Germany’s lower house of parliament on Thursday, January 19, recognized the 2014 massacre of Yazidis by the Islamic State group in Iraq as a genocide and called for measures to assist the besieged minority.
In a move hailed by Yazidi community representatives, Bundestag elected officials unanimously passed the motion submitted by three parliamentary groups. Thursday’s vote followed similar moves by countries including Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Dr Dler, the head of the Kurdish diaspora centre in Berlin, was present as an activist and announced that the report was presented by the Green Party, supported by the parties’ fraction in general. The Prime Minister of Germany asked that the parliamentarians Support the project. In his speech, he also talked about his visit to the area, where he saw a Yazidi girl, talked closely about the sufferings and sufferings that ISIS had suffered, and eventually asked for the sake of Azadi to reaffirm everyone’s support for the project.
The Yazidi minority was particularly persecuted by the jihadist group which has also forced its women and girls into sexual slavery and enlisted boys as child soldiers.
Silence cost lives’
Green lawmaker Max Lucks said Germany was home to what is believed to be the world’s largest Yazidi diaspora of about 150,000 people, meaning the country had a particular responsibility to the community.
“Their pain will never go away,” he told the Bundestag.
“We owe this to the Yazidis because we did not take action (in 2014) when we were needed. Our silence cost lives.”
While the Bundestag motion on genocide has no bearing on criminal trials, human rights advocates say it carries important symbolic and political weight.
Germany is one of the few countries to have taken legal action against IS.
In November 2021, a German court convicted an Iraqi jihadist of genocide against the Yazidi, a first in the world that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad hailed as a “victory” in the fight for recognition of the abuses committed by IS.
And last week, a German woman went on trial in the southwestern city of Koblenz accused of aiding and abetting war crimes and genocide with IS in Syria by “enslaving” a Yazidi woman.
