Military Concubine: For which Nadia Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize
"My story, told honestly and in a dry language, - the best weapon against terrorism that I have, and I plan to use it until these terrorists are brought to justice. "This is a line from the autobiography of Nadi Murad, an Yezidi activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize last week" for efforts to stop using sexual violence as a weapon in military conflicts "- she is the only laureate from Iraq in the history of the award.
alexander savina
Yezidis are a Kurdish ethno-confessional group living apart, professing their own religion — Yezidism (in it you can find elements of Christianity and Islam) and opposing any confusion with other nations: Yezidis cannot marry a Christian or a Muslim. On the struggle of the "Islamic state" (a terrorist organization whose activities are prohibited in the territory of the Russian Federation. - Note ed.) with Yezidis, whom they consider to be “incorrect” because they do not profess Islam, it is customary to speak in dry numbers and facts: the true scale is unknown, thousands of people are still in captivity, some experts believe that military conflict can be regarded as genocide . According to experts, in August 2014 about 10 thousand Yezidis suffered from the actions of ISIL. More than three thousand died; half were executed (shot, beheaded or burned alive), the rest died from starvation, dehydration and injuries during the siege of Yezidi territories by the militants of the Islamic State. The militants took nearly 7,000 people into captivity, most of them women who had been sexually enslaved (according to some victims, some of the ISIL militants believe that the “unfaithful” woman who was raped ten times becomes Muslim).
The story of Nadi Murad lends this dry volume facts. For the first time she told the general public about what she experienced, in December 2015 - then she spoke at a meeting of the UN committee, and before that she was hiding under the witness protection program. Everything that had happened to her — sexual slavery, the killing of relatives, attempts to escape, risking her life — Nadya spoke detachedly and seemed to be deliberately calm, and just finished, she covered her face with her hands. Nadia Murad was born in the Yezidi village of Kocho in northern Iraq. Her relatives, like the whole village, were engaged in agriculture; she almost graduated from school and wanted to become a teacher, and until the summer of 2014 everything was calm - but then there was an invasion of the "Islamic State". In August 2014, ISIS militants seized the Yezidi town of Sinjar and the villages close to it. The Murad family did not manage to escape, and they spent several days in the village occupied by the militants, until the remaining residents were given an ultimatum: to convert to Islam or die. The next day, August 15, the militants drove all the villagers to school: the women and children were taken to the second floor, and the men were forced to stay on the first floor. “Their emir shouted to us from below:“ Who wants to convert to Islam, go out and the rest remain in school. ”None of us, neither women nor men, wanted to convert to Islam. Nobody left school, Nadya recalls. they put all the men in pick-up trucks - all 700 people - and drove them away from the village, not far, two hundred meters. We ran to the windows and saw how they shot them. I saw it with our eyes. " Six Nadi brothers — five relatives and one stepbrother — as well as cousins and other relatives were killed under execution.
Yazid women, according to Murad, in ISIS were perceived as trophies or goods that can be exchanged for something more valuable. After the shooting, women and children were taken to the next village, where they were divided into four groups: married, elderly, children and young girls. Nadia was also among the latter: “We, the young girls, turned out to be one hundred and fifty, from 9 to 25 years old. We were taken to the park. Eighty elderly women were taken out of school and killed them, because the militants did not want to take them as concubines. They were all my fellow villagers. Among them was my mother. "
The surviving women, whom the militants considered attractive, were taken to Mosul - in each bus with them a militant rode, who examined them and in turn harassed each one. A couple of days later, in Mosul, women began to "hand out" property to ISIL militants. In different interviews, Murad describes the process differently, but each of these descriptions is equally creepy. She tells the Novaya Gazeta that the girls were screaming, many were vomiting with fear, they fainted. Time, she says that women tried to make themselves more "ugly", shaggy hair, smeared with battery acid on the face, but this did not help: they were required to wash again and put on "distribution". Many tried to commit suicide - in one of the houses where Nadia managed to visit, on the walls were the bloody prints of the hands of two dead women. Those who were taken by the fighter were photographed, and the pictures were hung on the wall in the Islamic court of Mosul, along with the number and name of the person to whom they gave her - the men could change concubines among themselves, sell them and rent them out.
