Daesh: Genocide of Minorities

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Like others, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for giving the House the opportunity to respond to the pleas that we have heard from a number of Yazidi young women who have come here to tell us not just of their experience, but of the plight of those like them who remain in captivity.

The hon. Member for Glasgow East (Natalie McGarry) gave a passionate speech, in which she quoted Ekhlas’s words yesterday. I too had written down those words. As other Members have said, we have heard from Nadia Murad, who, in a meeting hosted by the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O'Hara) and sponsored by the all-party parliamentary group on human rights, told us of her experiences. We also heard from Salwa Khalaf Rasho, in March. I pay tribute to all hon. Members who have hosted women witnesses who have come to give us their testimony: the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), and the hon. Members for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), for Newark (Robert Jenrick), and for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts). I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), who has such experience in the region.

This is what we heard from Nadia:

“Islamic State had one intention, to destroy the Yazidi identity by force, rape, recruitment of children and the destruction of holy sites they captured, especially against Yazidi women where they used rape as a means of destruction for Yazidi women and girls, ensuring these women will never return to a normal life. But it was not only me who suffered, it was a collective suffering. The Islamic State gave us two choices, convert or die. For those who accepted to convert, fearing for their lives, their men were killed, women were enslaved and children were recruited.”

She went on to speak of the desperate journeys that many people tried to make. She not only appealed to us to recognise the genocide happening to her people—and other minorities, including Christians in Iraq and Syria—for what it is, but asked:

“Open your borders for my community, we are victims of a genocide and we have the right to seek a safe place where our dignity will be preserved. We request that to give Yazidis and other threatened minorities the choice to resettle, especially the victims of human trafficking, as Germany did.”

Nadia wrote to us only this week, again not just asking us to recognise what the Yazidis are suffering as genocide, but asking the UK to undertake a programme similar to that in Germany, where 1,000 Yazidi women and girls were admitted for treatment and counselling on special two-year visas.

As I said, we also heard from Salwa Khalaf Rasho, who told us how she and other people contemplated suicide as they were being separated into different groups at 3 o’clock in the morning in a sports hall in Mosul, after a day of humiliating and molested travel by bus. They knew what was happening. She told us how, some days later after even more treatment like this, a 17-year-old girl, Gilan from Tal Afar, committed suicide. After she learned that Daesh had killed her family, she cut her wrists. In revenge, the Daesh terrorists took her dead body and threw it to the dogs.

We know from all that we have heard that this is indeed genocide. We should not be cavilling, quibbling or hesitating about this. We know that the depraved crimes of Daesh are unspeakable, but that should not mean that we should fail to call this the genocide that it truly is. According to the UN, genocide is killing members of a specific group, causing grievous harm, deliberately inflicting conditions designed to bring about the group’s destruction, preventing births within the community, or forcibly transferring its children.

We know that those who are perpetrating these crimes are doing so to exterminate and extinguish a people. We know that they mean what they are doing to be genocide, with all its bloody and awful consequences. We know that those who are suffering from these terrible crimes know that it is genocide and know that it is meant as genocide. Why should we as a Chamber hesitate to say, “We know what the word genocide means, and we know it is being committed against the Yazidi people”?