A deep-dive into the production of “This is still genocide”

Interview by Kathrine Hawes with Lynn Zovighian | Georgetown University — Washington, D.C.
November 30, 2022

Transcription

Interviewer: Katherine Hawes [KH]

Respondent: Lynn Zovighian [LZ]

Please note: This transcript has been lightly edited to remove filler words or sounds.

[KH]: What inspired the production of “This is still genocide”? What made it a project that felt like the right move for ZP right now? 

[LZ]: Right. That’s such a good starting point; thanks for that. Really, because we are eight years into a genocide that is still ongoing, but we are now in a world where there is tremendous focus on other challenges, and causes, and genocides, especially Ukraine has taken a significant priority for donors and for diplomats and governments. 

The question becomes, how do we tell the story to demonstrate that this genocide is still relevant and important for the international community to care for and actively be a part of resolving. And so, because we’ve done so many things in the past—advocacy focused, diplomacy focused—one thing we had never looked at was producing a documentary. We’ve felt like, well, visualizing that this genocide is ongoing is probably going to hit home a lot harder than just talking about it at a high level. We wanted people to see exactly what we are talking about, and that is really what inspired this documentary. 

[00:02:41:10]

[KH]: What do you think some of the most challenging aspects of producing this documentary were? 

[LZ]: I have a couple, actually, and that’s all assuming that your funding is covered. Obviously, we had covered the entire funding. I’m sure that would be a challenge for many who are trying to do good work. In our case, this was a commitment from myself and our family’s philanthropy, so we were left with two huge challenges. The first is, how do you make sure that you are ethically working with survivors and not triggering trauma, not causing harm when trying to do good? This was a huge fixation, if you will, obsession, because there are very few ways of doing it right, and making sure that there is ownership and meaningful agency. That’s hard to do. It’s hard to do because people on camera might not speak the way they would if they are offline. People who are survivors and community members are also at a point where they are wondering, “Why is the world not helping? If I am going to help this documentary, is it going to serve a purpose, or am I just throwing darts in the air and we’re not going to move forward?” So you know, lack of trust and suspicion related to not triggering trauma is important to get right. All the easy ways of getting it wrong and the few ways of getting it right. 

[00:04:45:24]

The other big issue was safety. When my team was there on the ground, Turkey bombarded a couple towns next door. So, you’re sending a production crew on your cost, your responsibility, to an area that is just not safe, with over eleven armed groups on the ground. You never know what can go wrong, and I wasn’t there because I couldn’t be there; unfortunately, being the philanthropist makes it harder to be in those areas sometimes, and so for the safety of everybody, and to make sure that we got the most authentic and grounded evidence on camera, the decision was made that I not be on the ground. And so there would be hours on end where I couldn’t reach my team. I would never know in those hours, is everyone alright, is everybody safe? I would only find out whenever they had access to Internet. Thankfully everybody was safe, but looking back I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable to go through such a difficult, uncomfortable... you know, going through this again with so much discomfort and lack of visibility, I don’t know if I would do that again as easily as I did the first time. 

[00:06:07:05]

[KH]: That makes sense. I actually had a Zoom meeting with Mohamad Chreyteh, the director. I met with him yesterday and he was talking about how Yazda worked with local militias to ensure the safety of the production crew. 

[LZ]: Exactly. And Mohamad, as you know, was on the ground.

[KH]: Could you discuss how you decided to only use the voices of survivors in the documentary, rather than including a voiceover of someone from like the UN or Amnesty? 

Lynn: Very important question. The very simple answer is that they are the only ones who can teach us what it is like to be a survivor today and help us better understand and bring us closer to their daily lived experiences and struggles. The reality is that no UN official or Amnesty International analyst or researcher would be able to do that. So we need to put the survivors first, and unfortunately we are in a world where that just never happens, or very rarely happens. Survivor voices are often tokenized; they are used for the purposes of diplomacy agendas, donor agendas, but are they really heard out? Do their voices change, and make a difference? Those are the big questions that we don’t always have positive answers to. 

[00:08:00:12]

[KH]: Overall, in the journey to rehabilitate the Sinjar region and bring justice to Yazidis, what do you think the importance of centering Yazidi voices is? Could you talk a bit about the movement from something like the Sinjar Agreement, which was very removed from including survivors in that process, to the Yazidi Survivors Law? 

