Sohrab Ahmari, Editorial Writer for The Wall Street Journal, addresses the 8th Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy.
Full Remarks
Well ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for being here, for staying with us. I’m Sohrab Ahmari, I’m an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and I have the honor of moderating our next panel, with the two laureates, but I just wondered if you could join me in giving him one more round of applause.
I had watched that video several times and I must say it never stops moving me, to my core, to see that video, and I had the privilege of traveling with Dr. Kizilhan when he was running his last trip to Iraq to evaluate women, and we will go into their project, but just to provide a bit of context for this discussion, as other previous speakers, including Ambassador Moses and others had alluded to, the 20th century was a century that was, in many ways, marked by mass murder and by genocide, and unfortunately, it looks like the 21st century is also shaping up to be such a century.
I mean, the most notable case, obviously, is what’s happening in Syria, where the Assad regime and its backers in Moscow and Tehran have murdered some 250,000 people by the low estimates [and] displaced millions. And this is happening at a time when there are people with the highest circles of power in the West, who’ve made careers on the idea of ‘never again’ – that’s also a founding ideal of the United Nations, where we’re so close to it, but no case has been as difficult and as heart-tugging as the case of the Yazidis, because they’re a small and voiceless minority and their plight is what we’ll be discussing now.
So, I’ll join my colleagues on the couches and invite each of them to comment on their experience so we can learn more about what happened since you saw that video.
So, thank you all again and I appreciate it.
