BBC Radio 4 2016-04-20

BBC Radio 4 2016-04-20

According to the Yazidi religion, when the peacock angel first came down to earth he spread vibrancy and colour from his feathers to everything that he touched. Unfortunately, when I was in Iraq last month, listening to Yazidi families and trying to understand their circumstances, the weather was atrocious, with grey skies and torrential rain. The glorious work of the peacock angel was hard to discern in the dismal refugee camps into which the Yazidis crowded for shelter and protection.

Back in August 2014, ISIS launched a major offensive into the traditional Yazidi areas around Mount Sinjar and many thousands of Yazidis were killed or taken prisoner. A lot of what they told me wouldn’t be suitable for the radio at this time of day. In fact, probably not for any time of day. I still find it almost impossible to process how one human being could do such horrendous things to another.

In a broadcast of August 1941, Winston Churchill said “We are in the presence of a crime without a name”. Three years later it was given a name: “genocide” – which the 1948 Genocide Convention went on to define as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Last month, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a motion describing ISIS actions against Yazidis and Christians as genocide. And later on this afternoon the House of Commons will be debating a similar motion.

In 2003 there were about 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. Now there are less than 260,000 - most of them coming from longstanding communities who still pray in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus himself. And it’s not just the Yazidis and the Christians that ISIS have been trying to wipe out of Syria and Iraq. Also Alawytes, Shias, Mandeans and Shabacks. “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept”, wrote the Pslamist about his experience of the land we now call Iraq. And that was my reaction too.

Some will say, of course, that religion is itself the problem, that ISIS themselves claim to be inspired by religion. So, of course, I understand why the secular prophet tries to imagine no religion as an answer to the problem of religious violence. But, I’m afraid, its not easy if you try. For it’s precisely faith that gives the Yazidis their existential identity, religion binds them together with a collective language and set of common practices. And it’s precisely this that ISIS wants to destroy. Yes, when religious solidarity gets weaponized through resentment or fear – or when it gets purloined for political purposes - it becomes hugely dangerous. But the heart of religion is solidarity not violence – what someone once called the solidarity of the shaken. And that, I suspect, is precisely what the Yazidis find in the stories of their glorious peacock.