A woman is riding in a bus. The streets are dusty. It’s hot. She is nursing her baby. Her fellow passengers hardly notice this. Yet the area they are driving through is controlled by ISIS. They suddenly pull the woman from the bus and yell at her: “How can you behave so disgracefully?”

To punish her, they chop off the mother’s hand.

It is hundreds and thousands of terrible stories like this that you, Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, have heard from your patients.

Stories of terror, rape, abduction and torture – stories that are almost unbearable to hear. Stories and experiences that you not only endure hearing, but above all pass on to others. You not only help the victims deal with their horror and pain. You help them make their way into a better future. Help them escape the paralysis caused by the perpetrators’ poison. So they can stop being a victim and become a survivor.

Some of them are here today. I want to extend a warm welcome to you all, as well. Thanks for being here on this special day.

The woman who was taken off the bus managed to escape her ISIS captors. You, Jan, have reported that she was able, together with her child, to find shelter in a refugee camp. She was maimed for one reason only: because, like every mother, she wanted to care for her child.

In the camp, the woman was given protection – and what she also received was treatment by Master’s students who had been trained at the Institute of Psychotherapy and Psychotraumatology of the University of Duhok. An institute that you founded in order to help women bear their pain and carry on living, and to keep supporting their children.

This was preceded by the Land admission programme, and one step prior to this by an initiative that we can hardly imagine existing today: because a Federal State – Land Baden-Württemberg – set out to protect people from a genocide. Also drawing on your many years of experience in Baden-Württemberg, you put together a team and said: we’re going to help.

Theresa Schopper is here today, too, and she was a part of those efforts.

All of this was also built on your expertise, Jan. You were the one who not only had to witness these terrible things where they happened, but who also built up , thanks to your intercultural skills, the assistance that was needed during the initial hours, days and months – thereby rescuing women and children.

Your engagement, Jan, not only helps every single one of these brave women and children, as well as men, who have experienced unspeakable injustice. Through your work, you help all victims of the ISIS regime, and especially survivors of the Yazidi genocide. This includes you being Director of the Institute for Transcultural Health Studies at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University.

All of this is founded on your work in Baden-Württemberg. And I also want to extend a warm welcome to the university’s representatives who are here today. It is thanks to your scientific expertise, Jan – your networks, your books and above all your great empathy and humanity – that your work extends not only to Iraq, but also to the wider world.

In this way, you are drawing attention to the fate of Yazidi women and children and showing how this affects us all as a society. Through the Baden-Württemberg admission programme, through your collective efforts at the universities in Baden-Württemberg and also in Duhok, you demonstrate what social commitment is all about, and what constitutes humanity.

And you show, as Düzen Tekka would put it, not only how strength can grow out of the ashes of the genocide, but how this can also be incredibly enriching. Especially for the societies in which many Yazidi women have found a new home, including the women who now work here. Either directly with you, at the institute and at the university, or in hospitals, as nursing staff. At the same time, this terrible crime, along with the spirit of survival, is being documented – for Iraq and the region, as well as here in Germany.

We as a society are learning from this expertise, and the international community, too, is benefiting from your work.

Your accomplishments, which are actually in the domain of psychology and traumatology, have created a new public awareness regarding these crimes and the strength of women – by referring to them not as victims, but as survivors. This is a recent development that has also occurred thanks to the spirit and strength of Yazidi women and men. Just as Shirin, a Yazidi woman, describes in her book, I Remain a Daughter of the Light. It is a book that you wrote together with her and that amplifies her voice.

Because what the terrorists aim to do is extinguish the light – to silence the voices of women, and those of Yazidi women and men. Through your work, you have helped to do the exact opposite – because Yazidi women’s light of hope is so much stronger than the terror – so that their light can shine on, even more brightly, in the world.

This is not a book that you simply read like any other book. I took it along during the first trip that I personally took to northern Iraq. That was six years ago, as a Member of the German Bundestag. And it was during this trip that the two of us met. We visited a large refugee camp together. I remember well our first meeting – not only because I was so impressed by this encounter, but because I have taken our joint travels and what I learned from our encounter with me into my current job.

We jointly visited one of the countless refugee tents, where we met a mother whose abducted son had just recently been returned to her, whom she would have loved to hug.

But, due to the situation, she was not able to fully embrace him.

He was around ten years old when we met him, and he had been abducted a few years prior to this. He could no longer speak his mother tongue, and he behaved more like an infant, also when interacting with his own mother.

It was a tough conversation, because it became clear how strongly this young boy had been indoctrinated by ISIS, how he had been brainwashed into hating his own family and disowning his Yazidi community.

The first thing you did was just sit there – making due with the situation, just being present, without feeling the need to say anything right away. A scene I have never forgotten.

