New Virtual Reality Lets You Experience ISIS’s Genocide of Yazidis as a Victim, and a Perpetrator
Part-1
In this new virtual reality, you can experience genocide through the perspective of a Yazidi girl, her brother, or an ISIS militant.
Six years later, more than 3,000 Yazidis are still missing. Many Yazidi women and girls have been sexually trafficked and sold to people in other countries.
A new project called “Nobody’s Listening,” founded by human rights advocate Ryan D’Souza, aims to educate people about these atrocities. The team of volunteers is comprised of a prominent human rights lawyer, a clinical psychologist who has previously worked in Iraq, and a number of creative consultants from the VR and arts world.
“Nobody’s Listening,” includes an exhibition about the history of the Yazidis and their culture, and a virtual reality tour that uses Oculus Quest headsets.
The project has so far been hosted in London, Prague, Johannesburg, and Queensland, and staff hope to expand it to as many places around the world as possible. A satellite exhibition was launched in Baghdad last year at a conference commemorating the 5th anniversary of the genocide. The full exhibition will premiere in Germany at the end of this year. Partnerships have been secured to take it to London, Prague, Johannesburg, Kigali and Queensland.
Three Perspectives
In the virtual reality, the viewer can be either a Yazidi girl, her brother who survived a massacre, or an ISIS fighter who attacked the girl and her brother’s village.
D’Souza said, “Too often people only focus on the horrific sexual enslavement of Yazidi women and girls, but we wanted to show that these gender-based attacks were a deliberate tactic of ISIS’s genocidal campaign to destroy the Yazidis. We included a Yazidi male perspective because their stories have often been overlooked. We were wary about including the ISIS fighter’s perspective, but we felt it was important to understand the mindset of a perpetrator. These are human beings who made their own decisions to commit these conscience-shocking crimes. And ultimately there has to be consequences for their actions. They must be brought to justice.”
Source prachatai.com/
Tags:
