Fred Abrahams: Human Rights Research Took Him Into Iraq

By C.K. WOLFSON

He used to spend summers on the Vineyard; the son of David Abrahams
and Carole Cronig Abrahams, grandson of Mae and Henry Cronig, a family
that has become part of the Island's history. But most recently
Fred Abrahams has summered in places such as Kosovo, the Czech Republic
and Iraq, and he has become a part of global history.

This Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew
Center, Mr. Abrahams, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) consultant, will share
insights and observations from his experiences this spring as a field
researcher in Iraq. Most of his time was spent in central Iraq
interviewing Iraqi families, visiting their homes, listening to their
stories. He describes it as a "shocking, emotional and dynamic
trip from all perspectives."

He sounds matter-of-fact, almost casual, as he explains, "The
complicated part of the job is that people tell you what they think is
the truth. With human rights abuses, memory is a tricky thing." He
compares it to someone who's been mugged trying to remember the
details of what the mugger was wearing. "Imagine then recalling
those facts after someone has burst into your home, taken your husband,
murdered your son or daughter. Our job is to collect the facts in a
corroborative manner."

The coauthor of A Village Destroyed, May 19, 1999: War Crimes in
Kosovo (University of California Press), the 35-year-old Mr. Abrahams is
expert at interviewing and compiling the experiences of victims of human
rights abuses.

Slight and boyish-looking, Mr. Abrahams was a college German major
who spent time in Europe as a student of international affairs. In 1989
he was working at odd jobs in San Francisco (he was a department store
Santa Claus, among other things), when news of the fall of the Berlin
Wall made headlines.

"That was when history handed me a career," he says. He
went to East Berlin as a "political tourist," collecting
archival material for university libraries and writing articles.
"It was tumultuous and exciting - a good place to feel a
sense of purpose."

He spent almost three years in Berlin and then Prague, where he
worked with the Helsinki Citizens Assembly, and European dissidents such
as Vaclav Havel (who was to become the first president of the newly
democratic Czechoslovakia). "The work chose me," he says,
recalling a sense of being "swept along."

Mr. Abrahams returned to New York to begin a master's program
in international affairs at Columbia University. As a summer project, he
and two other students, funded by a grant, went to Albania to help
university students publish a newspaper. Albania was in economic crisis,
there was war in neighboring Yugoslavia, and the country was emerging
from a repressive, communist past. The student newspaper, which had a
distribution of only 2,000, was shut down by the government.

"It was the closure of the paper that led me to human rights
work," he recalls. He began to record events and send reports to
HRW, a private, nonprofit, international human rights monitoring
organization.

Mr. Abrahams spent months in 1998 and 1999 monitoring events in
Kosovo as the senior field researcher for HRW, and he later testified at
Slobodan Milosevic's trial at the War Crimes Tribunal in the
Hague.

He was sent to Iraq this spring as a consultant for HRW.

"I think Iraq faced immense and intense challenges. It's
cliché to say it, but accurate to say it's much easier
winning the war than the peace. Even the U.S. military was surprised how
quickly the Saddam government fell. What shocked me politically, was
that I was totally stunned by the absence of any postwar plan by the
part of the U.S. government."

What impressed Mr. Abrahams most was the hospitality of the Iraqi
people. "They may not like American soldiers who are there in body
armor and automatic weapons, but when interacting with them I got
invited to numerous lunches. A lot of Iraqis express very sophisticated
political views. Some of them said, ‘Look, I am not Saddam
Hussein, and you are not George Bush. Our governments may disagree, but
we don't hold that against the American people.' "

He spent most of his time in Falluja, a town in central Iraq where
American military had fired on a group of demonstrators, killing 20. The
military claimed they were returning fire; protesters claimed they were
unarmed, and anti-military sentiment was rampant.

"We interviewed about a dozen families whose relatives had
just been killed by American forces. All of those families graciously
took us into their homes - took time, despite their grieving, to
explain their version of events, and were hospitable to the point of
offering us lunch and a place to sleep."

He and a coworker, completely independent from any military
affiliation, traveled around Iraq with a translator and a driver,
checked in regularly with the HRW office. And at night they listened to
the sounds of gunfire, "but it's amazing how quickly you get
accustomed to it," adding, "I don't want to put the
focus on the risks that we go through as human rights researchers. I
mean, we chose this profession."

He pauses to reflect, and says, "For me the main point is to
provide information. I don't have a political message -
well, maybe that human rights should be central to our foreign policy.
Human rights is more than just getting rid of a dictator. It's
helping to promote a system in Iraq that will be respectful of political
and religious rights - things like an independent legal system,
and depoliticized police, and all those rights that we largely take for
granted in the United States. If victory is building a democratic and
stable Iraq, then that will clearly take a long, long time."

Mr. Abrahams will be spending the weekend on the Island to
participate in Cronig family celebrations. His Vineyard reunions, he
says, help him reorient to life at home.

"My main strategy to recalibrate from war crimes and doses of
inhumanity is in nature, and the Vineyard is a huge part of that.
It's my decompression chamber back to normal life. There's
something regenerative about Gay Head, Lake Tashmoo - even the
fried clams at Nancy's. I find it healing."

He and his fiancée, Sarah Kershaw, a New York Times bureau
chief, are based in Seattle, Wash. Mr. Abrahams is completing a book on
the transition to democracy in Albania (for Public Affairs, a member of
the Perseus Book Group in New York).