Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News Volume XXVII Number 2, February 2019 UPCOMING EVENTS Remember, we need suggestions for speakers/videos for the monthly meetings. Thursday, February 28, 7:30-9:00 PM. Please feel free to email any ideas. Monthly Meeting. We meet at the Caltech Y, Tyson House, 505 S. Wilson Ave., Pasadena. Con cariño, This month we will watch and discuss "Saudi Kathy Arabia Uncovered". With undercover footage and on-the-ground reporting, FRONTLINE reveals a side of Saudi Arabia that's rarely seen, and traces the efforts of men and women Next Rights Readers who are working to bring about change. Light refreshments will be served. Please join us! Meeting Tuesday, March 12, 7:30 - 9:00 PM. Letter Sunday, March 17 Writing meeting at the Caltech Athenaeum, 6:30 PM corner of Hill and California in Pasadena. This informal gathering is a great way for Vroman's Bookstore newcomers to get acquainted with Amnesty. 695 E. Colorado Blvd Sunday, March 17, 6:30 PM. Rights Readers Pasadena Human Rights Book Discussion Group. This month we read "The Last Girl" by Nadia The Last Girl Murad. by Nadia Murad SAVE THE DATE: Saturday, March 30. Group 22 will participate in the Environmental Fair at the Arboretum in Arcadia. REVIEW (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/books/rev COORDINATOR’S CORNER iew/nadia-murad-last-girl.html) By Anna Della Subin Hello all Jan. 18, 2018 Cold enough for you?! LOL - dragging out all THE LAST GIRL my Northern California clothes - wool sweaters My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against and berets, down jackets and vests, gloves and the Islamic State boots! And piling the blankets on the bed! (I By Nadia Murad with Jenna Krajeski really feel sorry for the homeless when the weather is like this. Hope they can find some How to approach a memoir of a war still being shelter.) At least we're not in the Midwest! waged? “The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State” Group 22's Vincent De Stefano has been asked to contains open wounds and painful lessons, as attend the Amnesty AGM in Chicago March 1-3 the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad learns how her to accept an award for writing and sending the own story can become a weapon against her — most urgent actions ever! Way to go Vinnie! co-opted for any number of political agendas. In (Letter writing attendees: we gotta crank it up, August 2014 Islamic State militants besieged her he's making us look bad!) Enjoy the conference, village of Kocho in northern Iraq. They executed Vinnie! nearly all the men and older women — including Murad’s mother and six brothers — I'm looking forward to reading this month's and buried them in mass graves. The younger book as I had heard about this young Iraqi women, Murad among them, were kidnapped Yazidi woman who was kidnapped and spent 3 and sold into sexual slavery. Raped, tortured months in captivity by the Islamic State before and exchanged among militants, 21-year-old she escaped. She was awarded the Nobel peace Murad finds an escape route when she is sold to prize in 2018 jointly along with Denis Mukwege, a jihadist in Mosul who leaves a front door a Congolese OB-Gyn who specializes in the unlocked. She flees into Kurdistan by posing as treatment of women who have been raped the wife of a Sunni man, Nasser, who risks during armed conflict. 1 everything to escort her to safety. minorities for particularly inhumane treatment. Just when Murad, and the reader, expect a flood “I want to be the last girl in the world with a of relief, there is another sinister turn: Murad story like mine,” Murad concludes. Despite and Nasser are detained by Kurdish officials recent gains against ISIS in Iraq, many Yazidis who force them to testify about their escape with still remain in captivity. As a story that hasn’t cameras rolling. The officials are eager to hear yet ended, “The Last Girl” is difficult to process. how peshmerga fighters from a rival Kurdish It is a call to action, but as it places Murad’s faction — the two groups fought a civil war in tragedy in the larger narrative of Iraqi history the 1990s — had abandoned the Yazidi and American intervention, it leaves the reader communities they were supposed to protect. The with urgent, incendiary questions: What have officials swear no one will ever see the tape, but we done, and what can we do? it appears on the news that same night, putting Nasser and his family in grave danger. “I was ABOUT THE AUTHOR quickly learning that my story, which I still Nadia Murad was born thought of as a personal tragedy, could be and raised in Kocho, a someone else’s political tool,” Murad writes. small village of farmers and shepherds in Freed from captivity, Murad remains trapped northern Iraq. A inside