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LAST week, a young Yazidi woman named Nadia Murad was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Award. Her story is a truly harrowing one. In July 2014, Nadia was just an ordinary girl living in the village of Kocho in northern Iraq. In her own words, she lived a simple life, with little idea of just how harrowing life could become.
Yazidis, members of an ancient religious sect, have lived in the region for hundreds of years and have been declared ‘kafir’ by the militant Islamic State group, which was set to kill as many of them as they could.
That is exactly what they would try to do to Nadia and her family and thousands of other Yazidis in the village.
On Aug 15, 2014, Nadia and her family along with the other villagers were told to walk to the school at the edge of the village. All around them they saw IS fighters they had previously seen only on television. Once all the villagers were in the building, the men were separated from the women and children. According to the United Nations, 312 men were murdered in a single hour, along with six of Nadia’s own brothers and stepbrothers. Young women like Nadia were all grouped together and taken to the Iraqi city of Mosul.
The transnational human rights apparatus is failing the casualties of IS.
In Mosul, the women were distributed among IS fighters, who have declared all captured non-Muslim women as spoils of war. Many tried to kill themselves by slitting their wrists or even smearing battery acid on their faces rather than bear enslavement. According to Nadia, women would be told to wash and clean up.
Then they were taken to the ‘courts’ that the IS has established in Mosul. There, they would be photographed and their pictures pinned on a billboard. Underneath would be the telephone number of the fighter who currently ‘owned’ them. This was done so that the men could swap women amongst themselves.
One morning it was Nadia’s turn, and she, along with three of her nieces, was marched to the ‘court’. A large man with long hair wanted to take her but she begged another fighter, a tall and thin man, to take her instead.
It would not make her ordeal any easier. The man kept her captive in a room and sexually abused her, despite the fact that he prayed five times a day and had a wife and child. Her first attempt at escape did not succeed; instead she was punished by being locked in a room with six IS fighters who abused her until she fell unconscious.
According to IS fighters, who have revived the institution of slavery, women like Nadia were ‘sabia’, or slaves, whom they were entitled to take. One day, one of Nadia’s captors forgot to lock his door and it was then that Nadia managed to escape and run away to safety. She was taken to a refugee camp and managed to eventually escape to Germany.
Nadia Murad’s courage deserves to be acknowledged again and again. It is a testament to the callousness of the world that it is permitting such crimes to occur against women like Nadia. Even more troubling is the fact that millions of Muslims, who take to the streets to protest against controversial images, do not feel similarly compelled to do so against the militant group’s distortion of their faith. Thousands of Yazidis remain in IS captivity and undoubtedly many women like Nadia are being abused even as this article was being written. Many Muslims refuse to believe the accounts of suffering so as to absolve themselves of the responsibility to act.
At the same time, the transnational human rights apparatus is also failing the casualties of IS. Even as women like Nadia Murad are honoured with human rights awards, other casualties of the conflict are being largely ignored by the very Western governments that have the power to help them.
As Nadia received the award, named after Czech writer and dissident Vaclav Havel, the Czech government was proposing a complete ban on all refugees from the region. As is well-known, most Western countries have undertaken similar legislative measures in recent months, tightening refugee and asylum procedures such that they do not have to provide refuge to the hapless masses that are driven out by the fighting.
Nadia Murad is represented by Amal Clooney, the celebrity lawyer who is married to Hollywood star George Clooney. The alignment between stardom and celebrity and Nadia’s courage means that she will appear at countless galas and star-studded events. Her appointment as a UN goodwill ambassador means she will be asked to testify, her testimony being duly recorded by the many bureaucratic limbs of the UN. At the same time, it is her very incorporation into this world that is likely to make her largely impotent in producing any real change.
The Muslim world, it seems, cannot be shamed into launching a moral war against IS and the grotesque abuses it is visiting on innocent women and children.
At the same time, the Western world, its borders shut tight, has limited its responsibilities to the handing out of token awards to brave women. Once this is done, these women are invited to appear at events, make statements on human rights days and attend keynote conferences about the welfare of women. Yet, even as they do all of this, their words are not heard. Theirs is a role, the part of the authentic and courageous survivor, who speaks but is never heard, who asks for change again and again, but whose pleas are impotent, expected but never accepted. It is easy, it seems, for the West to laud their individual courage and leave it at that.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn October 19th, 2016
