When ISIS moved into the northern Iraqi town of Bakhdida in August 2014, Batool and her family left. Only her husband remained: he was ill and there wasn’t space in the car, so Batool returned later to fetch him. But when she did, the Kurdish troops surrounding the town refused to let her through.
Batool called her husband; after 10 days of talking, he stopped answering the phone. The next time she got a call from his number, it was ISIS calling. They demanded a $40,000 ransom and refused to let Batool talk to him. That was the last she heard.
Thousands of Iraqis and Syrians could tell stories as terrible as Batool’s. ISIS has committed mass murder, enslavement, torture and sexual crime on a vast scale.
Partly for that reason, the Christian population of Syria has more than halved, to less than a million; in Iraq it has decreased from 1.4 million in 1987 to 250,000. In Kurdistan, the Yazidis have been reduced to almost nothing.
To someone like Batool – whose testimony is recorded along with many others in a Knights of Columbus report – it may seem irrelevant whether or not you call this “genocide”. Yet it has become a major issue for Western governments whether they accept – as the US government did last week – that this is the right term. What difference, then, does “the g-word” make?
Robert Clarke, a barrister and director of European advocacy for the international legal group ADF, says it comes down to the 1948 Genocide Convention. That document obliges its signatories – 147 countries including the UK and US – to recognise genocide as (in the Convention’s words) “a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish”. Genocide itself is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. For Mr Kerry, that describes ISIS’s atrocities against Christians, Yazidis and others, including some Shia Muslims.
Mr Kerry’s statement did not specify immediate steps. Instead, he talked about the Americans’ current plan of military and diplomatic action. Nevertheless, Mr Clarke says, “once the international community starts using the word genocide, that tends to mark a turning point. It denotes a severity, it denotes a reality, an urgency that demands intervention.”
But the form of that intervention isn’t clear yet. The most talked about possibility is that the US will table a UN resolution calling for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to punish ISIS’s leaders. There are precedents: former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir was indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity and war crimes – though the court stopped short of adding genocide. Al-Bashir has travelled carefully to avoid arrest.
Lord Alton, a Catholic crossbench peer, says an ICC judgment could make a difference. “I’ve always believed that if people knew that one day they would be held to account for their actions, then it is more likely that they might consider the way they act in the first place,” he says. “And at the moment there is no clear route for that to happen, and everything ultimately comes down to cycles of violence.”
Until it was put under pressure by Congress, the US government had resisted the language of genocide; so far, Britain has done the same. But as the Catholic Herald went to press, a cross-party group of peers was putting forward an amendment to the Immigration Bill which would force the issue. It would mean that a judge would examine the evidence and rule whether ISIS’s actions were genocide – thus obliging the Govern-ment to act.
Lord Alton, one of the signatories, says this could affect asylum policy: instead of having a quota of 20,000 refugees, Britain might concentrate on accepting the minority groups targeted by ISIS. He also hopes Britain will table a UN resolution to bring in the ICC. The results of the “genocide” definition are still uncertain, but it will concentrate minds on humanitarian aid as well as diplomatic and military efforts.
“Momentum is probably one of the key words,” says Mr Clarke. Last month, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe was the first international body to make a declaration of genocide, followed by the European Parliament, and now the US government. If the horrors of Iraq and Syria are no easier to solve, they have become much harder to ignore.
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