Over ten days, the 20th International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights brought together artists, activists, journalists, and the public in Geneva for film and debate. After two pandemic-enforced digital editions, this year was also a chance for the festival to finally get back to some form of normality by meeting in person and welcoming back live audiences. The Grand Prize for Fiction was awarded to two films – Freda, by Haitian director Gessica Généus, and Vera Dreams of the Sea by Kosovan filmmaker Kaltrina Krasniqi.
“Freda” Devastated by earthquakes, Haiti is a country buried under corruption, violence and colonial legacy. Freda lives with her mother and sister in Port-au-Prince and, at the age of 20, she refuses to give up and wants to believe in the future. But how can she stay when everything compels her to leave? Spotted in 2017 with The Sun Will Rise, Gessica Généus directs her debut feature film, shot in Creole and carried by extraordinary actresses. She tells the story of her country with love, sings its courage and celebrates the deep joy that persists despite the heartbreaking reality.
“Vera Dreams of the Sea” tells the tale of a widow, forced to take on a ruthless rural patriarchy to claim an inheritance, for her, and her daughter and granddaughter. The film also won the Festival’s Youth Prize, an award Krasniqi told Euronews has particular significance. “You know, when you make a movie you think about audiences, of course, and then you think that people of a certain generation who resonate with issues but then getting a prize from youth meant quite a lot to me because that means the story resonates with other generations as well.”
White Torture directed by Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the festival’s Grand Reportages category. It focuses on psychological torture and its destructive effect on victims. Mohammadi is currently imprisoned in Iran. Her friend, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, is the film’s ambassador. Sitting down with Euronews, she said: “In my opinion, this film represents the state’s repression of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in Iran. But at the same time, it represents resistance, because the repression continues, but the resistance of the people also continues.“
Hussein al-Qaidi, director of the Office of Rescuing Kidnapped Yezidis for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), has been named the recipient of the Sergio Vieira De Mello Prize, which is awarded yearly in Poland (!) to individuals and organizations which promote human rights and dialogue.
Qaidi is a Yezidi, born in the Duhok province of Iraqi Kurdistan. In 2014, after ISIS overran the Yezidis’ homeland, he organized campaigns to find missing people, free them, and help then return to a normal life.
The KRG supported Qaida’s efforts and already in August 2014, he was named to lead a new unit: the Office of Rescuing Kidnapped Yezidis. It is based in Duhok, and Qaida remains its head.
Last November, Qaida received the prestigious Mother Teresa Memorial Award for rescuing thousands of Yezidi women from the clutches of the ISIS terrorists.
Raoof hopes that the award will put Yezidis in the spotlight again in Poland, since previous awards were widely reported in the Polish media.
“I believe that it will once again make Polish people aware of the difficult fate of Yezidis and also show that there are still many people and organizations helping Yezidi people with great courage and commitment, ”he continued.
Dr. Widad Akreyi at the award ceremony for the 2018 International Woman Harmony Award, Cortona, Italy, Nov. 23, 2018.
On 12 June 2019 Marta Bellingreri (an Italian writer, Arabist and cultural mediator. is the author of two books about Lampedusa and minor migrants in Tunisia, France and Italy) wrote a profile of Dr. Widad Akreyi, who lived through the 1980s Anfal genocide and the 2014 Yazidi genocide, and has become one of the major defenders of human rights in Iraq and beyond.
The fourth Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity was awarded on 19 October 2019 to Mirza Dinnayi, Co-Founder and Director of Luftbrücke Irak (Air Bridge Iraq). [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2019/05/01/nominees-for-the-2019-aurora-prize-are/] Driven by his passion to save lives, the Yazidi activist has found a way to overcome numerous bureaucratic and logistic obstacles to help the most vulnerable members of the Yazidi community during numerous conflicts in Syria and Iraq. “The recognition of genocide is the first step in order to satisfy the victims,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview. The Aurora Forum took place in Yerevan. For more on the million dollar Aurora Prize see: http://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/aurora-prize-for-awakening-humanity.
Tom Catena, Aurora Humanitarian Initiative Chair and 2017 Aurora Prize Laureate, praised Mirza Dinnayi by saying: “What makes Mirza Dinnayi an outstanding human being is the fact he couldn’t live in good conscience knowing that good people are left behind, that the innocent are suffering. Trying to help others while facing an unspeakable evil can be challenging and frustrating, but he never wavered. I am delighted to congratulate Mirza Dinnayi with being awarded with the Prize and welcome him to the Aurora family.”
Mirza Dinnayi will receive a $1,000,000 grant for support to organizations that have inspired his work. He has chosen to donate the funds to three organizations that provide medical care and rehabilitation to victims of ISIS terror:
Air Bridge Iraq;
SEED Foundation;
Shai Fund.
