UK Asylum and Refugee Policy

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

I thank the most reverend Primate for the opportunity that he has given us by challenging us to respond to the enormous problem of forced migration. I speak today about religious persecution as a driver, probably the key driver, for forced migration. We have with us today His Highness Prince Hazem of the Yazidis. All will recall that the Yazidis are perhaps the most persecuted minority of all at the moment. Of course, there are many others as well, but the Yazidis are victims of genocide, which is of course the worst crime in the UN convention assembly.

My colleagues and I have worked hard in recent years to do everything we can to support the Yazidis in their enfeebled situation in camps in northern Iraq and we have come out with one or two important conclusions which I shall put before the House and hope that we may have the opportunity to discuss, privately or in groups, at another place.

We have formed the Windsor Dialogue, under the chairmanship of Bishop Alastair Redfern and with the support of Canon Edmund Newell, Rev Dr Paul Edmondson and other members of Westminster Abbey, including the dean himself. With the Yazidi spiritual council, which is headed by the prince himself, we have tied ourselves to another oppressed and persecuted religious minority which has broken through, become immensely successfully and given us an example of what can be achieved: the Latter-day Saints—the LDS—also known as the Mormons. We have Jeffrey Holland as our co-chairman, and we work hard with Sharon Eubank and the US friends of the AMAR Foundation, which is generating energy to support dialogue.

We brought ourselves together because we learned that the excuse for the genocidal actions by ISIS against the Yazidis was that they were supposed to worship the devil. This has led us to the conclusion, looking in great detail over a number of years at the issue of refugees everywhere and forced migration, that religious persecution is a very important driver of forced migration. Without looking at the religious persecution angle, you cannot recover the lives, livelihoods and agency of those who have been beaten, oppressed and forced to become sex slaves and endure other disgusting activities that humans undertake when they lose their thread of morality.

We have worked intensively in the camps, and have been practical by building, equipping and running health centres. We have also brought in music, IT, English language and business training, and now we are starting to be able to offer jobs. We particularly focused on music because the prayers of the Yazidis are all sung, and we found that the onslaught on them was intensified by the onslaught on their own religion. That meant that those who held the music in their heads—the priests of the Yazidi spiritual council—were the ones whom ISIS was ultimately targeting. Indeed, at one point I could count only just over 10 remaining priests, meaning that the entirety of their equivalent of the Sistine Chapel, Westminster Abbey or Canterbury Cathedral was in the heads of just a very few priests, who were being targeted by their bitter enemy, the ISIS rebels. So we recorded the music with the agreement of the prince of the Yazidis, and it is stored in the Bodleian Library, so it can never be lost again. It has given us an understanding of what happens when your religion is attacked.

It seems that your religion is a key part of your identity, your personality. Of course, in Britain we like to think that religion does not count, and we simply discard the knowledge that 83% of the globe belongs to one faith or another, the principal faith being Christianity, the second being Islam, and then Hinduism and so on; and then, we have wonderful minority faiths such as the Yazidi faith. Understanding the reason for the onslaught was one of our key first efforts, and we have managed to articulate and write down what the Yazidi faith is. The prince’s predecessor, who is sadly dead, said that this was the first time ever that their faith had been properly and accurately written down, without being targeted by an onslaught claiming that it was wrong. The treatment of the Yazidis as a supposed enemy rests on this bizarre concept that they worship the devil. Of course, that is not the case at all, but it is very odd how humans refuse to dislodge an idea when it gets in their heads, and there remains an awful lot of thinking around that idea at the moment. So, first, we understood the reason for the onslaught and then we worked out how to tackle it.

Today, I am very happy to say that instead of a disaster, we now believe that we have a way out and a way forward. In that belief, which we are writing down, researching and will be presenting, we have the support of the UNHCR and the World Health Organization, and we hope very much that the formula we are developing may be of use and value elsewhere too. The Yazidis themselves are very happy to know that their suffering can help others. Much of that formula is based on music, and I am very pleased to say that we have been able to perform to King Charles and in the Bodleian Library, Westminster Abbey and St. George’s Chapel, Windsor: Exaltati, sing unto God, is basically where we are coming from. It is time to restart how we look at refugees by seeing them as a tremendously capable group of people, and to help them flourish, perform, be successful and be victims no longer.