WAITING FOR THE SUN. WHEN EVERY MEETING CARRIES LOSS
In August nine years ago, Daesh (Islamic State) militiamen arrived in the Sinjar mountains with a specific goal: to exterminate the Ezid community, one of the oldest religious minorities in Iraq's dense mosaic.
Tens of thousands were forced to flee, while thousands were killed or enslaved by al-Baghdadi's men. It was a genocide. We were at their side in those dramatic days and witnessed what was happening.
Almost 10 years after those terrible events, on 8 November we accompanied Farhan and Ghazala, director and programme director of Youth Bridge Organisation of Sinjar (Iraq), to a hearing in Rome before the 'Standing Committee on Human Rights in the World', chaired by the Hon. Laura Boldrini within the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chamber of Deputies.
Together with Farhan and Ghazala, we demanded that Italy also recognise the Ezid genocide, as it has already been recognised by the United Nations, the European Parliament and several national states.
Recognising a genocide means laying the fundamental foundations so that it will never happen again, it means finding solutions to protect the people who suffered it, such as family members or relatives, giving them access (and the right) to some kind of restorative justice.
Italy can play a key role at the international level to provide protection, support and stability to the Ezidic community and other religious minorities, so that history cannot repeat itself. The Standing Committee on Human Rights has undertaken to work towards this goal and we therefore hope that official recognition can be achieved as soon as possible. #RecogniseYazidiGenocide
ALONGSIDE THE EZIDIAN COMMUNITY
"We at Un Ponte Per have always considered the Ezidi activists as dear friends and courageous defenders of human rights, fighting to protect their people from persecution. When we accompanied Italian delegations to northern Iraq and wanted to make people understand how rich and complex Iraq's cultural heritage is, we always guided them to the Ezidi shrine of Lalish. But many aspects of their life and culture remained unknown to us. For example, for years we continued to call them 'Yazidis' unaware that that name represented an attempt by some to misrepresent them as followers of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid I or even to blame them for the assassination of Imam Hussein. Then, in 2014, everything changed. The scale of the previous persecutions that the ezidis had suffered in history took on the character of genocide after the advance of Daesh and its conquest of a vast area of the Nineveh Plain. Daesh occupied the offices of our partners in so many projects, the Ezidi Solidarity and Fraternity League, and our friends became internally displaced persons who had to join us in Erbil and Dohuk. From that moment on, we started to collaborate with Ezidi activists who wanted to document the human rights violations they had suffered, and prove that massacres, enslavement of women and children, forced conversions and exile could be defined as genocide. And this, in the end, was also the opinion expressed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in an official report in March 2015'.
Taken from the Preface by Martina Pignatti Morano to the book "EZIDI IN IRAQ. History, memory and beliefs" by Sa'ad Salloum, published in Italian by Un Ponte Per in one of the very first publications in Italian on this topic.
