Nadia Murad Bansee Taha at the state parliament in Hanover, Germany, 31 May 2016. Photo: Julian Stratenschulte/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

Yazidi activist and ISIS survivor Nadia Murad has been named this year’s Nobel peace prize winner, along with Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege, for their efforts to end sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.

Nadia endured more than three months in ISIS captivity after her village, Kocho, was overrun by militants on 3 August 2014. Troops from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) Peshmerga had left their positions all over the mainly Yazidi area of Mount Sinjar, in northern Iraq, to defend the city of Duhok after the fall of Mosul that June.

Her mother is believed to be buried in one of the mass graves found close to her village after it was retaken by the Peshmerga; she also lost brothers, sisters and nephews. Nadia’s niece, “sister and soulmate” was killed by a landmine whilst making her own daring escape from ISIS in 2016. Nadia took her passing particularly badly; by then she was safely ensconced in Germany and already advocating for rescues and aid.

Of the 331 individuals and organisations nominated for the Nobel peace prize this year, Nadia is absolutely the most deserved winner. I will freely admit my bias here: I met her first in the summer of 2015, during a trip to the UK with the AMAR Foundation. On this visit, she met the late Sue Lloyd-Roberts, whose last Newsnight dispatch before she passed away featured Nadia and two other ISIS survivors (all anonymously).

Yazidism, prior to the 2014 genocide, expelled those who had any sexual contact with non-Yazidis. Baba Sheikh, the religions patriarch, changed this when he said that those who had been in ISIS captivity should be honoured as “holy women”. This was hugely significant, removing some of the shame of speaking out about sexual violence and ensuring that ‘returnees’ were supported by their community.

In London, members of the Yazidi diaspora made long journeys from all over the UK to greet and honour Nadia and the two other girls, bringing small gifts, food and flowers. There was (almost) as much kissing and laugher as there were tears.

When Nadia talked, activists Ahmed Khuddiha and Mahar Nawaf and I struggled to retain the composure she kept throughout. Dressed entirely in black, she showed me scars still visible on her skin. Over the past four years, colour has slowly crept into her wardrobe and many of these wounds will have healed. But the toll of telling and retelling her story has left its own kind of mark.

Colour has slowly crept into her wardrobe and many of these wounds will have healed. But the toll of telling and retelling her story has left its own kind of mark.

Speaking out, Nadia explained that first day, is her way of fighting back. For her community, she has told her story again and again, expecting that assistance will follow. With notable exceptions including Germany’s Baden-Wuttenberg programme, that support remains largely elusive, inadequate, or in some cases, misdirected.

Inspired by meeting the survivors, I worked with Change.org and the brilliant Yazidi activist Rozin Khahil, a 17-year-old living in the UK, and in the middle of her A-levels at the time, to ask Theresa May, then Home Secretary, to help rescue 3,000 others still in captivity.

From Yazda activists, I received lists of missing people, including phone numbers (some of which still rang), and information about where they were being held. Yazda had shared this information with officials in Kurdistan, Iraq, the US and the UK, but no rescue missions were launched. They gave it to me in desperation, and I joined long email and whatsapp chains where people exchanged pictures of the missing and dead.

The advocacy and activism of Yazidi people in Iraq, and the diaspora, managed to free hundreds of those captured. In Duhok in late 2015, I visited camps where those freed from captivity lived, along with those displaced by the war. Conditions were appalling. I heard harrowing stories of sexual violence, torture and mass murder.

A woman stands in the Sharya refugee camp near the Northern Iraqi city of Dohuk, Iraq, October 2015. Photo: Stefanie Järkel/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

The only groups I saw providing aid in the camps – a year after the genocide – were the United Nations and the Germans. The UK Foreign Office told me at the time that our government was giving “support to all victims and vulnerable persons, including Yazidis, rather than specifically to Yazidis or any other group”.

Though the Yazidis had been singled out by ISIS as a minority ethnic group, efforts to help them from the UK did not. The same sectarianism and discrimination that the Yazidis experienced in war, and had experienced in Kurdistan for generations, was also evident in approaches to assist them in the aftermath of genocide.

The UK gave to a pooled UN humanitarian fund, and said it supported sexual violence awareness projects in the region – but couldn’t give me many details, due to safety issues of local partners.

The same sectarianism and discrimination that the Yazidis experienced in war, and had experienced in Kurdistan for generations, was also evident in approaches to assist them in the aftermath of genocide.