Working on behalf of the Yazidi community, Mirza Dinnayi has dedicated his whole life to saving the victims of the Iraq war, evacuating women and children from territories controlled by ISIS and providing those tortured and violated with rehabilitation and support. It was Dinnayi who brought to Germany the future Sakharov Prize Laureate Lamya Haji Bashar. Today, she is a renowned human rights activist and has one of Aurora’s scholarships named after her.Previous Aurora Prize Laureates include:
The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative also honored the contributions of the other two 2019 Aurora Humanitarians who received a $50,000 grant each: Zannah Bukar Mustapha, Director and Founder of Future Prowess Islamic Foundation in Nigeria, and Huda Al-Sarari, Yemeni lawyer and human rights defender.
Khemta H Jose in the Quint reviews the movie ‘Hell & Hope’. This documentary is filmed in Germany in 2018, where 1,100 Yazidi survivors of ISIS brutalities found refuge. There, they have managed to rebuild shattered lives even as mothers and sisters are missing – presumed enslaved or killed – fathers and brothers dead. Before it was too late for Salwa in Iraq’s Sinjar, before the militants came, she says it was Yazidi men who prevented them from running. “The men refused to run despite their wives asking them to. ‘We men don’t run away, we stay and fight’. But the women didn’t know how to drive, so they couldn’t run either. I doubt if in all of Sinjar, even four women know how to drive – if they knew how to drive, they would have escaped and survived. The men could’ve stayed and fought if that was what they wanted. They should have fought and not let us face what we faced.” said Salwa, Yazidi Survivor Knowing how to drive seems like a small thing, in the grand scale of what was happening in Iraq and Syria. And yet it is that small independence they were denied that might have made all the difference.
Despite the gripping horror of each story, there is not much different in the perspectives offered than what we’ve heard over the years now in countless pieces of reporting – the kidnappings, the slavery, the killings. What’s new is the fine detail that comes out when you have multiple women tell broadly the same story; the banality of evil.
Two of the three women who spoke expressed disgust, contempt and were especially distressed by the encouragement given to Daesh terrorists by their wives. It was felt as a deeper betrayal, even though Salwa explains why they did it: “What we saw was that the women encouraged their husbands. This is why I always say that women should see the world and get an education. They controlled women’s minds. What was Daesh telling their wives? They would say that women don’t go to heaven, that a woman is incomplete. Only men go to heaven, so in this life, women must please their husbands, and when they go to heaven, they can ask for their wives to join them. After a Daesh militant kills Yazidis, because they are infidels, he will go to heaven and if he is satisfied with his wife, he will ask for her to come.”
..how did they make it out of that hell? The German government reached out. “The girls did not apply for asylum. The government of the German state of Baden Württemberg came up with a special quota program to give girls, children and other victims a direct residence permit for 3 years.” Amish Srivastava, Director, Hell & Hope…
Watching the documentary is an exhausting experience, but the viewer is forewarned. One of the first lines that appear on the screen is “Girls risked their lives to escape Islamic State captivity. Few succeeded.”
Nobel Peace Prize for anti-rape activists Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege – Image copyright EPA
You do not have it hear it through me as most mainstream media carry the news (here the BBC with elaborate information) that the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize has gone to campaigners against rape in warfare, Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege. After the controversy created around some of the recent laureates, these two are safe bets as both have been recognized widely:
Ms Murad is an Iraqi Yazidi who was tortured and raped by Islamic State militants and later became the face of a campaign to free the Yazidi people. She found recognition from at least two earlier awards:
Dr Mukwege is a Congolese gynaecologist who, along with his colleagues, has treated tens of thousands of victims. He received wide recognition with 8 international human rights awards:
2008 United Nations Prizes in the Field of Human Rights
2009 Olof Palme Prize
2010 Wallenberg Medal (University of Michigan)
2011 King Baudouin International Development Prize
Ms Murad, 25, dedicated the award to her mother, who was killed by the Islamic State (IS) militants who overran their home in 2014. Ms Murad described her escape in a BBC interview in 2016, detailing how the women who were held captive were treated by IS.
Dr Mukwege was operating at his hospital when he heard he had won the prize. He dedicated his award to all women affected by sexual violence. He lives under the permanent protection of UN peacekeepers at his hospital and has also previously called for a tougher line on rape as a weapon of war.
Father Patrick Desbois speaks after being awarded the Lantos Human Rights Prize on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 26, 2017. (Chris Kleponis)
Father Patrick Desbois, a Roman Catholic clergyman, whose work has uncovered millions of previously unknown victims of the Nazi genocide was awarded the Lantos Foundation’s Human Rights Prize. The Lantos Human Rights Prize is an annual award given by the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, an organization founded by Tom and Annette Lantos, who were both Holocaust survivors. For more on the award see: http://trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/lantos-human-rights-prize.
Father Patrick Desbois, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Program for Jewish Civilization, was recognized during a reception on Capitol Hill as a “vital voice standing up for the values of decency, dignity, freedom, and justice.” His scholarly reportage on the Holocaust has focused on the Jews who were killed by mass shootings by Nazi units in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Moldova and Romania between 1941 and 1944. In 2004, Desbois founded Yahad-In Unum, a French organization whose sole mission was to locate the mass graves of Jewish victims from Nazi paramilitary death squads. These regiments were responsible for the mass killings of Jews, often by shooting and primarily in the former Soviet Union.
