Abstract
This chapter explores the enslavement of women as a genocidal strategy against Armenian and Yazidi communities during genocides a century apart. It outlines strategies targeted against women and girls within the context of enslavement, including sexual violence and trafficking, forced marriage and pregnancy, and forced conversion and assimilation. It also highlights ideological factors underpinning these gendered and strategic tactics, designed to destroy the group’s biological, cultural and social infrastructure.
Genocidal enslavement of women deprives them not only of physical freedom, but equally of their culture, identity and community, potentially leading to social death. This chapter shows that the gendered nature of the Yazidi genocide follows a similar trajectory to the Armenian Genocide and explores how an awareness of their parallels may be useful for intervention.
We did not think these crimes were possible in the 21st century
Yazidi survivor (quoted in Naomi Kikoler, Our Generation is Gone: The Islamic State’s Targeting of Iraqi Minorities in Ninewa; Bearing Witness Trip Report, Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, November 2015, 10.)
I’d like to acknowledge Mr. Vicken Babkenian, whose advice and assistance on this project I am most grateful for.
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Notes
- 1.
Nadia Murad, UN Security Council 7585 th meeting (16 December 2015), http://webtv.un.org/watch/nadia-murad-basee-taha-isil-victim-on-trafficking-of-persons-in-situations-of-conflict-security-council-7585th-meeting/4665835954001.
- 2.
The group calls itself the “Islamic State”; however, for a number of reasons, including debate within the Muslim community and more broadly, the acronym used in this chapter is ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (or Syria).
- 3.
E.g., Human Rights Watch, the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, and international authorities including the United Nations and the European Union.
- 4.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “They Came to Destroy”: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis (Human Rights Council, Thirty-second session, Agenda item 4, Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention, A/HRC/32/CRP.2, 15 June 2016), 36. This report notes the genocide is being implemented in multiple ways, through killing, enslavement, sexual violence, forcible transfer, imposing conditions of life that produce death, causing mental and physical harm, preventing births within the group, and cutting members off from their culture and community.
- 5.
Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013), 290.
- 6.
Anthonie Holslag, “Exposed Bodies: A Conceptual Approach to Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide.” In: Gender and Genocide in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. by Amy E. Randall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 98.
- 7.
Roger Smith, “Genocide and the Politics of Rape: Historical Psychological Perspectives.” In: Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives, ed. Joyce Apsel & Ernesto Verdeja (London: Routledge, 2013), 95–96.
- 8.
Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 5: 1 (2010).
- 9.
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
- 10.
Claudia Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18: 1 (Winter 2003), 69.
- 11.
Ibid., 76.
- 12.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “They came to destroy,” cites over 3,200 women and children held by ISIS as at June 2016.
- 13.
Samuel Totten writes that “authentic accounts constitute valuable testimony as to what it means to be caught up in the maelstrom of hatred and savagery that is genocide (Totten, 2012).”
- 14.
Geoffrey Robertson QC, An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians? (Sydney: Vintage, 2014), 65.
- 15.
Information in this chapter is correct at the time of writing.
- 16.
“It is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of 9. Most pure girls will be married by 16 or 17, while they are still young and active,” Women of the Islamic State: A manifesto on women by the Al-Khanssaa Brigade, https://www.quilliamfoundation.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/publications/free/women-of-the-islamic-state3.pdf. Yazidi survivors sometimes use the term “marry” as a euphemism for rape; however where this chapter details forced marriage, its usual meaning applies.
- 17.
Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 29; see also Robert Melson, “Review Essay: Recent Developments in the Study of the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27:2 (2013).
- 18.
Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, xvi.
- 19.
Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, Second Edition (Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 161.
- 20.
Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 331.
- 21.
Consultation with Yazidi community representatives, June 2016; “The caliphs of the Ottoman Empire carried out no fewer than 72 massacres against the Yazidis in the 18th and 19th centuries alone,” Falah Hassan Juma, quoted in Neil MacFarquar, “Bashiqa Journal; A Sect Shuns Lettuce and Gives the Devil His Due,” New York Times (3 January 2003); and scholar Matthew Barber: “Yazidis often say they have been the victim of 72 previous genocides, or attempts at annihilation,” in Avi Asher-Schapiro, “Who Are the Yazidis, the Ancient, Persecuted Religious Minority Struggling to Survive in Iraq?” National Geographic News (11 August 2014).
- 22.
For more on ISIS’s development, see Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution (London and New York, Verso, 2015); and Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, ISIS: The State of Terror (London: William Collins, 2015).
- 23.
Kikoler, Our Generation is Gone, 12.
- 24.
