On Thursday, January 19, three major political parties in the German Bundestag – the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, and CDU/CSU sister parties – motioned to recognize the 2014 massacre of the ethno-religious Yezidi Kurds carried out by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as "genocide."
As it joins 18 other governments and international bodies like the Netherlands in formally recognizing these atrocities as genocide, Germany's decision bears significant weight among its fellow states as the host of the largest diaspora of Yezidis outside the land of their historic heritage in the Nineveh Plains. In the immediate aftermath of the genocide, 1,100 Yezidi women and children needing advanced psychological and medical support received otherwise-inaccessible healthcare through German protection programs in Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony, Schleswig- Holstein, Berlin, and Brandenburg.
The final decision closely followed two unprecedented convictions within the German court system. Just two days before the Bundestag's resolution commemorating the genocide, the German Federal Court of Justice confirmed the sentence of ISIS militant Taha A.J. for genocide and other crimes after he failed to appeal against the Frankfurt court in November 2021.
Remarkably, Taha A.J.'s trial was the first based on the universal jurisdiction addressing international crimes committed abroad by a non-German citizen. The second genocide conviction, involving a female national accused of aiding and abetting genocide, followed in May 2022. This year, a third trial will take place in the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz and is against a German national known as “Nadine K.”
Pursuing further action, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock prioritized a victim-oriented approach in her January 19 speech: “It has already been mentioned that the judgement of the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court is so immensely important because the charge was not just terrorism but genocide, crimes against humanity, because the individual crimes suffered by the victims were heard and sentences imposed. This is a milestone in the global fight against impunity.”
Improving its efforts to commemorate the Holocaust and the colonial-era Namibian genocide, Germany's agenda toward such atrocities has long been recorded from the vantage point of the perpetrator. However, as unpardonable impunities persist, German lawmakers have quickly commemorated and condemned mass-scale atrocities as an enduring offer of solidarity against ongoing cycles of oppression. Last year, the Bundestag recognized the 1930s Soviet "Holodomor" famine as genocide, a recognition that drew unmistakable parallels with Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine.
The recognition of genocide, one of the greatest crimes under international law, differentiates commiseration and commemoration. According to the Genocide Convention under Articles I, V, and VI, a state recognizing the genocide of a people is not only obligated to prevent genocide but punish it and prevent it.
"After this major event, the ball will be in our court, and we need to use this opportunity and this sympathy for the best interest of the community and its destiny," commented Haider Elias in a joint statement by Yazda and the Yazidi Survivors Network (YSN).
Acknowledging the Yezidi-led fight to recognize the genocide on a meaningful scale, the Bundestag offered special acknowledgments and thanks to individuals Nadia Murad, Lamiya Aji Bashar, and Farida Khalaf for sensitizing the public and calling for crimes to be addressed, as they processed the narrative of their own trauma and losses.
The Bundestag published twenty objectives in its resolution to support Yezidi recovery in Sinjar and diasporic communities. Calling on the courts in-state and throughout the international community, it urges support for existing projects adequately documenting the genocide and to strengthen UNITAD's mandate to continue the prosecutions of ISIS perpetrators.
While the Bundestag credits Russia's current blockade for the failed referral by the Security Council to the International Criminal Court (ICC), subsequently preventing prosecutions through the ICC, it stresses the Government of Iraq's participation in reforming its justice system and ratifying the ICC's Rome Statute.
The resolution emphasizes multiple components of holistic wellness for the Yezidis at risk, such as stabilizing Sinjar, resolving community uncertainty concerning children conceived through rape, and addressing the vulnerable situation of impacted Yezidi women. The Bundestag's eighteenth point places women at the center of Germany's foreign and development policy, vowing to support and promote Yezidi women as "agents of change" with the resources to engage with the world as self-determined, fulfilled individuals.
As at least 130,0000 displaced Yezidi civilians still lead their lives in camps, countering the genocide itself and its ongoing effects remains a principal goal. This January, an estimated 100 families returned to their homes in Qahtaniya, while dozens moved their belongings back into Siba Sheikh Khider and Tel Ezeir.
In her 2022 year-end review on advocacy, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad's address to the public will remain a compelling standard for ten years, or even a century from now: "We can always do more to empower survivors and center them in our conversations and projects. Survivors know best what they need to heal and recover. We can be there to listen, amplify their voices, and provide resources."
Germany’s formal recognition of the Yezidi genocide is an important step toward such empowerment.
Myli Sangria is a sophomore at the University of Central Florida and the Spring 2023 recipient of the Kurdish Political Studies Program's Dr. Najmaldin Karim Research Fellowship. She volunteers with Sinjar Academy as a language mentor and volunteer coordinator for its new English program.