politics. To publish “The Last Girl” right member of the Yazidi now, in the United States, means there are tricky community, she and her issues of sensationalism to navigate; in a brothers and sisters threatening climate of Islamophobia, Muslims of lived a quiet life. Nadia all kinds are vilified for the actions of one group. had dreams of Yet Murad, and the team of translators and becoming a history writers with whom she worked, hedge against teacher or opening her this response with a book intricate in historical own beauty salon. context. Visible throughout are the disastrous legacies of the American intervention that On August 15th, 2014, when Nadia was just dismantled Baathist institutions and bred a twenty-one years old, this life ended. Islamic generation of Iraqis raised on violence and with State militants massacred the people of her few prospects. In a childhood flashback, a young village, executing men who refused to convert to Nadia receives a ring from one of the many Islam and women too old to become sex slaves. American soldiers who arrived in Kocho in the Six of Nadia's brothers were killed, and her mid-2000s bearing trinkets and empty promises. mother soon after, their bodies swept into mass During the Iraq war, Yazidis became graves. Nadia was taken to Mosul and forced, increasingly isolated from their Sunni Arab along with thousands of other Yazidi girls, into neighbors, caught in cross hairs of sectarianism the ISIS slave trade. in the wake of the “coalition of the willing.” Nadia would be held captive by several “The Last Girl” is also a primer on the ancient militants and repeatedly raped and beaten. Yazidi faith that sustains Murad throughout her Finally, she managed a narrow escape through ordeal: its creation myths, visions of the afterlife the streets of Mosul, finding shelter in the home and idiosyncratic customs. (Many Yazidis avoid of a Sunni Muslim family whose eldest son eating lettuce, and consider blue a color too holy risked his life to smuggle her to safety. for humans to wear.) Yazidis pray to Tawusi Melek, an archangel who, at the creation, took Today, Nadia's story--as a witness to the Islamic the form of a peacock, and painted a desolate State's brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a earth with the colors of his feathers. Over the Yazidi--has forced the world to pay attention to centuries, misunderstandings surrounding the an ongoing genocide. It is a call to action, a mysterious religion have fueled genocide — 73 testament to the human will to survive, and a times, Murad writes, a figure eerily exact. love letter to a lost country, a fragile community, According to a pernicious myth, Tawusi Melek and a family torn apart by war. refused to bow before Adam and was condemned to hell, echoing Satan’s behavior in (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34346848- the Quran. Branding them “devil worshipers,” the-last-girl) ISIS legitimized the massacre and enslavement of Yazidis, singling them out among Iraq’s many 2 The opposing Justices said that in the 2002 Security With Human ruling Atkins v Virginia the Court did not create a coherent rule for what constitutes the Rights intellectual disability that would make one By Robert Adams ineligible to be executed. Cliff Sloan, Mr Moore’s attorney, said that while AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL USA Texas authorities claimed they met the relevant RESPONSE TO 2019 STATE OF THE standards for judging intellectual disability, they UNION had in reality used something more like the lay 02/05/2019 stereotype based more closely to Lennie in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” The following can be attributed to Joanne Lin, Wyoming national director of advocacy and government relations at Amnesty International USA: Wyoming is a deeply red state, and yet this month the state legislators came close to “Tonight’s State of the Union was just another abolishing the death penalty. According to an opportunity for the president to peddle his article on the Death Penalty Information Center politics of hate and fear to a captive audience. website, “fiscal and pro-life conservatives, He has emboldened despotic regimes around conservative law-reform advocates, and the the world by turning a blind eye, and in some deepening involvement of the Catholic Church cases, actively promoting human rights in death-penalty abolition – has led to violations in places like Saudi Arabia and North unprecedented successes in numerous houses of Korea. At the southern border, his obsession state legislatures and moved repeal efforts closer with divisive symbols like a wall is just part of to fruition in a number of deeply Republican his continued efforts to stigmatize people states.” desperately in need of protection.