His first book, “Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews,” was based on that work and the culmination of its discoveries. Desbois has another book — a memoir on his life as an anti-genocide activist and Holocaust scholar — due for publication in 2018.
Iraqi lawmaker Vian Dakhil at the Lantos Human Rights Prize ceremony, 8 February 2017 – RNS photo
Last week I wrote about an award-winning human rights defender not being able to come and collect her award in the USA [https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2017/02/01/yazidi-human-rights-laureate-may-be-banned-from-coming-to-washington-to-accept-award/]. Vian Dakhilmade it to Washington in the end. She had already received a visa to come to Washington to accept an award from the Tom Lantos Foundation when President Donald Trump’s executive order pausing immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq, was issued. After an arduous process involving the State Department and the Iraqi Embassy, she was granted an exemption to the travel ban so she could attend the award ceremony on 8 February. Her sister and translator was able to get a visa after a federal judge temporarily halted the implementation of the executive order. Read the rest of this entry »
The idiocy of Trump’s recent executive orders on immigration is probably not better illustrated than by the case of Vian Dakhil (Yazidi MP in Iraq and ‘Isil’s most-wanted woman’). She may be barred from from coming to Washington to accept the Lantos Human Rights Prize.
CREDIT: AFP
Vian Dakhil was set to receive the Lantos Human Rights Prize at the US Capitol in Washington DC for her “courageous defence” of the Yazidi people as they faced mass genocide two years ago at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). However, as a carrier of an Iraqi passport she is unlikely to be allowed to enter the country next week despite holding a US visa. “It is not clear yet if I will travel or not,” Mrs Dakhil, 46, said. “The decision was a complete surprise.” The Lantos foundation dubbed her “ISIS’s most-wanted woman”. She used her position in parliament to inform the world of the atrocities being committed against the Yazidi people
Josh Rogin wrote in the Washington Post of 30 that Vian Dakhil was set to receive the Lantos Human Rights Prize at the U.S. Capitol on 8 February 2017. The prize is given by the foundation named after the late Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who championed human rights for decades while serving in the U.S. Congress. Dakhil’s case is a startling example of how the executive order signed by President Trump is having unintended consequences and ensnaring not only those who have no links to terrorism but also those who have risked their lives to fight terrorism in cooperation with the United States. “It adds a deep level of irony that this award is given in the name of my late father, the only Holocaust survivor ever to be elected to Congress,” said Katrina Lantos Swett, the president of the foundation. “He exemplified how America is strengthened and enriched by immigrants and refugees. I assure you he is turning in his grave at this.”
On 26 October it was announced that Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar are the 2016 laureates of the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought although Crimean Tatar Mustafa Dzhemilev was in the lead.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha and Lamiya Aji Bashar are survivors of sexual enslavement by Islamic State (IS) and have become spokespersons for women afflicted by IS’s campaign of sexual violence. They are public advocates for the Yazidi community in Iraq, a religious minority that has been the subject of a genocidal campaign by IS militants.
On 3 August 2014, IS slaughtered all the males in the village of Kocho, Aji Bashar and Murad’s hometown in Sinjar/Iraq. Following the massacre, women and children were enslaved: all young women, including Aji Bashar, Murad and their sisters were kidnapped, bought and sold several times and exploited as sex slaves. During the Kocho massacre, Murad lost six of her brothers and her mother, who was killed along with 80 older women deemed to have no sexual value. Aji Bashar was also exploited as a sex slave along with her six sisters. She was sold five times among the militants and was forced to make bombs and suicide vests in Mosul after IS militants executed her brothers and father.
In November 2014, Murad managed to escape with the help of a neighbouring family who smuggled her out of the IS-controlled area, allowing her to make her way to a refugee camp in northern Iraq and then to Germany. A year later, in December 2015, Murad addressed the UN Security Council’s first-ever session on human trafficking with a powerful speech about her experience. In September 2016, she became the first United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking, participating in global and local advocacy initiatives to raise awareness around the plight of the countless victims of trafficking. In October 2016, the Council of Europe honoured her with the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. [https://thoolen.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/yazidi-survivor-nadia-murad-wins-vaclav-havel-human-rights-prize-2016/]
Aji Bashar tried to flee several times before finally escaping in April with the help of her family, who paid local smugglers. On her way over the Kurdish border, and while racing towards Iraq’s government-controlled territory with IS militants in pursuit, a landmine exploded, killing two of her acquaintances and leaving her injured and almost blind. Luckily she managed to escape and was eventually sent for medical treatment in Germany, where she was reunited with her surviving siblings. Since her recovery Aji Bashar has been active in raising awareness about the plight of the Yazidi community and continues to help women and children who were victims of IS enslavement and atrocities.
Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards 