In this photo taken Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2016, a Yazidi refugee woman looks out of a window of a hotel room in the northern Greek village of Agios Athanasios, near Thessaloniki city. Portugal has offered to take in several hundred of the 2,500 Yazidi refugees living in Greece, arguing that the mistreated religious minority merits special protection. (AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos) (The Associated Press)
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January
25, 2017
AGIOS
ATHANASIOS, Greece – As a member of a persecuted minority in Iraq,
24-year-old Shaker Mahie has seen his people massacred, raped and scattered
across a new continent. Now, the Yazidi — whose faith is older than
Christianity — are at the center of a new European dilemma.
Portugal
has offered to take in several hundred of the 2,500 Yazidi refugees living in
Greece, arguing that their mistreated community merits special protection.
Athens has rejected the offer, worried that other countries might start
cherry-picking asylum applications based on religion or ethnicity.
Does
that make the Yazidis victims of discrimination or nondiscrimination? It's a
question that could be keeping some of them in limbo.
Ana
Gomes, a European Parliament member from Portugal who has been an outspoken
advocate of the resettlement proposal, says Greek concerns are misplaced.
Yazidis, she noted, were targeted for slaughter by Islamic State militants at
home and face ongoing harassment from fellow Iraqis stranded in migrant camps.
"These
people have been victims of negative discrimination in resettlement to other
European countries when they should be having positive discrimination in
recognition of the barbarity they have suffered," Gomes told the
Associated Press after returning from a visit to refugee camps in Greece.
The
dispute comes as the European Union wrestles with how to protect the most
vulnerable refugees while making sure that member nations are sharing the cost
of taking in newcomers. Delays and political obstruction have impeded an
emergency relocation program meant to ease the disproportionate load carried by
Italy and Greece.
Over
centuries, Yazidis have been the victims of purges by rulers who regarded their
religious symbols and practices as devil worship. Islamic State militants used
the same explanation when they targeted the insular community for conversion
and elimination.
Iraq's
remote Sijar region, the Yazidi minority's heartland, is where thousands of
civilians were massacred and thousands more fled in 2014. The United Nations
has described the attacks as genocide.
In a
small hotel room near the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, Mahie watches
his son and daughter play on the floor with a toy dump truck, and struggles to
find words to recount the horrors witnessed by his young family. He remembers
IS fighters entering his village two years ago.
"They
(took) girls and women and killed the men," he said.
He
and his family fled into the mountains of Sijar before crossing into Turkey and
paying smugglers to get them to Greece.
The
Yazidis' recent plight has been highlighted by the revelations of women being
captured by IS fighters for sexual slavery. Two Yazidi women, Nadia Murad and
Lamiya Aji Bashar, received an annual award for human rights last month from
the European Parliament.
But
old prejudices also have followed the Yazidi to Europe, where they have
reported being attacked by other refugees at camps and are often housed
separately.
"We
take the issue of Yazidis very seriously because they have suffered such
violence and persecution. We are doing everything we can to ensure their
protection," Greek Migration Minister Yannis Mouzalas told The Associated
Press.
Greece
says more than 60,000 refugees and migrants who arrived there hoping to make it
further into Europe are stranded in the country, after EU and Balkan countries
closed their borders last year. Athens is struggling to shelter them over the
winter and pressing other European Union countries to honor relocation
commitments.
Portugal
so far has taken in about half of the 1,618 asylum-seekers it pledged to accept
under the EU's embattled relocation scheme. Nevertheless, it's Yazidi-specific
invitation is unacceptable, Mouzalas said.
"No
government can discriminate on a racial basis," he said. "And those
making a lot of noise around this issue are not helping the Yazidis."
Yazidi
refugees themselves are split on the offer from Portugal. Some worry about
further dispersing the members of a minority group thought to number only
several hundred thousand worldwide.
"I
don't want to go to Portugal," Mahie said. "My mother and my brother
are in Germany and my father is in Iraq. It's difficult for one family someone
to (be) in this country and someone to (be) in another country."
To
others, the idea of a safe haven is appealing.
Like
Mahie, Riad Salo sought refuge from IS in the mountains of Sinjar; his
father-in-law died there. The younger of Salo's two daughters, Xzidxan, was
born in a tent at a refugee camp near Mount Olympus in northern Greece.
Salo
said he feared continued persecution from other Iraqis even if another EU
country agrees to relocate his family.
"I
don't want to go to a country where there are many (other refugees)," he
said. "I want to go to Portugal because it's very safe."
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