Nadia Murad, Yazidi Woman Who Survived ISIS Captivity, Wins Human Rights Prize

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/world/middleeast/yazidis-isis-nadia-murad.html

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Fighters for the Islamic State abducted a young Yazidi woman named Nadia Murad, her siblings and their mother from their village in northern Iraq more than two years ago. Barely in her 20s, Ms. Murad was separated from her family, beaten and sexually assaulted.

Compared with thousands of other Yazidis, followers of a centuries-old religion whom the militant group considers heretical and has killed or enslaved by the thousands, she considers herself fortunate. She managed to escape, and eventually made her way to Germany.

And more: Despite her own trauma, she took up a global campaign to draw attention to the plight of Yazidis being held in sex slavery by the Islamic State or remaining displaced in Iraq. For that work, Ms. Murad was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize on Monday, named in honor of the Czech writer and dissident who served as president of his country for 14 years after the fall of Communism.

The Havel Prize follows on other recognition for Ms. Murad, who is 23. Last month, she was named a United Nations good-will ambassador on behalf of victims of human trafficking. And she was widely mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded on Friday to the president of Colombia.

In a nine-minute address in Strasbourg, France, to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Ms. Murad said she was linked to Mr. Havel by “tragedy, injustice and the search for a glimmer of hope in darkness.”

Ms. Murad said she was exhausted by having to repeatedly speak out about what she has survived. But she also said she knew that other Yazidi women were being raped back home even as she spoke: “I will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when I see people accountable for their crimes.”

Ms. Murad’s story has captured widespread attention. Among the people who have come forward to champion her cause are Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations and Amal Clooney, the British human rights lawyer who now represents her.

But for all that support, her cause is still an uphill one. Although the Islamic State is widely reviled, efforts to have members of the group face international justice for their killing and abuses have been fraught, caught up in international tensions and the chaos of a raging war in northern Iraq and Syria.

“It was a genocide,” she said of the campaign against Yazidis by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “They sought to force us to deny our religion, as they considered us to be nonbelievers. And they killed men and enslaved women, and abducted children in order to transform them into terrorists.”

Girls as young as 8 were kidnapped and made to join “a systematic network of sex slaves,” she said, adding: “I have met young girls who were raped at an age when they didn’t even know what the word meant. I met people who lost their entire families; whole families were wiped out.”

In June, United Nations experts called the Islamic State’s campaign to exterminate Yazidis and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria genocide.

But to hold the militants accountable under international law would take the explicit cooperation of the Iraqi government, as the International Criminal Court, which handles war crimes cases, has no jurisdiction over Iraq or Syria.

Iraq could ask the court to look at crimes committed on its own territory. But it has not done so yet, perhaps in part because the actions of its own pro-government militias would be likely to come under scrutiny if investigators came in. Some point out that it would be difficult to single out the Islamic State when there are so many suspected war crimes being committed in the countries where it operates, Syria and Iraq.

One option under discussion among United Nations Security Council members is to establish a team to investigate all crimes committed by the Islamic State everywhere — not just against Yazidis.

On Monday, Ms. Murad again called for a special international tribunal to prosecute Islamic State fighters as war criminals.

“We cannot have terrorist groups, barbarians, massacring whole peoples, destroying civilizations and cultures, because all people must be able to determine their own lives and nobody should seek to impose their ideas on anyone else,” she told the lawmakers. “We need to have religious freedom, we must accept difference wherever it arises and we must make sure that all parliaments are aware of what happened to us.”

Ms. Murad said that 18 members of her family had either died or disappeared. The Yazidi people, whose ancestral homeland on Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq was overrun by the Islamic State in August 2014, have not been able to return to their villages despite the fact that the terrorist group was pushed off the mountain almost a year ago.

Part of the reason is that the Islamic State dynamited homes as they withdrew; in addition, the government of the Kurdistan region of Iraq has placed tight controls on the types of goods that can be transported onto the mountain, making it difficult for families to get the supplies they need to rebuild.

The majority of the community — whose population in Iraq is estimated at 500,000 — remains displaced, living in sprawling tent cities that were erected in 2014 in the valley to the northeast of the mountain.

Members of the Yazidi community were disappointed that Ms. Murad did not receive the Nobel Prize, but expressed satisfaction at the recognition by the Council of Europe.

“I was watching it live, and I am so, so happy,” said Amena Saeed, a Yazidi activist and a former member of the Iraqi Parliament who has dedicated the last two years to trying to smuggle women out of ISIS captivity. “Nadia — she is a victim, so when the international community gives this to a survivor, what it means is that they feel with us,” she said. “They are sharing our suffering.”

An estimated 5,000 Yazidi people were kidnapped by the Islamic State in 2014 and about 3,000 remain in captivity; according to activists, most are women and girls. Aid workers say that depression and suicide attempts are increasing.

Addressing the United Nations in September, Ms. Murad described her role, speaking repeatedly about her abuse, as a burden, but one she was determined to bear.

“I was not raised to give speeches,” she said. “Neither was I born to meet world leaders, nor to represent a cause so heavy, so difficult,” she said.

But she would continue “so that one day we can look our abusers in the eye in a court in The Hague and tell the world what they have done to us,” she said. “So my community can heal. So I can be the last girl to come before you.”