Thanks to your professionalism as a therapist, you made it possible for us to communicate with him. Even though the boy was actually no longer able to speak in his mother tongue. Yours was a humane approach, using looks and gestures. This gave that young mother and the boy strength.

Because you said: “It is a long process. But later we will meet with children and young women that we have been working with for some time.”

I often revisited this situation in my mind. I took this image with me when I travelled to other places in the world where horrific acts had occurred. To Mali, or to Nigeria, where I met a woman who eight weeks prior had freed herself from more than eight years of captivity – she had escaped from Boko Haram, and she was accompanied by her small children, who obviously were born during this captivity.

Simply being present, with no words being spoken. In this regard, during all these years, you were always my role model.

It is one example of how you can make clear that every single human, every single person, is worth it. Not only regarding the victims who have directly suffered, but also regarding their children.

The aim is to keep a new, next generation from being subjected to these terrors.

That is what you said, over and over again. During that trip, and later at university. And there is another sentence I will never forget: We will never be able to fully heal the scars. But what we can do is help ensure that these scars and the traumatic experiences of genocide are not passed on to the following generations.

In this sense, your work’s significance extends far beyond specific individuals, as it impacts generations and also societies.

The Baden-Württemberg admission programme helped arrange for 1100 Yazidi women and children to be taken in by Germany from northern Iraq – and these included the later Nobel laureate Nadia Murad. You became the programme’s medical and psychological director, and you repeatedly travelled to Iraq, where you conducted interviews with victims in your role as a therapist, provided them with care and then brought them to us. And you had to make very difficult decisions.

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This, too, I want to emphasise: the Baden-Württemberg admission programme had only 1100 spaces. We tried to set up other admission programmes. Some Länder did so. But ultimately there were not only 1000, not only 2000 and not only 3000 affected individuals, but rather upwards of 10,000. Some remain in captivity. And that is when a decision must be made: whom can we admit, and whom can we not admit? Those are the most difficult decisions imaginable. And it is specifically for this that we want to say thank you and honour you today – because it takes strength to also be able to make these decisions. Because you know that you can only save some – not all. In the years since, thanks to your support, many more Yazidi survivors of ISIS terrorism have been afforded protection through other humanitarian admission programmes. Also in other countries, for example in France. For developing the programme, President Macron was guided, among other things, by your programme.

However, you are not solely focused on the act of saving people. There is a sustainable, long-term orientation to your work. It seeks to empower people in Iraq so they can themselves better deal with trauma and strengthen their society. The institute that you founded in 2017 in Duhok has over the past years trained 92 psychologists and traumatologists. They are the first licensed psychotherapists in all of Iraq.

That, too, shows how what are often called “soft” humanitarian efforts always become powerful tools when you use them wisely and to benefit an entire society. The experts that help the victims bear their pain and make their way into a brighter future, like the mother who had nursed her baby on the bus – they are an example of what a society as a whole can accomplish.

And there’s something else that you, Jan, are especially interested in when it comes to your work: the institute’s staff is always around 50% male and 50% female. In the youngest cohorts, women outnumber men. At the same time, special attention is paid to ensuring that all religious minorities are represented, for example, Christians and Yazidis. I am pleased that we at the Federal Foreign Office, as the German Federal Government, have been able to fund this project for many years now via the German Academic Exchange Service.

Mona Kizilhan and I discussed this just earlier: many of the students who travel back and forth enrich not only the healthcare system in Iraq, but also those of Germany and in other European countries. This project is truly one that gives us hope. It is therefore my wish and my appeal to everyone who will be in a position of political responsibility in the future that we continue to tackle this important task with determination. Not in the sense that we’re just helping others, but that we are all strengthening each other.

I must often think of something that you, Jan Kizilhan, said and that characterises your work: “We can give the people treatment – but what they deserve and need is justice. Because, without justice, the pain cannot end.”

It is with this in mind that you, your wife Mona, and so many others here in this room today have taken a stand. Urging that we recognise the crimes for what they are, namely genocide. That is why it was long overdue that in the German Bundestag, too, we finally made this clear. If we want to attain justice for the victims, then we must also work to call those responsible to account, and to prosecute the crimes. In 2021, the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt am Main convicted a former ISIS fighter of genocide against the Yazidis. This court decision was the first of its kind in the world, and it was probably also made possible by your work. It was a milestone in the fight against impunity, because it shows how the perpetrators can be brought to justice. Because the crimes perpetrated against Yazidis were recognised for what they were: genocide. And because the case was explicitly prosecuted as sexual violence and the enslavement of women – not subsumed under the category of “terrorism”. This, too, helps justice be served for the victims. Because the deliberate aim of sexual violence – and this is true not only for violence against the Yazidis, but we see it in other conflicts, as well – is to break women. And when you break women, then you break families, you break villages and you break societies.