[LZ]: The documentary models that. The documentary is doing what all of those agreements and legislative mechanisms are not doing. The reality is that when you don’t acknowledge the power that you have and the interests that you have over survivors and communities, then any effort to include them will be perceived as not authentic. When we say empowerment, which is also a term that has become so tokenized and means so little; its essence is that the power not be held by the legislators, but by the survivors for which this law is intended, and the same goes for the Sinjar Agreement. 

[00:11:28:21]

Iraq is politically a quagmire caught between Turkey, Iran, and other forces, and one can argue that Iran itself doesn’t even have full agency or self-determination, as the government and as people. So, the reality is that if we want to bring meaningful inclusion of survivors and communities to the Yazidi Survivor Law and to the Sinjar Agreement, that’s already a bit too late because the law has been passed and the agreement has been signed. But what we can do is include them in the implementation and have the humility to make addendums to those agreements and laws, and very importantly, to take on the lesson of not doing that again for other legislative and political mechanisms and debates that still are needed to resolve this cause and really bring justice and accountability to all. 

So, what does meaningful inclusion look like, aside from forfeiting power and passing it on to communities and survivors? To make sure they are part of the conceptualization of laws and policies from day one. That in fact they are educating policymakers and lawmakers, not only on what to include but on how to think, and what should be in scope, and how should those policies and laws be implemented. Today, neither law nor agreement is being implemented; well that’s what happens when you don’t include, because whatever you signed for was not reflective of the reality of the situation and was not viable from the very beginning. Meaningful inclusion is how to ensure that survivors and communities are helping transform mindsets; so educating and transforming mindsets, driving the very scope and wording and spirit of law and policy, and being direct participants in its implementation.

[00:12:50:11]

[KH]: Going back to the production of the documentary, when you are engaging with survivors, how do you build trust and create an environment in which people feel comfortable sharing their stories? You mentioned earlier not wanting to create more harm for a community that has already faced significant trauma. How do you create those environments in which people are able to share what they’ve been through? 

[LZ]: Really, it begins with not starting with the documentary. The documentary is an asset that we can co-create with communities with whom we already have deep trust and have demonstrated commitment. You don’t just go in and produce a documentary when you’re still strangers. So you have to demonstrate worth, and you have to demonstrate consistency, and you have to demonstrate partnership. Because we had all of that, after seven years of working so closely together, we could drive and co-create together and fund a documentary, which isn’t just a documentary. It’s a public advocacy asset. We’re here to make sure we are telling the Yazidi story as it ought to be told, years into a genocide that the world has forgotten about. Those are tremendous hurdles. Those are objectives that are just not possible to go near, to get anywhere near, , if there isn’t mutual trust, mutual commitment, and meaningful ownership. 

[KH]: How did you select which stories to include in the documentary? 

[LZ]: Those decisions were made completely by the community. We did not presume or foresee or expect what those stories would be. The way we actually ran the production schedule, was we already had a couple of interviews lined up, but then we made sure that there was ample time on the ground for meeting people that would just come up to us and talk to us. So it was not engineered, precalculated. Barev wasn’t planned for. She was there. She was brilliant; she brought so much authenticity to everything that needed to be said. The judge was not planned for. We just pushed and it happened whilst on the ground. So, those are just a couple of examples of what I mean by making sure that you make space to be investigative and to respond to the ground and to respond to events and recommendations and non-recommendations. You’re on the ground. 

[00:16:53:03]

[KH]: Could you discuss a bit your views on the importance of using survivors’ stories to create the outline of any story, documentary or article, rather than creating an outline yourself and using survivors stories to fill in wherever you think they best fit. 

[LZ]: As social scientists, as researchers, we have to understand our positionality. We have to be very cognizant of who we are, who we are not, what we know, what we think we know, what we know we do not know, and be open to the fact that what we do not know, we do not know. And so, I really think that the scientific method is a really important ethical and methodological basis to work with. And that’s very much applied in the way we were thinking about this documentary and not thinking about this documentary. Don’t forget, as the funders and the commissioners of this documentary—because we have these values and because we have that trust and we are deeply committed—we did not enforce any views as the donors. Other donors would. Other donors would come in with expectations and compliance requirements to be able to be funded. We don’t work in such ways. 

