Resilience in the face of adversity: Hardship brings out the strength of the Yezidi community

27-06-2016
Judit Neurink
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Through the ages the Kurds have been subject to attacks time and again. The Yezidi history counts over seventy attacks, some of them clear cases of genocides. The Kurds in general were the victim of dictatorships, persecution and genocide.

And through the times, often the victims of these atrocities, who survived, came out stronger. However terrible the suffering or the crimes committed, people have the talent to survive by holding on to the stick held out to them not to drown.

That goes in particular for the Yezidis and the Kurds. When their land was split over four nations, they put up a fight not to be crushed completely. When Arab regimes tried to Arabize them, their identity only became stronger.

The former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein tried to beat the resistance out of the Kurds, by gassing the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 which killed more than 5,000 people. And by destroying thousands of Kurdish villages and killing 180,000 in the Anfal campaign, he tried to destroy their urge for autonomy and independence.

Yet the opposite happened. The Kurds rose against Saddam when he was weak in 1991, and were able to turn the tables and get their autonomy.

The question here is whether this would have happened without the horrors and crimes of Anfal and Halabja. In reaction to that, the Kurdish resistance only grew, as did the craving for self-rule.

Before these tragedies only oriental experts, some travelers and politicians had heard of the Kurds. But the French president’s wife Danielle Mitterrand pointed the world attentional to their plight, when thousands fled into the mountains in 1991. Saddam was on his way to crush their uprising, but it was saved and entered Kurdish history books as the Raparin.

Because of that, the world began to understand what had happened to the Kurds, how they had been robbed of their land and victimized by rulers.

And it was because of the fight against the Islamic group ISIS that the Kurdistan was really put on the map, due to the indispensable fight the Peshmerga troops have put up against it.

The terrible fate of the Yezidis, over 6,000 of whom were kidnapped, women used as sex slaves and at least 1,500 killed at the hands of ISIS, at the same time saved their ethnic group from oblivion.

Before, the world was hardly aware of them. Now the United Nations has discussed their plight and decided it is a genocide, and the story of the fate of the Yezidi-women inside ISIS’ Caliphate has touched millions of hearts all over the world.

Terrible tragedies have happened, but they did not only bring pain. They also helped to make the Kurds stronger, to feed their nationalism and resolve. Instead of destroying them, it made them stronger.

This is a difficult message in a land so devastated by tragedies, genocides and disasters as the different regions of Kurdistan. Where people are in pain, they cannot look further than towards the end of that pain.

That is why the sociologic analysis by former Kurdish minister of Anfal and Martyrs, Chnar Abdullah, stating that the latest tragedy the Yezidis have suffered in the hands of ISIS will eventually also make the group stronger, recently lead to an outcry.

This analysis does not deny or minimize in any way the horrors that the Yezidis went through and are still suffering from, just like the fact that Anfal making the Kurdish resolve stronger does not diminish the suffering and loss of fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

The process is an international one. The development of the world sped up after World War II, even though it had caused disaster and destruction. On the ruins of Europe, the EU was born.

Israel could only get the approval of the United Nations in 1947 to become a state, because of the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis.

When Yugoslavia was split up, it led to ethnic cleaning and destruction, but also to the birth of new states that would otherwise not have existed.

It is a true message, but a hard one to sell to a people like the Yezidis who are in mourning and still looking for the bodies of their men and boys, for their women who were kidnapped. They are scared to think of their sons being forced to fight for ISIS against their own people.

But the strength of their community has come out. Their proud girls are speaking to the world about their plight. Their women and men are fighting against their enemies side by side. They are surviving and the world has finally taken notice of the existence of this peaceful and life-loving people.

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