Many Yazidis believe that money intended for them was siphoned off by the KRG to pay for the costly war their Peshmerga troops were, at the time, still losing. The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) then consolidated their position in Sinjar, and took many Yazidis recruits within the ranks of their Syrian affiliate, the YPG. Some of these included ISIS escapees, to more tabloid fanfare.

Nadia’s resolve and furious eloquence in sharing her story soon turned her into a spokesperson of her Yazidi people. In 2016, at just 23, she was named the UN’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She has been lauded by politicians and supported by celebrities – notably Amal Clooney, who wrote a moving forward to Nadia’s recently-published book, The Last Girl.

Nadia Murad with her book The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, 2017. Photo: Luiz Rampelotto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

When we met again in 2016, when Nadia spoke at the UK House of Commons at the invitation of MP Brendan O’Hara, she was being showered with gifts.
As she became more famous, her story and that of the Yazidi genocide in general became easier for me to pitch to editors. But her message, in my mind, began to get lost. The terminology used to describe her – sex slave, ISIS hostage, sexual violence victim – was muddy and de-emphasised her and other survivors’ heroism.

What was lost was the reason that survivors spoke up: their wider concern for their community. Each of the escapees I met all conveyed this very clearly. They had made a simple calculation, waging that telling their story would help their families. Despite the intense personal toll, they persisted.

But instead of the stories of heroism in escaping ISIS captivity, the media focus shifted to the forms of sexual torture they had endured. As a feminist and a freelance journalist, newly let loose from the comforts of the newsroom, I found this disempowering in so many ways.

I had so much information I was expected to hand over to big-name media partners I knew well enough not to trust. Relationships I spent months building, with people I cared about, I was expected to hand over for a pat on the head and a day rate. I knew they wanted to make sexual victimhood horror stories and I felt complicit. If I couldn’t see the impact, what was the point? By that stage, no one could say they ‘didn’t know’.

If I couldn’t see the impact, what was the point? By that stage, no one could say they ‘didn’t know’.

A low point was discussing a potential documentary with a male commissioner who insisted that Nadia (still maintaining her anonymity at the time) and the other girls would have to show their faces whilst detailing their experiences of sexual violence.

Otherwise, he insisted, we’d be denying viewers “anything to look at.” We discussed videos of sexual assaults I had heard that ISIS fighters were sharing. I got home and decided this wasn’t a search I wanted to undertake. I didn’t get commissioned.

I eventually stepped back, but Nadia kept on going, writing her book, meeting Hillary Clinton when she seemed about to be the first female US president, touring the world advocating on behalf of victims everywhere including meeting Boko Haram survivors. All whilst learning English and German and, earlier this year, getting engaged.

Like other Yazidi survivors I met, Nadia considers herself lucky. She talked more about what happened to her family and her community, than what happened to herself. She was in captivity for far less time than other girls, she would say. She’s safe and well in Germany; she has many nice things. I wasn’t to worry about her; there were many others.  

Her Nobel peace prize deserves to be celebrated, but it cannot make up for the serious lack of international commitment to her cause. The tacit deal she made with us – with me, as with every journalist she spoke to – has been broken by our collective inaction.

Help to find those missing is still needed. Resettlement programmes must be supported along with adequate aid and meaningful education facilities in camps; medical treatment for the displaced, support for those who want to return to Sinjar; and some kind of dignified identification of remains that still lie decaying in open air mass graves.

By telling her story so bravely, Nadia has done her part – again and again and again. Now it’s time for the international community to do theirs.

Lara Whyte is a reporter and award-winning documentary and news producer focusing on issues of youth, extremism and women’s rights. Originally from Belfast in northern Ireland, Lara is based in London. She is 50.50’s special projects editor working with our feminist investigative journalism fellows and tracking the backlash against sexual and reproductive rights. Find her on Twitter: @larawhyte.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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A Youth for Life anti-abortion campaigner. Photo: Youth for Life/Facebook.

Irish politicians have been deaf to the clamour of women’s voices calling for abortion rights for decades. Despite being the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote (in 2015), the republic of Ireland still maintains an abortion regime stricter than Saudi Arabia’s.

Abortion is legal in Ireland only when the mother’s life is at risk. The country’s constitutional misogyny has baffled fellow European states and earned it the censure of international groups including the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and Amnesty International.

In northern Ireland, women carry the passports but not the entitlements of British citizens (who have had access to legal abortions for 50 years, since 1967). This island seems united in its deliberate disregard for women’s fundamental rights if nowhere else; those seeking terminations from either side of the border must travel abroad.

