[ Background noise ] So introduce yourself. My name is Joamand Herti. I was born in the city of Soleimaniya. I was displaced from this city twice because of war. Eventually, the second time we left, we ended up in Iran and then in the long run, I ended up in Britain as a refugee. That's where I completed my education. And Enphal and Halabja happened when I was in my early teens and that was the year in the middle of the Enphal campaign, my family fled. So the campaign was still going on when we left Iraq and went to Iran. So then may I switch the second question a little? The connection, I could talk about the connection. Yeah, you can keep on talking about the connection. May also when you come back. So throughout 1988 from February, we started hearing about gas attacks, destruction of villages, the siege of Halabja and the gasing of Halabja and deportation of village populations. Now, around April or May, my father's cousin came to see him and said some of the villages had been brought from the Karadakh region to Soleimaniya in the emergency building. You know, they were in-- surrounded by barbed wire and they were muddy, they were hungry, they were exhausted and people in the neighborhood were trying to give them food but the soldiers wouldn't allow them. I remember at the time my father said, he shook his head and said, "They're going to be killed." And I actually hated him for it because I hated my father's pessimism and I couldn't believe that anyone would do that to a group of people. So we ended up in Iran and there were many rumors about what had happened during Enphal. I mean, the gasing of Halabja was obvious because it was also filmed by some journalist, photographed also by the Iranian army. So what happened in Halabja became more public knowledge. But what happened during the Enphal campaign which went on for about seven months, February to September 1988, remained hidden because many people believed that, yes, the government destroyed the villages, bulldozed the houses, concreted over the water springs, looted the machinery and the farming stuff, deported the population, probably deported them to the south of Iraq, which used to be the case in the 70s and the early 80s. They would either be dumped in the fringe of the Kurdish cities or deported to the south. So there were many rumors. They were killed or not. Nobody knew the truth and I think it was in 1991 during the uprising when many of the governmental offices were raided, the security and intelligence offices, Inseli Mani and all the other cities. And the very well-documented destruction of the villages was revealed. At the time, Human Rights Watch gathered. There were tons of documentation. They were sent to America. And we were very angry at the time because this is our history and it should remain here. But fortunately, this happened because unfortunately, a few years after the civil war, the Kurdish civil war between 94 to 98, meant that if the documents were here, they would probably be destroyed. So in a way, the fact that they are safe in Denver is a very good thing. And they were the foundations for these two books by Human Rights Watch about Anfal. And I had been in a way just really not believing the story because I was too young to accept that such horrors happen. But I was also very interested in people's narratives. So from a very early age, I think I was around 13 or 14, I was collecting stories of survivors. What did you see during Anfal? And I had a big notebook dedicated to this purpose. Unfortunately, one of the survivors I gave this to did not return the book. So I lost that. But this interest and knowing what happened in particular, what happened to the woman, stayed with me. And in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the first Kurdish satellite channels started broadcasting in Europe, and we were living in London at the time, there were many documentaries about Anfal. And even though many women were interviewed for these documentaries, I had many questions that were not answered about women's lives and women's bodies and sexual harassment and surviving hunger, children, death of children, pregnancy, miscarriage, rape. So I wanted to research about this. I wanted to find answers to these questions. When my PhD was finished, I applied for a scholarship from the Leverhjem Trust. And then fortunately, I managed to secure a scholarship, came home, conducted a lot of fieldwork over five years between 2005 and 2010. As a result of that, I wrote this academic book, Gendered Experiences of Genocide and File Survivors in Kurdistan, Iraq, through Routledge. But a book with the title of Gender and Genocide on it is not very accessible. Academic books are not read by many people. So these stories, in particular, the woman's voices were very much in my head. And I always thought, how could I bring them into the, you know, because victims and survivors are very much silenced and shut away. I mean, their stories are very much tailored for certain ends, bureaucratic ends or research or whatever. And sometimes the truth, you know, the emotional truth, the loss, the cost of all of that is missing. We do not have empathy and understanding of what has happened. So I always think that literature can do that. So I had in my mind this sequence of poems where their stories could be told each story from one survivor's perspective. And I wanted to bring into light the different aspects of Anfal, because like some of them tried to cross into Iran in winter and died, froze to death. Some of them were gassed and died then. Some of them were gassed once and then gassed again in Iranian camps when the government followed them. Some of them were at the stage, the last stage, where they were supposed to be shot in the mass graves when the amnesty came and they were saved. So I wanted to shed light on the different conditions, different experiences and how people have survived not only during the campaign, but also afterwards. And that's why I wanted to have this overall story. What was their life like before? What happened during Anfal and what has happened after the catastrophe? Maybe I want to ask one more question, because maybe two, because one, I'm really interested in how is it? Now for you to live again in Kurdistan, what's changed in a specific way the memory and the work on the memorial on Anfal and Alabj? So it was in fact the field work that I did at the time that made me realize that I need to come home. I was doing very well in Britain and I was successful as a poet. I was completely in the inner circle, getting to the festivals and touring with well-known poets and fantastic writers and so on. But I knew that there was a lot of work that I could do here. And if I wanted to actually make a difference here, I would be more effective if I moved back. I did a lot of activism while I was in the diaspora. It consisted of things like organizing conferences, providing training, creating networks, even founding an organization with another group of women, trying to raise attention, seminars and conversations with people, trying to connect with women activists back home. But I felt that there was a lot more that I could do if I came home. So I had been looking for an opportunity to move back since 2010 and I tried. I met with several universities at the time, administrators, even the Ministry of Higher Education, trying to come home with one condition, if they allow me to start gender studies. At