In a further link between the two cases, ISIS blew up the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Deir al-Zour in September 2014, http://armenianweekly.com/2014/09/21/der-zor/.
- 25.
Stephan Rosiny, “The Caliph’s New Clothes: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” German Institute of Global and Area Studies 6 (2014); see also Institute for International Law and Human Rights, Minority Rights Group International, No Peace Without Justice and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. Between the Millstones: The State of Iraq’s Minorities Since the Fall of Mosul, 2015.
- 26.
At the time of writing, military actions were underway to recapture ISIS territories, e.g. Hwaida Saad and Kareem Fahimmarch, “Syrian Troops Said to Recapture Historic Palmyra From ISIS,” New York Times (27 March 2016), and “Battle for Sinjar: IS-held town in Iraq ‘liberated’,” BBC, 13 November 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/34806556. In October 2016, an offensive was launched to retake Mosul and surrounding territories: “Mosul: Iraq launches offensive to drive out Islamic State group; UN warns of humanitarian crisis,” ABC, 19 October 2016, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-18/iraq-launches-mosul-offensive-to-drive-out-is-militants/7941164.
- 27.
“The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” Dabiq 4: The Failed Crusade, October 2014, 14–15, https://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis-isil-propaganda-magazine-dabiq#.
- 28.
In addition to numerous witness accounts, evidence of mass graves has been found, E.g. “IS blamed for mass Yazidi grave found near Sinjar, Iraq,” BBC, 28 November 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34954233.
- 29.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq: 6 July – 10 September 2014, 12–13. These acts align with Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention; further detailed in “They came to destroy” report.
- 30.
Kikoler, Our Generation is Gone, 3.
- 31.
Human Rights Council. Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Iraq in the light of abuses committed by the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant and associated groups. 13 March 2015, 5–6.
- 32.
Matthew Barber, “Islamic State Officially Admits to Enslaving Yazidi Women,” October 2014, http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/islamic-state-officially-admits-to-enslaving-yazidi-women/.
- 33.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s landmark Akayesu decision stated that rape and sexual violence “constitute genocide in the same way as any other act as long as they were committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group, targeted as such,” The Prosecutor Versus Jean-Paul Akayesu, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, 2 September 1998.
- 34.
Helen Fein, “Genocide and gender: The uses of women and group destiny,” Journal of Genocide Research 1:1 (1999), 44, has argued that the intersection of genocide and rape in the Bosnian and Rwandan cases “both recalls ancient history and suggests disturbing modern innovations in instrumentalizing rape, including the role of propaganda and media.” This is even more evident in ISIS’s use of the internet and social media to justify and encourage participation in genocide via the enslavement of Yazidi women.
- 35.
Human Rights Watch. “Iraq: ISIS Escapees Describe Systematic Rape.” 14 April 2015.
- 36.
Danish rescue worker Karen Jeppe, cited by Matthias Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse Than Dying: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide.” In: Dagmar Herzog, ed. Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 24.
- 37.
Smith, “Genocide and the Politics of Rape,” 86–87.
- 38.
German missionary Blank’s testimony, [1915-05-27-DE-001, Enclosure 3], Wolfgang Gust et al. (eds.), “Documents from the Political Archives of the German Foreign Office,” (undated), also cited by Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 312.
- 39.
Ibid. [1916-01-03-DE-001, Enclosure 1]. Also cited by Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse Than Dying,” 33 and Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide, 55.
- 40.
Survivor from Konia, cited by Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 88.
- 41.
See Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse Than Dying,” 23, and Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 313.
- 42.
E.g., an “emir” wrote the names of victims on pieces of paper for fighters to draw out. The emir and an imam were reported to have laughed upon hearing victims screaming. Two girls, 15 and 18 years old, had blood on their trousers afterwards and confirmed they had been raped, Report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq, 9.
- 43.
Ariel I. Ahram, “Sexual Violence and the Making of ISIS,” Survival 57:3 (2016), 70.
- 44.
Ibid., 67.
- 45.
One survivor reported, “He said that raping me is his prayer to God.” Others reported captors praying before and after the rapes. Rukmini Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape,” New York Times (13 August 2015).
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Dabiq 4, “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” 15.
- 48.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “They came to destroy,” 12.
- 49.
Dabiq 4, “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” 17.
- 50.
The answer continues: “However, if she isn’t, her uterus must be purified [first]…” ISIS prohibits sex with Yazidis if they are pregnant. Su’al wa-Jawab fi al-Sabi wa-Riqab (“Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves”), The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), http://www.memrijttm.org/islamic-state-isis-releases-pamphlet-on-female-slaves.html.
- 51.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, They came to destroy, 13.
- 52.
