2019 Aurora Prize Laureate Mirza Dinnayi is Co-Founder and Director of Luftbrücke Irak (Air Bridge Iraq), a humanitarian organization that flies Yazidi victims from Iraq to Germany for medical treatment. Driven by his commitment, he has found a way to overcome numerous bureaucratic and logistic obstacles to help the most vulnerable. We talked to him about saving lives and what the Yazidi community has in common with the Armenians.
The Need to Help Others
I am a Yazidi human rights activist and defender. I am the head of the German-based humanitarian organization Luftbrücke Irak, which means Air Bridge Iraq. The [aim of the] organization that I founded together with some other friends in 2007 was to help the victims of terror, especially children and women, to give them an opportunity for free treatment in Germany. So, we have been on this humanitarian mission since 2007 until now.
There is no end to the humanitarian engagement. As long as there is trust, there is a journey. As long as there is injustice in the world, there is no stop for us, too. This is, you know, a field that we are running, and they are running. They are destroying, and we are trying to build trust with humanity. The people who are making the war, they are trying to make the people hopeless of the humanity, and we are giving people the hope of this humanity.
The Aurora Prize Nomination and Motivation
Until now, let me be honest, I ask myself: “Who nominated me actually, for that? Who mentioned my name in front of [the] Aurora Initiative?” I don’t know that until now. So, it was actually… Well, for you, especially if you are working in some humanitarian field, because it is very hard for you, you take too much pain from the people, and you are yourself traumatized with the pain, for the visions and views that you see in your life. So, you are so happy if there is someone in this world who can promote you by recognition of the work that you are doing, and for sure it was, for me, a big honor to be nominated through [the] Aurora Initiative.
In the field that I am working with, it gives you more credibility and more trust to work with the people because they see that so prestigious an organization that is recognizing your work. So, for sure, it is giving you a more moral and give you more power to work. This is more, I think, more, for my case, personal satisfaction that encouraged me to go farther in the way that I have chosen in many years. So, I said [that] sometimes in this issue, you feel yourself upset. Especially, you sometimes have a target, a humanitarian target, and you cannot reach that, and you say: “When is the time to give up?” But if you have such [an] event like that, and if you have such [a] recognition like that, so you say: “OK, there is no time to give up.” You should work more and more even if you didn’t reach your goals until now.
We shouldn’t give up. For me, one soul, if I can save one soul, one soul is enough. If I find that 5,000 people are dying, I cannot help all these 5,000 people, but if I can touch the hand of one of them and save his life, it’s enough. And I think this is the start. Where is the border of my capacity? Where, and until when, I can fight, and when I know this border, and work for that, and try to do that, and this is somehow satisfying. In general, not, because the problem is huge but if you are doing, helping one person, in one time a year, for me, it is more than enough. If you are doing that, [it is] better than not doing that, better to giving up.
Yazidi Community Now
Unfortunately, we still have 80% of our community displaced in camps, in the tents in northern Iraqi Kurdistan. We have about 2,900 woman and children [who] are still missing within the ISIS areas, within the ISIS families, in the camps, and we didn’t have until now any information about those missing people. We have completely destroyed areas in Sinjar and other places. 80% of our population from Sinjar, they are still refugees outside of their area. They cannot return back. [The] Sinjar area became a conflict zone between different powers and nationally neighbor countries, like Turkey and Iran, Syria and Iraq. So, it is a bad destiny that my people have. Unfortunately, even now there is no escaping all this plight. Beside that, we didn’t find until now any Iraqi agenda for bringing justice, for recognition of the Yazidi genocide in the legal perspective, or for the starting [of] a kind of transitional justice under reconciliation to encourage the people to return back their homes. So, the situation is miserable, in [a] few words.
Doing the Right Things Together
I think the most important thing, and this is also the spirit of Aurora, [is] that you bring the most of the people who are working in this field, and this gives us collectively a power to work together, everyone in his field. And this is, I think, the next alternative. When I cannot do and achieve my goals alone in the benefit of the humanity, but if I have a big family like Aurora, all of us will take the spread of Aurora, and try to dispute it in our field, and search [for] another alternative, a realistic alternative, to achieve that. And I think this is the realistic way that Aurora was also established for, and hopefully all of us are taking advantage of this spirit.
We share with the Armenian community many values. So, also, my community is the Yazidi community. We have also a Yazidi community here. We have a very good history together. We have also, unfortunately, a painful history together. So, in all these last trips that I visited Armenia, [I noticed] how friendly and helpful the people here [are]. I was impressed by, especially, the Armenian elite who are working for the country. I am so proud of them: the Armenians from US, from Europe, from all over the world. They are all working for their country, and they are trying to keep the country working. I was so impressed by this idea because this is the issue. So, you shouldn’t check everything on the shoulder of the government or of the budget of the government. If you do something from your side, all of them can collectively do and bring peace, bring success, and everything. This is what impressed me in Armenia every time.