A mass grave is unearthed on February 3, 2015 near the Sinuni village in Iraq’s Sinjar region, where Yazidis have been persecuted. SAFIN HAMED v AFP
Should we call the massacres that the Islamic State (IS) organization carried out on the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria starting in the summer of 2014 “genocide”? Yes, the MPs present in the Bundestag answered unanimously on Thursday 19 January, making Germany the fourth European Union (EU) country to adopt this qualification, after the Netherlands and Belgium in July 2021 and Luxembourg in November 2022. Before them, a handful of other states, including Armenia, Canada and Australia, as well as the United Nations and the European Parliament.
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“ISIS aimed for the complete eradication of the Yazidi community. More than 5,000 Yazidis were tortured and brutally murdered by IS, especially in 2014,” underscores the Bundestag resolution. Presented by the three factions of the governing coalition (Social Democrats, Ecologists and Liberals) and the conservative opposition (CDU-CSU), this seven-page text commemorates the martyrdom of this Kurdish-speaking religious minority. The men were “forced to convert and, if they refused, immediately executed or deported as forced labourers”, the boys “sent to Koran schools, drafted as child soldiers or used as suicide bombers”, the women “reduced, enslaved, raped or sold”.
Passed by the members of the Bundestag from the radical left (Die Linke) and the extreme right (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), among others, the resolution is not only oriented towards the past. In addition to recognizing the crimes committed against Yazidis as “genocide”, there is a list of specific demands that are addressed directly to the federal government. These include the call for the prosecution of former IS fighters who are suspected of having participated in the persecution of Yazidis; the funding of an evidence-gathering campaign on Iraqi territory; the search for missing persons, who are estimated to number around 3,000; the creation of a research and documentation center in Germany dedicated to the history of this genocide; or participating in the rebuilding of destroyed towns and villages “to enable the return of some 300,000 Yazidis displaced from their homes, particularly in Sinjar,” a region of northern Iraq where IS launched a violent offensive in August 2014.
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From the lectern in the Bundestag, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock welcomed the initiative of the parliamentarians and bluntly criticized the attitude of the then federal government under Angela Merkel, in particular its passivity towards the plight of Yazidi women. “One day, as thousands of women were being herded into a school, GPS data was sent. Yes, we knew where they were. (…) But why didn’t we act? Admittedly, the military option should always be treated with caution, but isn’t it because of the origin or gender of the victims that we didn’t intervene? I don’t know the answer to the question, but I think it’s important to ask it so that crimes like this never happen again,” said the former Green Party co-leader, who sat on the opposition benches in 2014.
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