Film screening & Discussion
1-2 pm
In 2024, ISIS launched the Yazidi Genocide, targeting Iraq’s Yazidi minority. In her documentary ‘HÁWAR––My journey to Genocide,’ HÁWAR.help founder and chairwoman Düzen Tekkal portrays the fate of resistant women to shed on the collective trauma of the Yazidis. The film’s shows that the lives of surviving women will be scarred forever if the perpetrators go unpunished and if there is no justice for the Yazidi people.
Following a 20-minute video screening of the documentary, filmmaker Düzen Tekkal will discuss both the role of female Yazidi genocide survivors as agents of change in international relations and peace processes, as well as the importance of international institutions, such as the United Nations, in punishing crimes against humanity and putting an end to impunity.
Welcome by Professor Daniel Naujoks, director of SIPA’s UN studies specialization and moderation by Natia Navrouzov.
Columbia students, faculty and staff may attend in person; others please join us virtually. Please see the different registration options. A light lunch will be served after the event.
Speaker bio:
Düzen Tekkal is a political scientist, social entrepreneur, war correspondent, filmmaker, founder, journalist and author. She is a member of the Expert Commission on the Causes of Flight and an expert on human rights in the Bundestag. For her documentary film Háwar - My Journey into Genocide, she traveled to Iraq several times and documented the genocide of the Yazidis there. Düzen Tekkal learned how to network and empower as a child: growing up with ten siblings in a Kurdish-Yezidish family that fled Turkey in the 1960s. Together with her sisters, she founded the human rights organization HÁWAR.help, with which she has launched various multi-religious and multi-ethnic projects in Iraq and Germany. In 2019, she founded the educational initiative GermanDream to inspire students for the free democratic basic order. In 2021, she received the Federal Cross of Merit from the President of Germany.
