Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade on the Issues facing diaspora communities in Australia by the Yazidi Australian Association Yazidi Australian Association welcomes the opportunity to provide a Submission to the Senate Standing Committees on Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade on the Issues facing diaspora communities in Australia. Yazidi Australian Association represents the needs and issues of the newly arrived Yazidi community members in Australia. We are one of the most recently arrived small and emerging refugee communities in Australia. Majority of our community members have settled in rural and regional Australia including Coffs Harbour, Wagga Wagga, Armidale and Toowoomba with a smaller cohort settling in Western Sydney. Below is a brief outline of the persecution faced by Yazidi community members. Further cultural information can be provided upon request. The Yazidi (or Ezidi) are a people who originate from Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The population is estimated to be between 800, 000 and 1000, 0001 globally, although their population is difficult to estimate considering their dwindling numbers over the last century due to constant persecution. The Yazidis are located primarily in the Nineveh province of northern Iraq, and in the Al-Jazira and Kurd- Dagh areas of Syria. The sacred valley of Lalish is the centre of pilgrimage for Yazidis. Some also live in Armenia and Georgia and many have migrated to parts of Europe. Sweden has had a significant Yazidi population since 20082 and Germany since the 1970s3 Yazidis almost all speak Kurmanji, with the exception of some villages in northern Iraq where Arabic is spoken. Kurmanji is the language of almost all the orally transmitted religious traditions of the Yazidis4. Yazidis began to face persecution from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Organised anti-Yazidi violence dates back to the Ottoman Empire. In the second half of the 19th century, Yazidis were targeted by both Ottoman and local Kurdish leaders and subjected to brutal campaigns of religious violence5. In the late 1970s, Saddam Hussein launched brutal Arabisation campaigns against people in the north of Iraq. He razed traditional Yazidi villages and forced the Yazidis to settle in urban centres, disrupting 1 Kizilhan, J. & Noll-Hussong, M. (2017). Individual, collective and transgenerational traumatization in the Yazidi. Retrieved from: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-017-0965-7 2 Asatryan, G. & Arakalova, V. (2002). The Ethnic Minorities of Armenia. Retrieved from: http://www.minorities-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/The-ethnic-minorities-of-Armenia.pdf 3 Allison, C. (2017). The Yazidis. Retrieved from: http://religion.oxfordre.com/oso/viewentry/10.1093$002facrefore$002f9780199340378.001.0001$002facref ore-9780199340378-e-254;jsessionid=259EAC77572CAA3907EC9130493559DC 4 Asatryan, G. & Arakalova, V. (2002). The Ethnic Minorities of Armenia. Retrieved from: http://www.minorities-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/The-ethnic-minorities-of-Armenia.pdf 5 Asher-Schapiro, A. (2014). Who are the Yazidis, the Ancient, Persecuted Religious Minority Struggling to Survive in Iraq? National Geographic. Retrieved from: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140809-iraq-yazidis-minority-isil-religion-history/ 1 | Page their rural way of life. Saddam Hussein constructed the town of Sinjar and forced the Yazidis to abandon their mountain villages and relocate in the city. In 2014 Islamic State captured large areas of Iraq’s north. In August 2014 they seized the city of Sinjar. In the next few days ISIS militants carried out the Sinjar massacre, killing more than 2000 Yazidi men and taking Yazidi women and girls into slavery, leading to a mass exodus of Yazidi residents, 250,000 of whom fled to the Sinjar mountains and were forced to choose between surrendering to ISIS forces or dying of dehydration, thirst and starvation on the mountain. The majority were able to be rescued by both Kurdish PKK fighters who broke the ISIS siege on the mountains and by a multinational rescue operation in which planes dropped supplies and helicopters evacuated refugees6. The persecution of the Yazidi people has been viewed as qualifying as genocide by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in a March 2015 report7. Cited were numerous atrocities such as forced religious conversion and sexual slavery as being part of an overall malicious campaign. In March 2016, the United States House of Representatives voted unanimously that violent actions performed against Yazidis, Christians, Shia and other groups by ISIL were acts of genocide and was confirmed a few days later by United States Secretary of State