the time, this wasn't possible and I nearly gave up on the idea. Eventually, by accident, a friend of mine said there's a position opening the American University of Iraq Soleimani in the English department. And you know, I am a poet, but I mean, my research and my work is more social science. But I'm a poet and I'm a translator of literature as well. So I applied, not being sure whether I would be accepted or not. Fortunately, I was. I came back and I was able to develop gender studies courses. I founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies in 2015 and started sort of networking and applying for funds and building a team. And over the years, the center became successful. And one of the things we were concerned about was trying to make gender studies accessible in Kurdish and Arabic. So we got some funding from the European Union to translate UG courses, you know, undergraduate courses for several departments and to provide training to professors in order to be able to teach, not just like in English universities, but also in Kurdish and Arabic speaking universities. So we've done research and we've done so we initiated the first gender studies minor nine classes in the American University, the first one in Iraq. And we've conducted research. Our latest project is about masculinity. So I've been home for more than eight and a half years, nearly nine years soon. And I must say, things have become more difficult. And when I came home, the possibility of doing work and the I didn't experience backlash. There was a lot of openness to discussing gender equality, women's rights and to also get training, find out more. But I think over the last few years, more and more backlash has taken place in particular. Lots of people, conservative forces are sort of mobilizing masses of people, misinforming them and trying to defame and erode the trust of the kids. And I think that's a very important part of the community in the activists and academics who are working in the field. And to a large extent, they are succeeding because they have a very strong social media machinery, which they suddenly, when they attack somebody, there are dozens of Facebook pages and each of them has hundreds of thousands of followers and hundreds of posts are created and reshared and commented on within the space of weeks. And this content stays there forever. This is also a place where it's post dictatorship, it's conflict affected. Trust is a problem anyway. But in a new era of the Kurdish government, where there is nepotism and corruption and mismanagement and also the fact that the Kurdish parties have used this misinformation against each other. And there are so many different versions of what's going on of the truth. Sometimes people don't know where the truth is. And there's this very muddy water. So it's become a thing that if you repeat a lie long enough and many people repeat it, then people believe it. And that's happened a lot with women's rights activists who are being attacked. So much false information is repeatedly said about them that the community now thinks that we are just trying to destroy family and culture and community. And in fact, all feminists have always fought for is better, healthier relationships between men and women where women are not victimised. In fact, that will lead to a happier family, happier children, healthier society. But of course, there's so much, you know, and for the rights of people to be different, you know, to be accepted as they are. This has been very unfortunate that my experiences, things have become more difficult recently compared to when I had just come home. Or maybe also I was much more optimistic and maybe more naive. I think sometimes you do a lot of very tough work marching forward, not realising how strong the opposition will be. And then when you're faced with it, it's a sobering experience. Yeah, one last question about, you know, it's I'm from Germany. You lived a long time in the UK. May you have also a perspective how I lived in Germany a bit too. Munich. Munich. My. Oh, my God. It's beautiful, but not very nice. Yes. Yes. True. No, but what I my question is like what what could be the role or the exercise from Germany or Europe countries as well to support. Courage people, for example, or in the focus on and for and to help to topic nowadays. What do you think is the role and the needs? So we know that at the time when Saddam Hussein was building chemical weapons, many factories in the West provided the raw material. And one of the countries that provided raw material was Germany. There were reports about this. But of course, it was very sensitive at the time. I guess it still is because it sort of shows that Germany and other countries that have sold material to Iraq are in part responsible for what happened because you give dangerous tools to a dictator. What does he do? Obviously, he oppresses people and kills his own people and so on. So I think this happens throughout history where the West has a connection to what's happening in the East historically and also politically. But they refuse to take responsibility for past mistakes or actions. I do not want to say that there's this perception that we here should be supported by the West. That's not what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to say that there wasn't just one person responsible for this. There was a network of, of course, to various degrees, varying degrees. There was a Dutch businessman who was eventually convicted by the Dutch authorities. I think we need more cases like that where companies that did sell, at least they should pay some reparation towards the children of the survivors whose parents died of gas in and so on. The whole thing in Iraq, even the trial, the Enfhal trial was very swift. Very few survivors took part. So that was their chance to tell the truth. That was their chance to tell their story and make it have a consequence. But that opportunity was stolen from them partly also because Saddam Hussein was killed even before the trial started. And also, even though the, you know, the federal court judged that that was genocide, what happened in Enfhal was genocide, there was no compensation to go with that. So the central government in Iraq took no responsibility for it either. So for a long time, the survivors lived in substandard housing, in lots of poverty, no services, no paved roads until 2007 and eight, for example, a town like Khelair or Samod, that were sort of very much where the survivors lived, didn't have any paved roads, you know, water services and so on, or any entertainment places for children, for young people. And these have become very deprived places where, because the fathers were gone, the main generation of men and teenage boys were, you know, were killed off by the government in the mass graves. So the remaining were elderly people, women and their young children. And because of the poverty, many of their children ended up not going to school and they had to work. And when they grew up, they became policemen, you know, security guards, Peshmerga. So they ended up also in the less paid professions. And there was a lot of stigma about these children who didn't have a guardian. And none of that has been compensated for. None of that. There is no even an apology. There's no recognition of the harms caused. There is no reparation, not even symbolic reparation. Thank you very much for this words. Yeah. Also really.