Behind Bars

“I believe that civil society organisations will work to bring peace to Yemen.” Laila Al Thawr

Laila was a housewife living a normal stable life until 2011, when the youth revolution took place. She saw from the window of her house, overlooking the sit-in squares, all that was going on outside. She decided at that moment to work with civil society organisations, to help change the political situation in Yemen. She began working in the political and social arenas to establish an alliance that brings together civil society organisations to work together under one roof to achieve their goal. But things do not always unfold as they should do.

After the war erupted in 2015, Laila had established an organisation for the defence of rights and freedoms, when a child approached her with a request that completely changed her course. The child, who had been detained in Aden, asked her to help him to release his friend, who was still in detention.

Laila took this on as a personal case and decided to look for the child held by groups in the South, where she faced complex networks. She realised the magnitude of the tragedy experienced by a large number of detainees of all parties. She negotiated with everyone in her capacity as director of her organisation.

Laila did not listen to those voices which belittled her ability to free this detained child because of the complexity of the situation and the difficulty of negotiating with conflict parties. Instead she surprised everyone with her resolve. She came back with a comprehensive prisoner exchange agreement with the leader of the organisation that had detained the child. From then on Laila had the trust of all parties and worked to free prisoners from both sides.

Unfortunately, in one of the deals the location of the of the exchange was revealed, and an extremist group attacked the exchange with shelling. Rumours spread that negotiations had failed, proliferating a wave of despair and frustration among detainees that pushed some of them to try to end their lives, while others went on hunger strike. This led Laila to re-double her efforts. She contacted the detainees to calm them down and called upon them to stop the strike, pledging to get them out of detention. In the end all were released, thanks to her efforts.

Laila then returned to look for other prisoners, not only to give them hope, but to give them freedom too. Her efforts have contributed to freeing 4000 detainees since the beginning of the war.