John Kerry, who declared that the violence initiated by ISIL against the Yazidis and others amounted to genocide. The Human Rights Council8 describes the Yazidi community of Sinjar as having been devastated by ISIS attacks, with no free Yazidis remaining in the Sinjar region. The once 400,000-strong community have all been displaced, captured or killed. While Yazidis are gradually returning to the retaken areas of Sinjar north of the mountain, the majority of the region’s Yazidis live difficult and impoverished existences in IDP camps scattered throughout the Duhok region of northern Iraq. The on-going ISIS attacks against the Yazidis were viewed by the community not as a stand-alone event but part of a long history of oppression and violence against them which has aggravated intergenerational trauma. According to the Human Rights Council, few Yazidis believed that international criminal justice was possible, citing centuries of impunity to attacks on their community9 Currently, there is another genocide of the Yazidis going on and the attempt to displace them in Syria, especially in the regions and villages of Afrin where a destructive campaign of harassment, kidnapping, rape and killing began in 2018 and continued till the present day. Some of Afrin Yazidis fled to Iraq, others to Lebanon and Turkey, but there is also persecution and deprivation of all their rights there as well. Within another year, according to studies and the threats that the Yazidi community keeps 6 Reuter, C. (2014). The drama of Sinjar: escaping the Islamic State in Iraq. Speigel Online. Retrieved from: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pkk-assistance-for-yazidis-escaping-the-jihadists-of-the-islamic- state-a-986648.html 7 Human Rights Council. (2016). “They Came to Destroy”: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis.” Retrieved from: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoISyria/A_HRC_32_CRP.2_en.pdf 8 Ibid. 9 Asher-Schapiro, A. (2014). Who are the Yazidis, the Ancient, Persecuted Religious Minority Struggling to Survive in Iraq?. National Geographic. Retrieved from: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140809-iraq-yazidis-minority-isil-religion-history/ 2 | Page receiving in Afrin, they will end up murdered, deported, and the Yazidi civilization will be lost in all the regions of Syria101112 AHMAD IESSO President of the YAZIDI AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATION w. www.yazidi.org.au Question 1 10 Ochab, A.U. (2020) Will The Yazidis Survive In The Middle East?, Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2020/06/01/will-the-yazidis-survive-in-the-middle- east/#105e6e904d23 11 Cockburn, P. (2018), Yazidis who suffered under Isis face forced conversion to Islam amid fresh persecution in Afrin, Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-yazidis-isis-islam- conversion-afrin-persecution-kurdish-a8310696.html 12 Ahmado, N. (2019), Hundreds of Yazidis Displaced Amid Turkey's Incursion in Northeast Syria, VOA News, https://www.voanews.com/extremism-watch/hundreds-yazidis-displaced-amid-turkeys-incursion-northeast- syria 3 | Page What do you think about the support offered to our community associations and similar organisations, including government grants and other funding? Did the organisations in Yazidi community receive enough support? Were the right things supported? If Yazidi community did not receive enough support and if the right projects were not supported, what should be supported? Yazidi Community is very new to Australia. The first organisation has just been incorporated and we have only received funding through our auspice arrangement with the NSW service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS). Our community members have received essential support from settlement agencies, torture and trauma services, education providers and others. We are grateful for the support we have received so far as individuals. Of course, there could be improvements but we feel that overall we were well supported on arrival. However, for our community to fully integrate in Australia, we will require a different type of support and on the community level including: - Access to funding that we can manage independently coupled with mentoring and guidance by the dedicated Government staff or an appropriate non-Government Agency. While we appreciate services being delivered to our community members, we feel that we need to develop independence and build on our community’s strengths and assets. This funding can be small at the start but we are willing to learn and grow. - Direct access to relevant Australian politicians and other Government officials to ensure we can raise issues faced by our community first hand rather than being represented by non-Yazidi service providers. We feel that