempted to return to Pakistan with many other Arabs, but on the way he was gravely wounded by a U.S. attack helicopter. He struggled into a local village and was handed over to Northern Alliance supporters, who “sold” him to the U.S. military for a bounty.

At first, Dr. Batarfi was pleased to be transferred to U.S. custody. He assumed the U.S. would quickly determine that he was a physician and an aid worker, not a fighter or a terrorist of any kind. Many U.S. interrogators seemed to reach that conclusion. Many times they suggested to Dr. Batarfi that he would be released. By this point, in December 2001, western aid workers were returning to Afghanistan to tend to the sick and wounded. But eventually a U.S. interrogator told Dr. Batarfi that all Arabs in custody would be transported to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

As far as the U.S. military is concerned, an Arab claiming to be in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons was cause for suspicion, not celebration.
Today, more than 6½ years later, Dr. Batarfi is nearly 38 years old, still in prison. He has never been charged with a crime, and he has never had a trial. He is not allowed telephone calls. He is not allowed personal visitors, and he has not seen his friends or family since 2001. He is not allowed to study medicine, and he cannot maintain his medical accreditation from a prison cell.

While Dr. Batarfi languishes in prison in remote Cuba, skilled health care workers are desperately needed in many corners of his former world. The Afghan people continue to struggle, and orthopedic surgeons are in high demand. Across the border in Kashmir, hundreds of thousands of civilians were injured in a severe earthquake in 2005. Many Pakistani physicians, including Dr. Batarfi’s former adviser, answered the desperate calls for help. Dr. Batarfi was not even allowed to follow the earthquake in news reports. Yemen, Dr. Batarfi’s homeland, is ranked 110th out of 134 countries in physicians per capita – just a little above Afghanistan.

It is time that Dr. Ayman Batarfi is allowed to come home to continue the task he has set himself in life – curing the sick and tending to those with broken bones.

Clive Stafford Smith is the Director of the UK legal charity Reprieve which provides free legal representation to Ayman Batarfi and other prisoners being held by the U.S. in Guantánamo Bay and other secret prisons. To contact Reprieve, e-mail info@reprieve.org.uk, or fax at +44 207 353 4641.

Media coverage

The Guardian (24/7/08)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/24/guantanamo.humanrights

The British Medical Journal (30/7/08)
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/jul30_2/a1071

Stourbridge News
http://www.stourbridgenews.co.uk/news/3580724.Hagley_doc_leads_fight_for_justice/