In a move well received by representatives of the Yazidi community, members of the Bundestag unanimously followed the movement of the 3 parliamentary teams of Germany’s center-left governing coalition and conservative MPs.
Thursday’s vote followed moves by countries including Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The chamber “recognizes crimes against the Yazidi network as genocide, following legal evidence through UN investigators,” the solution said.
The text denounces “unspeakable atrocities” and “tyrannical injustices” perpetrated through IS fighters “with the aim of annihilating the Yazidi community. “
It urges the German judicial formula to initiate new proceedings against criminals against suspects in Germany. And it calls on the government to develop its money to collect evidence of crimes in Iraq and to increase investment to help rebuild shattered Yazidi communities.
It also calls on Germany to identify a documentation center on crimes against Yazidis to create a secure old record and put pressure on Baghdad on minority group rights.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad, an activist for the rights of Iraqi Yazidis, said she hoped the solution would motivate other countries to do the same. “The survivors deserve nothing less. “
In August 2014, Islamic State jihadists massacred more than 1,200 Yazidis, members of a Kurdish network in northwestern Iraq that follows a long-standing tradition rooted in Zoroastrianism. ISIS considers them “devil worshippers. “
The Yazidi minority has been persecuted through the jihadist group, which has also enslaved its women and women and recruited children as child soldiers.
A UN special investigator said in May 2021 that he had accumulated “clear and convincing evidence” that IS had committed genocide against the Yazidis.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock recalled speaking to Yazidi women in Iraq who had been raped and held captive by Islamic State fighters. The movement went through them and “in the call of humanity,” he said.
“We have to call those crimes by their name,” he told the camera. “We want to ask ourselves what we can do to prevent genocides in the long term. “
About two dozen representatives of the Yazidi network attended the debate on the construction of the glass-domed Reichstag parliament in central Berlin.
Mirza Dinnayi, head of the NGO Air Bridge Iraq, which helps the Yazidis, told AFP that the measure is “pioneering” in dealing with the “consequences of genocide”.
He welcomed the inclusion of “practical steps the German government can take for the Yazidi network in Iraq, as well as for the diaspora. “
A Yazidi deputy in the Iraqi parliament, Nayef Khalaf Sido, is a “historic turning point” that would bring “positive effects for the Yazidis” on the ground.
Kurdish regional president Nechirvan Barzani thanked Germany for its “continued support” and encouraged other nations to take action.
Green lawmaker Max Lucks said Germany is home to what is believed to be the world’s largest Yazidi diaspora of about 150,000 people, the country has a special duty to the community.
“Your pain will pass,” he told the Bundestag.
“We owe it to the Yazidis because we didn’t act (in 2014) when they needed us. Our silence has claimed lives. “
Derya Turk-Nachbaur, a Social Democrat and one of the sponsors of the measure, noted that “there is no statute of limitations for genocide.
“It was incumbent upon us to turn a blind eye to their suffering any longer,” he said of the Yazidis.
“The unspeakable atrocities of ISIS militias must not go unpunished, neither in Iraq nor in Germany. “
Although the Bundestag’s movement on genocide has nothing to do with the trials of criminals, human rights advocates say it carries symbolic and political weight.
Germany is one of the few countries that have taken legal action IS.
In November 2021, a German court convicted an Iraqi jihadist of genocide against Yazidis, a world first Murad hailed as a victory in the fight for popularity of ISIS abuses.
And last week, a German woman tried in the southwestern city of Koblenz accused of aiding and abetting war crimes and genocide with Islamic State in Syria by “enslaving” a Yazidi woman.