‘This island seems united in its deliberate disregard for women’s fundamental rights if nowhere else.’

Yesterday the Irish government announced that a referendum will be held next year, in May or June, on whether to repeal a constitutional amendment that gives equal rights to a woman and her unborn child, thus opening the door to legalising abortion.

Battle lines have been drawn between those who want the eighth amendment repealed, and those fighting to keep it. In northern Ireland, anti-abortion lobbying has so far succeeded in blocking attempts to bring reproductive rights in line with the rest of the UK.

On the frontline are two anti-abortion groups who work loosely together across the border: Precious Life in northern Ireland and Youth Defence in the south.

In the past, both groups spent their time protesting against family planning clinics holding nightmarish posters purporting to show ‘the aborted baby’ (despite the fact that abortion was already illegal) and assuring those of us trying to enter that we were going straight to hell.

Today these groups have successfully attracted articulate millennial women to their ranks, who are then placed front and centre to recruit others. Grisly images remain, but threats of eternal damnation have been replaced with “Love Life” protests and “Rally For Life” marches.

The tone has titled to mirror the language of human rights activism and growing pro-choice movements that have been propelled by a new and active, engaged and connected generation. The last five years have seen rising pro-choice mobilisation in Dublin, Belfast and elsewhere, amid ‘repeal the eighth’ campaigns.

Precious Life at the ‘Rally for Life’ in Dublin. Photo: Lucy Kelly/Youth for Life/Facebook.

In July I joined the youth brigade of Precious Life, called Youth For Life NI, as they embarked on a summer roadshow tour of northern Ireland. They visited eight towns and cities in a week, almost at the same time as a similar Youth Defence tour, which made 17 stops across the rest of Ireland over ten days.

Appointed to speak to me was the eloquent and charming 20-year-old Lucy Kelly, who joined Precious Life through an affiliate group at Queen’s University in Belfast, where she studies law. Kelly describes herself as a “pro-life feminist”. She’s a committed campaigner and, I gathered, a serial over-achiever.

“Abortion is absolutely femicide”, she told me. “Consider who is aborted now – over half of the babies are female. So many times it’s about gender selective abortions. It’s this whole thing about women’s rights, but what about a woman’s right to be born?”

“What about a woman’s right to be born?”

Kelly is a strong communicator and her talent is clearly being recognised within the organisation. At this year’s ‘Rally For Life’ in Dublin, she was tasked with introducing the entire march before it kicked off.

This march is the highlight of the Irish anti-abortion calendar, and a potent display of the immensely well-connected, church-backed and community-centred lobby. This year, organisers claim 70,000 people attended (though this figure is disputed).

When we met, Kelly and half a dozen other young activists were cheerfully handing out pamphlets, featuring improbable horror stories from US abortion clinics, to shoppers caught in Belfast’s summer rain.

They had set up a table displaying aged plastic props – a womb and vagina, and foetuses at different stages of development – and advertisements for Stanton Healthcare, founded by US Christian activist Brandi Swindell, that opened its first overseas anti-abortion clinic in Belfast in 2014, on the same central street as reproductive rights charity Marie Stopes.

Swindell, described by Cosmopolitan magazine as ‘the woman who wants to take down Planned Parenthood’, is also one of the founders of a group called ‘Generation Life’, which recruits young anti-abortion campaigners and teaches abstinence as a form of contraception. Swindell has also worked with Youth Defence in Ireland.

Lucy Kelly (left) in Dublin at the ‘Rally For Life’. Photo: Youth for Life/Facebook.

“We are not anti-women”, Kelly insists. “We want to save both the life of the mother and the life of the baby – we want better care for both.”

Youth for Life is small – “we’re about 30 really pro-active and engaged members,” Kelly says – but has a large network of supporters offline and, increasingly, online. Among other things Precious Life sends out weekly emails, which Youth For Life contributes to, with updates for supporters and requests for donations.

Their funding, Kelly insists, does not come from the US, as is widely believed to be the case, and instead is from “grassroots” activists. But there is certainly a level of collaboration across the Atlantic. “Pro-life people stick together,” she says. “The big march in Washington DC, [the] numbers get bigger every year. Some of us are actually hoping to go…this year.”

There are also links being built across Europe: for this summer’s roadshow in northern Ireland, the group was also joined by activists from a Slovakian anti-abortion group. “People all over seem to be waking up,” says Kelly.

