Rez Gardi was just six when she came to New Zealand from a refugee camp where she was born.
Her Kurdish family spent nine years living in the camp, after they fled to Pakistan from Iraq and Saddam Hussein's brutal chemical attacks which killed her grandmother and two aunts.
She was the first person in her family to go to university, and after Auckland, she headed to Harvard Law school - becoming the first Kurdish woman to graduate from there.
She's now a human rights fellow in Northern Iraq, gathering evidence of war crimes carried out by Isis against the Yazidi people.
Photo: supplied
Gardi tells Kathryn Ryan the Kurdish people are among the most oppressed people in modern history.
“There’s approximately 40 million Kurds worldwide, and we still have no state of our own.”
Her father and his family are from the Kurdish region of Turkey and Iraq, while her mother is from the Kurdish region of Iraq and Iran.
“Just within my family, the places we’re from span three countries. This has been something that’s been happening for around 100 years, the struggle of Kurdish people, of oppression, discrimination, marginalisation, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the abuse of our human rights.”
Gardi says her parents met in Iran where they were part of a human rights group fighting for the rights of Kurdish people and for Kurds to be recognised as a state and minority group.
“It was very dangerous for them, the work they were doing, prominent activists were disappearing. It became very dangerous for Kurdish human rights activists, so they made the decision to flee to Pakistan where there was UN presence.”
They were told there, that because of their dangerous situation, they would be resettled within six months. Instead, they stayed nine years and Gardi was born in the camp before they eventually arrived in New Zealand.
She says that her first years in New Zealand were happy ones and she was pleased to see children weren’t beaten at school like they were in Pakistan.
“I learnt very quickly that I was in a very safe environment and I started loving school.”
Things took a turn for the worst when she was 10 years old and the 9/11 terror attacks happened.
“I remember going to school that day and it felt like my entire world had changed. All of a sudden, my classmates were looking at me different. They started saying, oh you’re from that part of the world where Osama Bin Laden is from, your family must be terrorists.
“It was really difficult for me to deal with that situation and make my classmates understand I was not a terrorist and actually my parents had fled dictator regimes and terrorism to be here in New Zealand, to be somewhere safe, and that I was on the good side.”
Gardi says she began to withdraw into herself and avoid attention.
“I went from this very loud, charismatic young person who was always very lively and involved in class and school, to being this person who didn’t want to interact with anyone for fear that people would say, you don’t belong here.”
She says she would try hide the fact that she was Kurdish and began to withdraw from Kurdish community events.
“I was trying to be as Kiwi as possible, I went to the point of making up a fake story about being born in New Zealand and having never lived abroad and not knowing any other language apart from English.”
She wouldn’t even let her parents pick her up near school in case they spoke Kurdish to her.
“It was really difficult in the beginning and it went on for a number of years.”
A turning point came in 2005 when she and her family were allowed to visit the Kurdish area of Iraq, Iran and Turkey and she fell in love with Kurdish culture and her homeland.
It was there she discovered how persecuted and oppressed the Kurdish war, and on her return to New Zealand, began to get involved in human rights causes.
That passion for international human rights persisted and today she’s part of an international team of lawyers working to find citizens who joined Isis and perpetrated crimes in the hope they can be prosecuted.
“It’ll be for individual members of Isis who are currently in custody or can be tracked. It would’ve been better if we could’ve had prosecution in an international court of law but the UN, as yet, has not set up a court specifically for prosecuting Isis for the crimes they’ve committed.
“It falls on the cases on individual members and on specific countries to hold trials in their specific jurisdiction.”
They’re currently in evidence collection, interviewing survivors who were held captive by Isis, and she says it will take a long time before they get to the point where it can be presented before a court of law.
While the persecution of Yazidi people by Isis in Syria and Iraq is well documented, Gardi’s team is more interested in tracking down specific perpetrators.
Yazidi people have been detained, abused, and killed by Isis and mass graves have been found in both countries. Young boys were often recruited, and the young girls were held as sex slaves for Isis members.
“We know very well the human rights abuses that occurred against the Yazidi population but what we don’t know is necessarily who committed those crimes.”
She says her own family’s journey and the plight of the Kurds are part of what drove her passion to get into human rights law.
“I thought, I can’t stop hiding who I am. I need to use my story and see where that takes me. I think that’s how that journey began.”