Holslag, “Exposed Bodies,” 98.
- 53.
Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse Than Dying,” 23. Also see Ara Sarafian, “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide,” in: Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001).
- 54.
German eye-witness, Bastendorff, Gust et al., “Documents from the Political Archives of the German Foreign Office,” [1916-01-03-DE-002, Enclosure 2].
- 55.
The hospital was described as a “pleasuredome” for CUP officials including Cemal Azmi, the province’s governor-general, 26 March session of Trebizond court-martial trial, as cited in Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 313.
- 56.
Ruth Seifert, “War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis.” In: Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.) and Marion Faber (trans), Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 56.
- 57.
Katharine Derderian, “Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19:1 (Spring 2015), 7, cites the New York Times, September 1915, “One hundred [Armenian] girls…were divided into groups, and those that were the best looking in the opinion of the Turkish officers were taken over by those officers. Those considered not quite so good-looking were given over to the soldiers, while those still less attractive were put up for sale to the highest bidders.”
- 58.
“They were ordered to stand and remove their headscarves to be inspected. Then they were forced to smile while ISIL fighters took photographs,” Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq, 9; “Some women and girls reported ISIS fighters taking photographs of them without their headscarves. One girl, aged 18, recalled being ordered to smile and laugh while fighters photographed her,” International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “They came to destroy,” 10–11.
- 59.
“Senior UN official warns of ‘widespread and systematic’ sexual violence in Syria, Iraq,” 7 May 2015, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=50794#.VUxlN40cSB9.
- 60.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq, 9.
- 61.
Amnesty International, Escape from Hell: Torture and Sexual Slavery in Islamic State Captivity in Iraq, December 2014, 6.
- 62.
Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.”
- 63.
In “Genocide and gender,” Helen Fein writes: “In such [patriarchal] societies…women’s ‘purity’ and honor are usually contingent on their preservation of virginity before marriage and later inviolability. Repeatedly, we see that men of the group perpetrating genocides in such societies use rape as a means to destroy the Other,” 58.
- 64.
Sue Lloyd Roberts, “Raped, beaten and sold: Yazidi women tell of IS abuse,” BBC (14 July 2015).
- 65.
Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.”
- 66.
“Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves,” MEMRI, Also, as one survivor explained: “He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as we see fit,” Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.”
- 67.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “They came to destroy,” 12.
- 68.
Survivor testimonies from different locations and dates are consistent. Callimachi, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.”
- 69.
ISIS used buses fitted with curtains to transport large groups, and halls were prepared with mattresses, plates and food, ibid.
- 70.
Y. Yehoshua et al., “Sex Slavery in the Islamic State – Practices, Social Media Discourse, and Justifications; Jabhat Al-Nusra: ISIS Is Taking Our Women as Sex Slaves Too.” MEMRI Inquiry & Analysis Series Report No.1181 (17 August 2015); Also see Paul Wood, “Islamic State: Yazidi women tell of sex-slavery trauma,” BBC (22 Dec 2014).
- 71.
Derek Farrell interviewed by PBS, “Freed but not free: Yazidi girls who escaped Islamic State are trapped by trauma,” 19 February 2015, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/freed-free-yazidi-girls-escaped-islamic-state-trapped-trauma/. International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic notes that many interviewees showed signs of both physical and psychological trauma, “They came to destroy,” 16.
- 72.
Attila Tekin et al., “Prevalence and gender differences in symptomatology of posttraumatic stress disorder and depression among Iraqi Yazidis displaced into Turkey,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 7: 28556 (February 2016).
- 73.
Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” 69.
- 74.
Erika Solomon, “Escape from ISIS,” The Australian (13–14 February 2016).
- 75.
Smith, “Genocide and the Politics of Rape,” 92.
- 76.
Bjørnlund, “A Fate Worse Than Dying,” 33.
- 77.
These accounts are extremely common. See for example, Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London/New York: I.B. Taurus, 2011) and Miller and Miller, Survivors.
- 78.
Amnesty, Escape from Hell, 8.
- 79.
Yehoshua et al., “Sex Slavery in the Islamic State.”
- 80.
Fein, “Genocide and gender,” 57.
- 81.
Card, “Genocide and Social Death,” 73.
- 82.
Ayse Gül Altinay and Yektan Turkyilmaz, “Unraveling layers of gendered silencing: converted Armenian survivors of the 1915 catastrophe,” in Singer et al. (eds., 2011), 43–44.
- 83.
Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, 316.
- 84.
E.g. telegram dated 30 April 1916 from the Interior Ministry to almost all provinces, ibid., 322–323.
- 85.
E.g. Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, cites a telegram dated 11 August 1915: “The personal property of the children who are to be left with people worthy of trust for the purpose of education and upbringing, [this necessarily entailed forced conversion and assimilation] together with that of those converting or marrying, will be preserved, and if their testators have died, their hereditary shares will be given.”
- 86.
Human Rights Watch. “Iraq: ISIS Escapees Describe Systematic Rape.”
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
Sohrab Ahmari, “Helping the Escaped Slaves of ISIS,” Wall Street Journal 23 (November 2015).
- 89.
Human Rights Watch, “Iraq: ISIS Escapees Describe Systematic Rape.”
- 90.
Stephen Mallesons Jaques, “Special Court for Sierra Leone – Forced Marriage as an ‘other inhumane act,’” Australian Red Cross Humanitarian Law Perspectives (3 September 2010); also see Carmel O’Sullivan, “Dying for the Bonds of Marriage: Forced Marriages as a Weapon of Genocide,” Hastings Women’s Law Journal 22:2 (2011).
- 91.
Margaret Ajemian Ahnert, The Knock at the Door: A Mother’s Survival of the Armenian Genocide (New York: Beaufort Books, 2012).
- 92.
Matt Brown, and Suzanne Dredge, “Australian jihadists Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar accused of enslaving Yazidi women in Islamic State stronghold,” ABC (23 January 2015).
- 93.
Siobhan K. Fisher, “Occupation of the Womb: Forced Impregnation as Genocide,” Duke Law Journal 46 (1996).
- 94.
The Akayesu decision consolidated the earlier definition of forced pregnancy as “the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population,” Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, entered into force on 1 July 2002, Article 7, 2(f).
- 95.
Some descendants have broken the taboo by investigating their Armenian family history; see e.g, Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: A Memoir (London/New York: Verso, 2008).
- 96.
Patterson’s concept of “natal alienation” may apply here, which he argues occurs when a child is born in slavery: “Formally isolated in his social relations with those who lived, he also was culturally isolated from the social heritage of his ancestors,” Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 5.
- 97.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “They came to destroy,” 15.
- 98.
Yehoshua et al., “Sex Slavery in the Islamic State.”
- 99.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “They came to destroy,” 15.
- 100.
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict in Iraq, 10.
- 101.
Ibid., 10.
- 102.
For more detail, see Survivor “Mesrob,” at http://www.teachgenocide.org/files/Witnesses%20to%20the%20Armenian%20Genocide.pdf, Survivor “Elise,” The Forgotten, http://www.theforgotten.org/site/intro_eng.html and Survivor from Konia, Miller and Miller, Survivors, 88–89.
- 103.
Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details,” 7.
- 104.
Holslag, “Exposed Bodies,” 101.
- 105.
Nadia Murad, UN Security Council address, December 2015.
- 106.
Kurdish official Dr Nuri Osman and Matthew Barber, cited in Cathy Otten, “Isis keep closer eye on enslaved Yazidi women after series of dramatic rescues strike at the heart of the ‘caliphate,’” The Independent, 18 February 2016. Also, International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic notes that many Yazidi women were not given abayas to wear which are mandatory in ISIS-controlled areas, thereby ensuring any escapees would be quickly identified, “They came to destroy,” 14.
- 107.
Ekmekcioglu gives the example of a woman who begged for an abortion, only to be incarcerated in a special hospital ward until she gave birth. She suicided hours later. “The Biopolitics of ‘Rescue’: Women and the Politics of Inclusion after the Armenian Genocide,” in Amy E. Randall (ed), Gender and Genocide in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey.
- 108.
Ibid., 217.
- 109.
This is in direct contrast to the usually strict rules about conversion and return, e.g, that two Yazidi parents are required for a child to be considered a member of the community, and that conversion of a woman prevents her children from being accepted as Yazidis, Kikoler, Our Generation Is Gone, 20.
- 110.
Susannah George, “Yazidi Women Welcomed Back to the Faith,” UNHCR Tracks (15 June 2015).
- 111.
International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic also mentions additional challenges such as a lack of education and financial independence, and recommends that women’s views be considered in processes of accountability and reconciliation, “They came to destroy,” 16. Detailed recommendations to the Human Rights Council are included in the report.
- 112.
Lerna Ekmekcioglu, quoted in Hrant Galstyan, “Confronting Challenges: To be an Armenian Feminist in Turkey,” hetq 2 (September 2015).
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Marczak, N. (2018). A Century Apart: The Genocidal Enslavement of Armenian and Yazidi Women. In: Connellan, M., Fröhlich, C. (eds) A Gendered Lens for Genocide Prevention. Rethinking Political Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60117-9_7
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