Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Thursday 13th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I thank him on behalf of everyone, globally, internationally and in the United Kingdom, for his lifelong devotion to those who are unable to worship as they wish and who suffer death for attempting to maintain their family and their community faith. His name, reputation and his activities on their behalf are known absolutely everywhere. I thank him from the bottom of my heart because he is a very great Member of your Lordships’ House.

I have been working more modestly on the issue of genocide against the Yazidis. I first raised this in the House in the autumn of 2014 following the devastating assaults and occupations by ISIL in northern Iraq, where there were unspeakable scenes of torture and death, all supposedly validated by Muslim writings. Mr al-Baghdadi, the leader of this awfulness, claimed in his instruction letter to his assigned rapists that it was the duty of every Muslim to wipe out the Yazidis since they were devil worshippers. His written word—his fatwa—was followed with increasing sadism: rapes and crucifixions, drownings with cameras recording the struggles of bound victims repeated several times with the captives being re-drowned to get stronger and more salacious pictures for the web. It was death pornography using blameless people.

I brought the first rescued rape victims here to give evidence to the Select Committee on PSVI, which I had the honour to chair. The evidence was so terrible that our clerk bowdlerised it at the last moment. It was a clear example of our classic and all too squeamish refusal to face up to the ghastly reality of genocide and its Hieronymus Bosch-like visions of the fourth level of hell. We defy it to be true, but true it is. Unless we, the lucky ones living in peace, accept its foul reality, genocide after genocide and massacre after massacre will continue to stalk our world.

I chair AMAR, an international charitable foundation. On finding desperate victims fleeing from Mosul and dying on the roads to Najaf and in Baghdad, the medical director acted immediately and the staff have not stopped. They are all Iraqi and almost all Muslim—not Yazidi at all; they did not know about them. They stepped in and gave all the help they possibly could to a high-level WHO standard. Doctors, pharmacists, teachers and women health volunteers all rushed to help victims countrywide.

Our London team approached interested individuals, groups, businesses and industry for urgent funding, all of whom responded magnificently. AMAR has continued to serve 350,000 encamped internally displaced people, with the figure rising from 12 June 2014 until today. They are all heroes, especially Dr Ali Nasir Munthanna, Dr Ammar and Rewaq. Very special friends came forward immediately and I shall name them: the Church of the Latter Day Saints charities, Jeff Holland, Sharon Eubank and many other friends and colleagues. Their insight has been superb and their compassion boundless. Right reverend Prelates on the Bishops’ Bench and other colleagues in this House understood immediately the real point at issue: religious persecution demands an understanding of the faith under cruel assault and an acceptance of it as a decent way to live and worship despite—or, dare I suggest, because of—its difference from other faiths that are better tolerated.

Canon Edmund Newell of Cumberland Lodge helped to lead discussions with a number of different faiths. He produced a paper and resolved the theological constraints of the Yazidi. It was a major multifaith achievement to describe the Yazidi faith and has been accepted by the Yazidi Prince and the Spiritual Council as the first and only accurate description of their faith. But still today Yazidis are unsafe in their own country and much more needs to be done. I raise the point particularly in the context of this debate. The Right Reverend Bishop Alastair Redfern has pointed out that the injustice of categorising the Yazidi people and others like them as refugees is that the real issues are obscured, leading to less than appropriate strategies of response. How right he is. Their faith is the key.

We raised the question of whether, for example, the Yazidi faith is a reasonable one. Does it promulgate horror, hatred and extension of “the other”? Some globally accepted faiths do just that. It is not a happy thought at all. But no, the Yazidi faith is blameless of calls for extermination or harassment of the supporters of any other faith. Its daily prayers are mirrored, or we mirror them—I speak as an Anglican—in our nine offices of the day. Like the Jews—our UK laws and customs are Judeo-Christian-based—Yazidis are hard workers and decent people who produce high-level professionals and follow the rule of law, which should enable their faith to be accepted into the world’s faiths after it was discarded by the Ottoman Empire. In our multifaith world, we must take them in. The Westminster declaration that we pulled together calls for signatures to enable that to happen.

The second question, therefore, is why their future and the futures of people like them are so uncertain. After the genocide of the Holocaust, the generation of my grandparents and parents declared, “Never again”—but that has not been the case at all. As the co-author with Dr Neil Quilliam of a paper coming out next week, I feel that genocide—and its ugly sister, massacres on religious grounds—has a horrible similarity in consistent occurrence and sameness of methods. We have carefully pulled apart religious persecutions carried out over 500 years by most major faiths. This is the key: we have to accept that religious persecution is at the heart of most of these genocides.

I ask noble Lords to recognise the Yazidi faith and work to help other genocide and massacre victims to identify their identity. Religion is liable to be at the heart of that identity. If we do not do that and secular societies everywhere continue to sideline faith, we cannot save the victims or survivors—and their families—of religious discrimination.

I will end with a quotation from Prince Tahsin, the head of the Yazidi people. He asked me to tell your Lordships that he wants to take this opportunity to thank the British Government and the AMAR Foundation for the great humanitarian work that the British do. He said:

“We know that nobody can change the fact that four years ago, genocide of the Yazidi people made my community lose their faith in humanity. Thousands of members of our religion were murdered. Many endured the horror of being burned alive and 3,000 young women and children are still missing. The famous Mount Sinjar is still not safe. Approximately 200,000 Yazidi people are still in camps without any idea of what’s going to happen to them in the next few years. On this stage, we would like to say that we need international help and, more importantly, we need to rebuild our lives. Please deliver this message to the entire world on our behalf. Thank you. Prince Tahsin”.