When we first thought about the documentary, we—that same day—brought it to the attention of the community. The community co-created the entire concept from the very beginning. That’s why it is a Yazidi public advocacy asset. That’s why it was a documentary felt by many community members, who responded on Twitter with a show of feeling that they were being heard and represented. And so, you have to include them from the very beginning because otherwise you are bringing in your own biases: as donors, as documentary patrons, as investigative journalists, as directors, as producers. The only way to do it right, and to do it fairly, and to do it meaningfully, is—from day one—everybody is at the table. 

[00:20:17:21]

[KH]: What are some of the main messages that you hope viewers take away from the documentary? 

[LZ]: Well the biggest one is that this genocide is still happening. When you read the media, you still hear or read, ‘the genocide happened eight years ago.’ Happened eight years ago. They treat the genocide like an event, like just August 2014. That’s not the reality, that’s the narrative we want to debunk. And so, we are here to say, ‘This is an eight-year-old and still ongoing genocide.’ You know, when Mohamad and I had our first serious meeting about this, he was like, “Lynn, if you had to explain what you believe needs to be achieved, how would you describe it?” And I told him, I said, “This is still genocide.” When he was in Sinjar, he messaged me one evening and he said, “Remember when you said, ‘This is still genocide’? We think that’s the title of the documentary, because that is exactly what we are seeing, with our cameras and our own eyes, and that is what the community is telling us.” 

[00:23:06:21]

So, that’s the biggest and most important message. And then of course, there are important nuances / sub-messages. You know, you still have significant displacement dramatically affecting human lives. You have an inability to rebuild Sinjar or even think about a future. Yazidis are wondering, ‘Are we just being left behind?’ And having armed groups on the ground, conquering those grounds, and seeing the devastation with no efforts to rebuild sustainably and for the long-term: ‘that just demonstrates that this genocide is being perpetrated today by inaction, by choices not to do the right things. I think that is why this is still genocide. It’s no longer just the responsibility of Da’esh that genocide has been perpetrated against the Yazidi people.’

Today, the international community, the national governments, all stakeholders are perpetuating that genocide. So we’re all responsible. 

[00:23:43:21]

[KH]: From your work with survivors, and from what you’ve heard from the Yazidi community, what are some of the key steps towards guaranteeing a safe future going forward for Yazidis? 

[LZ]: Well, there are many. I would love to draw your attention to a report that I co-authored with an amazing Yazidi woman with the consulate support of the Yazidi Survivors Network. It’s a report that defines what transitional justice looks like for survivors today. The survivors make it clear; the blueprint is clear. Survivors deserve their days in court. Daesh foreign fighters and local fighters must be tried—not for cases and crimes of terrorism, but for crimes of genocide, because only then is it targeted, and is it really justice. The women, the survivors, need to be the plaintiffs. They need to be the reason that we’re all in court. So that’s very important. Like I said, rebuilding and investing in Sinjar—and we can talk a lot about that, but that’s very high-level—reestablishing security, and getting rid of all of these armed groups on the ground. 

Then, really focusing long-term on integration and re-integration. The Yazidi people and other minority groups must not go back to Sinjar feeling unsafe. Laws must be put in place to protect them. They must know that they are safe, that their neighbor is not their enemy. There needs to be space for sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic integration; friendship building. That can only be done through driving citizenship and making sure that the Yazidis and others are not treated as second-class citizens and do not feel like they are second-class citizens in Iraq and the Kurdistan region. You need all of those steps to happen for a safe, sustainable future. We don’t get to hatpick. It’s not, ‘I’ll do this, and I’ll not do that.’ It’s all, or it will feel like nothing. 

[00:26:48:14]

[KH]: Have there been any specific interactions that you’ve had with survivors that have really impacted how you approach this work? 

[LZ]: Yes, definitely. I can think of a few moments, actually. Firstly, working with survivors of sex trafficking and genocide, in terms of my experience, has not just been with the Yazidi people. I think the first moment that comes to mind is when I was in Baghdad and I met a survivor, I won’t mention her name for confidentiality purposes. Whilst other survivors were coming up to me and talking with me, she came up to me and said that she would not engage in conversation with me because her captor had been a Lebanese man in Daesh. That was a huge moment for me. I was devastated that that had happened to her. I was devastated that she did not feel that she would be able to trust me because of my nationality, because of what a man of inhumanity and terror had done to her. He had created a barricade, an obstacle to being able to develop a friendship and sisterhood with this woman. 