That makes the opposite so important: when these victims, these women, are empowered, then you empower societies and you prevent them from breaking apart. Many of the survivors who you, Jan, and your colleagues have treated are today serving as witnesses in cases that are being brought by the Federal Public Prosecutor General against members of ISIS. It is therefore also thanks to you and these brave women that these crimes are not only being prosecuted, but can also result in a conviction on the basis of evidence. In this regard, too, we as the Federal Foreign Office are working closely with the various experts. We are helping to secure evidence that can at some future time lead to an indictment.

From this, we have learned, and we continue to learn, a great deal. This work is important not only for other conflicts, such as currently in Syria, but also with respect to crimes committed by Russian soldiers in the form of torture, sexual violence and rape, crimes for which they must be brought to trial.

We can always learn from and with one another. We know that investigating and prosecuting crimes is important – because it gives the victims a voice, because it leads to justice being served and it can lay the foundation for lasting peace.

You may have heard that I just arrived back from Syria last night. There, too, we are seeing the same thing, namely how important it now is to investigate and prosecute these crimes. It is important for the Assad regime’s crimes to be investigated and prosecuted, for the perpetrators to be convicted and brought to justice, so that there is no sense of impunity that could give way to new violence. Because we see everywhere that precisely this feeling is being deliberately exploited and instrumentalised. “This is about a sense of justice” – that is how you have put it, Jan.

“When some justice is served for our patients, this helps them deal with their trauma and develop a sense of hope for the future.”

In politics, many things occur by chance – even though many will claim that the opposite is true when something succeeds. That is why I am so very pleased that this awarding of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany coincides with my return from Syria, because one of the things I was able to announce there was that we, the Federal Government, are not only making available an additional 25 million euro to the White Helmets for the preservation of evidence.

When I travelled to the country for the first time in January, my initial thought was: your work must now continue in Syria. We put a lot of effort into this in the subsequent weeks. And I am happy to be able to announce that you have already specifically applied your expertise to Syria, in that guidelines for action will now be developed for the purpose of assisting traumatised people in Syria – the aim being to set up a training programme for trauma therapists in Syria, as well. The approach is the same one you already took in Iraq – namely “train the trainers”. This creates the possibility for people in Syria to now benefit from the fact that therapists have been trained in northern Iraq, because some of them can also go to Syria to help there, as trauma therapists and psychotherapists.

Jan, you’ve impressively described the tremendous inner strength of the women and children you are treating – in spite of the terrible things they have experienced.

And now – because I’ve also had the opportunity to meet the members of your family who are here today, your two daughters and your two sons – I want to make a personal comment. Not only those who experienced these terrible crimes need this strength, and not only the experts like yourself and many others who are in this room today, but always also the families who are behind the scenes. I can imagine – you were ten years younger then, teenagers – what it must have meant for you when your father travelled to a place where a genocide was being committed. In Germany, there were hardly any reports in the media. But certainly, in your family, you were concerned about the impact on your own children. To be away for an uncertain amount of time and in a region with a completely unknown future. For this, you need a strong family. That is why I now also want to say thank you to your family, and to you as children. Because without this support, this would definitely not have been possible.

“I’m going to keep fighting. I want to survive.” That is the quintessential statement in Shirin’s book, I Remain a Daughter of the Light. We as a society can learn a great deal from this resolve, especially in our present age. Today, we call this resilience. It is something every society, and every democracy, needs. Especially in these weeks, as we are being flooded time and again with terrible news reports from around the world, and as we witness the poisoning of society on our mobile phones and social media feeds, not able to tell what is true and what is a lie. Where empathy – indeed what makes a society strong – is used in a targeted way to depict things that may not even have happened, for the purpose of inciting even more violence.

For this reason, too, it is so important that work is done in the affected region, that people can see what is actually happening. And that eyewitnesses and survivors around the world can provide reports. That is precisely what you have done all these years, and it is what you continue to do. That makes this an “interim award”.

Yet summoning new strength means becoming aware time and again of the things one has accomplished by setting out to tackle them on one’s own. When the precise outcome is uncertain. In the form of, for example, a Land admission programme that, afterwards, is applauded by everyone because one has saved people’s lives. But for which at the outset it was completely unknown if it would succeed, and that many advised against pursuing.

You did precisely this, applying your expertise and scientific knowledge, your empathy, your humanity and, yes, your courage to stand up for others and make things better. It is for this that you are today receiving this award. For this courage, this determination and this deep sense of humanity.

Today, on behalf of the Federal President, it is a great honour for me to bestow on you, Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, this Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

I most warmly congratulate you on this special award.