The day when she herself was sent into slavery, Nadia Murad always describes the same way: the militant chose her ("a very big man, like a cupboard, as if it were five people together, all in black"), she screamed and resisted because she did not want to leave nieces, with whom she was imprisoned, and was afraid of a man. She was thrown on the floor - she saw the legs of another man, not so high, and, not looking at his face, she began to beg to take her away. Whether this choice was correct, Murad does not know so far - the man turned out to be the field commander from Mosul, Haji Salman, and, according to her, she did not meet such a ruthless person. Salman had a wife and a daughter, but during her life in his house, Nadia never met them. He violently raped her many times, and after she tried to escape and caught her, beat her, forced her to undress and gave her to six security guards until she lost consciousness.
Murad was resold several times and exchanged for other girls; living conditions in other homes were no better. This continued until, in November 2014, she finally managed to escape: she ran out of the house, knocked on strangers and asked to hide her for the night. The owners of the house were not associated with the "Islamic State" and agreed to help her. The girl's surviving brother, who was in a refugee camp, transferred money to them (according to Nadi, this is a common story of salvation — relatives who buy slaves for large sums of money). The owner of the house helped her to move to another city, he went with her by taxi - she covered her face with a burqa and used his wife's identity card. Everyone checked only her documents, although at all checkpoints hung her photos with an open face. She managed to get into a refugee camp, and then move to Germany.
After being released from slavery, Murad became an activist - she fights against human trafficking and military rape. She often tells her story, but she admits that it is not easier to do this each time — she is re-experiencing both the violence and the fear that she cannot be saved. In 2016, she received the Vaclav Havel Prize and the Sakharov Prize - important human rights awards.
Voluntarily or due to circumstances, Murad became the main face of the fight against violence against Yezidi women, many of whom are still being held captive by ISIL. Everybody knows about the brutality of the militants - but almost no honest and horrible stories of women about this in Western society. “These crimes were not accidental - they were organized and planned. The Islamic State came for the sole purpose of destroying the Yezidi identity. They did it by force, raping women, taking the children to the troops and destroying our shrines,” Nadya Murad told the UN Committee “The rapes were used to kill women and girls — so that they would never lead a peaceful life."
The wording “the use of sexual violence as a weapon in military conflicts,” with which Murad was awarded the Nobel Prize, seems strange to a European, but the story of Nadi Murad is only one of many. Not so long ago, women in Myanmar, South Sudan and Burundi experienced sexual violence in military conflict zones, before that happened in Rwanda, Bosnia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the same time, until recently military violence was not recognized as a problem, although it becomes not only a manifestation of power, but also a weapon: confessions are beaten out of victims with the help of rape; in patriarchal societies, a woman raped faces immense humiliation, and, for example, due to pregnancy after being raped, can be sent into exile. The scale of the catastrophe can be assessed by the Yezidi reaction: they are categorically opposed to relations with people of a different faith, but for women who have been in captivity of the Islamic State, made an exception - the tragedy affected many.
"I never thought that I would have something in common with women in Rwanda - before all this happened, I didn’t even know that Rwanda existed - and now I’m connected with them in the most horrible way possible I am a victim of a war crime, which is so difficult to talk about, that for the first time they brought to justice for him only sixteen years before ISIL entered Sinjar, ”writes Nadya Murad in his book. And this is true: for the first time, the crime of rape in the conflict zone was recognized only in the nineties - in Rwanda, where the Tutsi people fell victim to genocide, and in Bosnia, where eight Bosnian Serbs were found guilty of crimes against Muslim women.
Nadia Murad named her own biography “The Last Girl: My Last Story”, because she hopes that she will be the last girl with a similar story. So far this is far away - but the first steps have already been taken.
Photo:UN Photo, Getty Images (1)