I deeply resented what he had done, in that moment. I could completely understand why it was important for her to tell me this. That was a huge moment for me, but I will say that we did begin to work together as a group, all together, and it didn’t take long before her and I developed a  very important bond. She is someone that I deeply care for, I care for all of them, but she is someone who really brought Daesh home for me. 

I wish that every single one of the decision makers out there could experience something like what I had experienced, because when you get hit in this way, hit with the hard truth and reality, you don’t sleep well at night. You constantly think and rethink who you are. I think that that is the type of destruction these decision makers and power brokers need today. They need to feel so uncomfortable in their own skin because I don’t know how else we will be able to get them to behave the way that they do need to if we want this genocide to end with full justice and accountability to all. 

[00:30:51:24]

[KH]: Stepping back a little bit, can you talk about how you developed this close relationship with the organization Yazda? 

[LZ]: I first learned of Yazda when it was first being set up. It was just a little start-up team, four or five people, Hadi Pir was one of them. That was our starting point. We supported them immediately to make sure that their survivor programs would succeed, because we knew that they would need credibility, because we knew that they would need a lot of friends, and a lot of support, for them to be the organization that their community needed to play a meaningful role in the face of genocide. This was a team of Yazidi professionals from oil and gas, academia, translations, project management, and these professionals decided to form a team, and they’ve done the hardest and most incredible work. It’s been an honor to invest and reinvest in them over the last several years. 

[00:32:20:01]

[KH]: What are some of the projects that ZP and Yazda have collaborated on? 

[LZ]: Quite a few. We have helped build their first mobile clinics, their first health database. We’ve funded their first spiritual pilgrimages and co-designed them with them. We have funded and co-created a lot of their advocacy plans. Our first big work together was me presenting my assessment that this was a genocide, and not just attacks and an invasion of Sinjar. Over the years, capacity building, helping make this start-up team an institution, a global institution of global standing. We’ve helped them with their branding, with their website. 

Also, intangible cultural preservation. We sponsored and helped them with a beautiful collection of Yazidi poetry on the genocide, making sure that we are preserving those stories by Yazidi poets and publishing them, as well as producing a Yazidi children’s choir rendition of the Yazidi anthem. There’s been a lot of things that we’ve done, and a lot of the stuff we’ve done is the stuff that other donors are not interested in, and almost everything that we have done, we’ve been the first movers because other donors aren’t so vested, don’t want to take as much risk as we are willing to take. 

[00:35:49:23]

[KH]: You mentioned working on advocacy plans with Yazda. What are some of these plans for advocacy in the near future? 

[LZ]: Our focus right now is on publishing very succinct policy papers that tackle the micro and the macro point-by-point. We just published a very important paper with the Wilson paper in D.C. We have another paper coming up soon; we published an important report on transitional justice in Saudi Arabia with Arab News. We have a lot of closed-door sessions on advocacy with governments that are friends to the cause. We also host for them the annual commemoration of the start of the Yazidi genocide. 

[00:37:02:16]

[KH]: For those who haven’t really heard about the Yazidi genocide, why should people learn about this crisis and care about doing this type of work? How do you try to get people to engage with these issues? 

[00:38:35:21]

[LZ]: We live in a world today where this could happen to any of us. The reality is that nobody saw this coming. The survivors and the advocates in this genocide and the community today are people who used to live very normal lives, very happy lives. So, why is this important? Because if we don’t take care of this, if we do not resolve this, if we do not drive justice and accountability, this will happen again, and next time it will also happen to a community that we didn’t expect it to happen to. We will be fueling and reinforcing a world where impunity is absolutely fine. That’s why it’s relevant for every human being on the planet, because when one community faces genocide, it will happen again, and it can happen to anyone.

I want to maybe bring a little bit more reason to that idea, for those of us who are in countries where we’ve never experienced war, and we’ve never experienced instability. When you look for example today at Ukraine, this is an example of a country that lived well, was part of the EU, was joining NATO. It’s not a place that’s so removed. That’s why it’s easier for people to feel solidarity, because they feel like it can happen to them. But the same way that we are all Ukraine, we are also all Yazidi.

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