“Pro-life people stick together.”

Kelly laments that “the media are very biased in favour of abortion,” and that “the media totally misinforms people of the facts.” To this she said: “bring on the referendum, because you will lose.”
There’s a slightly counter-culture feel to it all: Kelly’s group is small, but everyone I meet is under 30 and appears deeply invested in trying to win over the hearts and minds of those few members of the public who did stop to challenge their views.

They presented themselves as activists for truth more than God, who wasn’t mentioned as far as I could hear – at least not in the conversations I was trying to earwig.

Young anti-abortion activists on the roadshow. Photo: Youth for Life/Facebook.

“Something we don’t hear about is how women die in legal abortions,” Kelly adds. “There was a woman from Ireland who died in Marie Stopes in London. Hundreds of women have [died] from so-called safe and legal abortion – look it up online.”

The weaving together of facts, anecdote and fictions is disarming. Abortion is a safe medical procedure (in the US less than 1% of terminations results in complications), but it’s likely she was talking about the preventable death of 32-year-old Aisha Chithira who died in London hours after having an abortion at 22 weeks in January 2012.

At the time, Chithira’s husband told the The Irish Times that she had first gone to a maternity hospital in Dublin but was denied a termination. In Ireland on student visas, the couple’s journey to England was delayed as they raised travel funds. Late term abortions carry significantly higher risks; staff involved in Chithira’s care were cleared of negligence charges in 2016.

But this tragedy has been twisted by both Precious Life and Youth Defence online, and seized upon by activists in the US who leverage the immense power of social media to tell highly emotional stories peppered with truth that promote their agenda.

“The internet helps massively of course”, Kelly told me. “Social media is massive for us, and when it’s used well it can be extremely effective.”

“Social media is massive for us.”

The array of websites framed by anti-rights and anti-abortion ideology that have emerged over the past decade could be seen as a case study in the power of “fake news”.

During the roadshow, another young woman anti-abortion activist said: “I wasn’t always pro-life, I agreed with abortion under some circumstances, but then I saw something on Facebook that had a profound impact on me.” Then, she said, “the more I started looking into it and researching it on Facebook, the more pro-life I became.”

Grim online videos, including notoriously deceptive 2015 undercover films, made by the anti-abortion Centre for Medical Progress inside Planned Parenthood clinics in the US, are particularly potent currency on Facebook.

In the social media giant’s attempts to become a video-led platform, algorithms alert users to videos based on their ‘likes’. And so a particularly distressing video by a man called Dr. Anthony Levatino recently appeared on my radar.

The video, which has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube alone, purports to show a first-trimester abortion. It’s currently at the centre of a hunger strike outside Irish parliament, by a young man who says he will not eat until the prime minister watches it.

The hunger striker is also a member of Youth Defence, and has previously run as an independent candidate in the Irish general election. Being anti-abortion in Ireland brings a certain level of political capital with it that election hopefuls eagerly cash in.

This year’s Rally for Life march in Dublin. Photo: Youth for Life/Facebook.

This summer, Kelly found a number of male politicians willing to appear in a Youth for Life promotional video that is now on their Facebook page.

What’s more, she said that one of the politicians featured in the video boasted, separately, about refusing to help a constituent who came to his office asking for assistance to get to England to obtain an abortion.

“I don’t ever feel like I am on the losing side.”

“We were really lucky with the roadshow in that most of the major parties agreed to meet us,” said Kelly, naming the SDLP, UUP and DUP as among them. “Our big campaign at the moment is ‘lobby for life’…to encourage people to contact their representatives, as they will be the ones deciding on any changes to the law.”

Northern Ireland’s first minister Arlene Foster also met with Youth for Life this summer, and assured them that she would work to protect existing anti-abortion laws.

Looking ahead, Kelly seemed confident that the eighth amendment will stay in place, and that northern Ireland will continue to be a place where women’s reproductive rights are restricted.
“There will always be obstacles, but we have to stay positive,” she said. “In the pro-life movement, everyone is extremely happy. Everyone is fighting for life. I don’t ever feel like I am on the losing side.”

Lara Whyte is an investigative journalist and award-winning documentary and news producer focusing on issues of youth, extremism and women’s rights. Originally from Belfast in northern Ireland, Lara is based in London. She is currently commissioning editor (special projects) for 50.50 tracking the backlash against sexual and reproductive rights. Find her on Twitter: @larawhyte.

Courtesy: Open Democracy
 

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