Recent media reports and blog posts have featured news stories indicating sporadic violence directed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against the LGBTQ community. Previously, international organisations including the United Nations and Amnesty International have held ISIS responsible for grave human rights abuses and war crimes committed at an unprecedented ‘historic scale’ of abuse and ethnic cleansing. However, inciting a generalised marker of identity (the identity of ‘gays’ in this regard) as a community of victims, calls for a far more nuanced approach in negotiating the narrative of violence that ISIS has been associated with in the recent past.
BBC Magazine accounts the experiences of Taim, a 24-year old gay medical student subjected to repeated attacks as a consequence of his ‘identity’. He not only states his father’s threats to turn him over to ISIS, but also how violence is used by the militant group as a means of gathering public support in ‘a place where LGBTQ people are already deeply stigmatised’. Interestingly, the mechanism to track such individuals, as Taim notes, is not random. Victims are systematically targeted through screening social media accounts, phones and messages of acquaintances who also belong to the LGBTQ community. These individuals are then subjected to violence, as Taim’s gay friend in Iraq, who was thrown from the top of a building and thereafter stoned to death.
In the past few weeks, circulation of horrific videos and image files over the internet reinforced claims made by Taim regarding brutal execution and torture against members of the LGBTQ community. While the need for a re-assertion of global LGBTQ rights is unquestionably crucial, the situation has to be viewed by incorporating different perspectives. In this regard Scott Long, Director of the LGBTQ Rights Program at Human Rights Watch from 2004 to 2010 focused on the conditions in Iraq and the specific nature of violence within. The two-fold explanation of ISIS advertising acts of violence, Scott says, reviews the possibility of terrorisation (that suppresses potential opposition to their rule and ensures a resultant support base among civilians) as well as a further technique in ‘trumpeting dominance’ in the distinct socio-political milieu of Iraq in the last forty years.
However, reducing the discourse of victimisation only to ‘gays’ ignores the wider trajectories of gender relations, cultural and symbolic meanings, and more specifically masculinity in relation to the overall politics of post-occupation Iraq that further contribute to the understanding of torture carried on by ISIS. The ‘gay label’ on such killings often reduces our reference to a specific typology when in reality, as the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission rightly notes, we are not even decisive about what exactly we mean by ‘gay’. They further state:
“…in the strongest possible terms against assuming that the men identified as ‘gay’ and against assuming the men engaged in homosexual acts… If the men did not identify as gay, the allegation is inaccurate and obscures the Islamic State’s motivation for publicly labelling them as such. If the men indeed identified as gay… widespread publicity potentially exposes their families, loved ones and intimate partners to harm.”
As Scott recalls, placing the persecution of gay men in Iraq within this specific context reveals further specifications with respect to the gay press coverage of the incidents and the overall political equation that inaccurately deemed Ayatollah Sistani – the most distinguished cleric in Iraq – responsible for the violence between 2003 and 2009. The overall arrangement of LGBTQ violence as an organised campaign was in fact, according to Scott, contributed by Shia militias in their attempt to reassert their moral indispensability, with respect to homosexuality viewed as a ‘serious illness’ in the community brought in by the youth on account of ‘western influences’ from outside their cultural cohort. “These are not the habits of Iraq or our community and we must eliminate them,” it further reported.
The meaning attributed to ‘gay’ within the cultural context of Iraq has to therefore be reassessed, as noted by scholars such as Nancy Lindisfarne. While sex exists within the Da’ish realm of religion and juridical terms, it exists only at the level of deeds and not identities; thereby making the overall argument of violence as directed against members of LGBTQ community likely to commit over-generalisation.
Even in the year 2012, the surge of killings of ‘effeminate-looking men’ in Baghdad was referred to by several gay activists as ‘gay killings’. However the attacks were part of an internally institutionalised mechanism to incite fear of ‘emos’, or youth who were believed to be ‘corrupted’ by styles, alternative music, gender ambiguity and fashion appropriated from the West – a rhetoric incorporating men who didn’t appear to be ‘masculine enough’.
While any form of hate killing is an example of human rights violation, it is noteworthy to account for the specific causes that announce a particular incident a situation of grave concern vis-à-vis other violations, such as the routine accounts of rape of women in the same cultural context. Contextual sensitivity along with the vantage point advertised in the process of reporting facts remain critical considerations in approaching war crimes and norms legitimised culturally under a specific region in a distinct socio-political milieu. While an identification of the LGBTQ community can look into everyday experiences of abuse and violence, the possibility of carving a social identity marker as a political tool in discourse formation remains equally a point of contention. It is therefore essential to read between such fine lines of interpretation and forms of representation.
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