Nobel laureate Murad’s story is that of survival and hope
Nadia Murad from Iraq and Denis Mukwege from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) won The Nobel Peace Prize for 2018 on Friday for their “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”. While Mukwege got the award for helping wartime-rape survivors in DRC, Murad was awarded for her “uncommon courage in recounting her own sufferings and speaking up on behalf of other victims”.
I met Nadia at the Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards ceremony in New York on September 25 this year, where she was given the Changemaker Award for using her own story to put the spotlight on war crimes, including rape, in Iraq and across areas of conflict across the world. She refused all interviews but we said hello. She doesn’t speak but understands a smattering of English, so the conversation was short and stilted.
But I had noticed her in a crowded hall much before I realised who she was – her eyes speak of the unimaginable horror she witnessed and endured for months as a sabaya (sex slave) of Islamic State (IS) militants.
The 24-year-old Yazidi is a survivor of the IS ethniccleansing in Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014, where they massacred and drove out thousands of Yazidis from their ancestral lands. Nadia lost 18 of her family in the genocide, including six brothers, and her mother was killed soon after. They were all dumped in mass graves.
Nadia was allowed to live because she was young and could be used as a sabaya, who are raped, beaten and sold several times. “This was the first time I heard the word sabaya—or sex slave—applied to me. That moment was the moment I started dying. Every second with ISIS was a slow, painful death,” she writes in her autobiography, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Flight Against the Islamic State. Like other adducted girls and women, Nadia was beaten, spat on, whipped, burned with cigarettes, raped and sold repeatedly. She escaped captivity in January 2015 with the help of a Muslim family in Mosul and since then, has become the voice of the Yazidi people, including 1,300 Yazidi women still enslaved by the IS. “Deciding to be honest was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made and also the most important .... it never gets easier to tell your story. Each time your speak it, you relive it. When I tell someone about the checkpoint where the men raped me, or the feeling of Hajji Salman’s (the man who first bought her) whip on the blanket as I lay under it, or the darkening Mosul sky while I searched the neighbourhood for some sigh of help, I am transported back to those moments and all their terror,” writes Nadia, who was named the UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking in 2016.
“My story, told honestly and matter-of-factly, is the best weapon I gave against terrorism, and I plan on using it until those terrorists are put on trial,” writes Nadia. She has founded the Nadia’s Initiative, which supports women and minorities through the redevelopment and stabilisation of communities in crisis.
It’s not easy to call out and relive sexual assault and violence, past or present, as evident from Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who is set to be confirmed as a US Supreme Court justice on Saturday despite her damning accusations. She’s a hero, like Nadia, for everyone who believes in human values.