Smallest truths, greatest freedoms: Unlocking justice when atrocity survivors lead

Podcast by the Zovighian Public Office (ZPO) with Nadine Maenza and Lynn Zovighian

What does it mean to “do no harm” when telling the truths of survivors? In this inaugural episode of “Smallest Truths,” Zovighian Public Office (ZPO) founder Lynn Zovighian speaks with Nadine Maenza, global advocate for freedom of belief and former Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), about serving communities facing religious freedom violations and risks.

Together, they explore the fragile balance between advocacy and safety: when silence protects communities, and when silence hurts them. They discuss the power of independence in humanitarian diplomacy, the ethics of survivor trust, and how the smallest truths can shift power from perpetrators to survivors.

This first of three conversations opens the series with urgency and hope: How do we act with authenticity, protect those enduring atrocity, and still move the needle for justice?

[Podcast begins]

[LZ]: Nadine, so good to have you back in Beirut. Welcome to your second Levantine home.

[NM]: Thank you for having me. It's wonderful being here. I love Beirut.

[LZ]: Welcome to the Zovighian Public Offices, [our] new offices in Beirut, and thanks so much for helping us open up to the world, because we have a new platform that we get to launch with you and share with the world. This, in fact, is the inaugural edition of “Smallest Truths.”

Now, Nadine, you and I know that there is so much content out there now, so many reports, so many podcasts, very, very smart people, very, very smart thinking and analysis, and there's also a lot of more commercial but very outspoken content. So, it's never been harder to separate the wheat from the chaff, the “truth” from the “real truth,” and it sometimes feels like a needle in a haystack. So, we need to really dig in and look for the truth, to find not just the truth, but the essence of the truth.

So, this is why we wanted to launch, one can call it a podcast; a safe space. The most important thing is that it's a truth-telling forum, and we hold ourselves accountable – and you do this so brilliantly in practice – [to the] highest ethical standards, highest standards of accountability towards the communities facing the most atrocious crimes and crises here in our region.

And so why did we want to bring in a new platform, a new place to have dialogue and discussion? Because we're always publishing reports, lots of articles, lots of analysis, but I know that so much of our audience doesn't have the time to read, even those who would want to. And so, what we wanted to do was a very pragmatic format of a podcast, not something that happens weekly or monthly, but happens when it needs to happen. Happens when we need to step up, and happens when we have the best moment where minds and hearts come together. And we want to amplify that, and so that is “Smallest Truths.”

I just want to also speak to the name a bit further, because in the work that we are doing to support evidence-building, cultural protection, and humanitarian diplomacy with the communities whom we serve and have been serving now for 10 years since June 2015 when the Zovighian Public Office was first founded… The moment when power begins to get transferred from perpetrator to survivor is when the smallest truth becomes the biggest truth. And that is the very spirit that we are hoping to instill and carry and hold space for with this podcast.

[NM]: I love it. There's so much need for analysis and for understanding the essence of the situation, versus just more information about it. So, I'm looking forward to following this and listening to it myself.

[LZ]: Thank you so much for being our special guest to inaugurate this with us.

We have been working so closely together since the seventh commemoration of the Yazidi Genocide. We first met in Baghdad. In front of us had been key Iraqi government and Kurdistan Regional Government officials, rows of Yazidi survivors in front of us and behind us, the most courageous Yazidi leaders from all over Sinjar and from all around the world – because the Yazdi Genocide mobilized the diaspora to step up in the most incredible and heartfelt and effective ways. I know we're going to talk a lot about that today,

But we met in Baghdad, at this time of deep mourning. And we were introduced by a very dear friend, and a mentor and a coach, and, a champion of the great work that you're doing, and the work that we here have been trying to do. I want to just also take a moment to express my gratitude to former Congressman Frank Wolf, former USCIRF Commissioner, a brilliant man with the heart and the mind to move mountains.

[NM]: Yes, absolutely. He's been the trailblazer on religious freedom in the United States and globally. So, it's wonderful to still be able to work with him and to be able to continue the work that he really pioneered.

[LZ]: Absolutely. And so, we couldn't have had a more brilliant mind and heart with us here in Beirut to kick us off. So, international religious freedom, Nadine, if I can start us there to first begin to describe it, define it – not just in terms of what international laws and international policy recommend – [with] the standards and thresholds that are defined to determine the extent to which there are liberties and freedoms, and also the extent to which they are being violated. But it would be very good to hear from you – yes, on what those international standards are – but when it comes to the true, not just practice, but the praxis of international religious freedom, what does that also mean for local communities and the space for them to define and co-determine what constitutes freedom and what constitutes a violation, and, dare we say, a crime?

[NM]: So, international religious freedom is a term we use in the United States. But really, globally, most countries use the word “freedom of religion or belief” for the phrase, freedom of religion or belief or FoRB. So, FoRB or IRF is really the same, and we base the work off the international standards, which change.

But it's really the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18, [which] says: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” So, from the United States, we don't come someplace and try to quote the U.S. Constitution. It really is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and there [are] other covenants that also are used in different countries that have very similar language to this. But it really is, when we're talking to countries, the international standard.

What is the normal for registration of houses of worship? And this is what you should be in this range, because it's okay for there to be regulations, zoning rights for land before they build a house of worship. And so, there's practical things that need to be done with governments, and those things are allowed. So, it's really when they are favoring one religion over the other, or being against all religions, that you start seeing these violations, and it's so important that they be called out.

And in the United States, the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998 is what really changed the way religious freedom was looked at globally, and that was passed by Congress and authored by Congressman Frank Wolf and then amended later by the Frank Wolf Act after he left Congress.

So, what this does is sets up the Office of International Religious Freedom at the State Department but also sets up the independent [United States] Commission on International Religious Freedom [USCIRF]. It's an independent government agency that's bipartisan in the United States, and its mandate is to assess religious freedom conditions globally and then make recommendations to the President, Secretary of State, and to Congress. It's run by nine commissioners, so always five-four, usually whatever party is the President's, but very much bipartisan.

I had the opportunity to serve four years there; two terms by President Trump and then my last year as Chair. I found that we were never divided bipartisan the way it really fell when we voted, and decisions are made. And there's staff of about 20 and we see now envoys all over the world; we have one in the UK and the EU. And now, we have ministerials that are run by what they call the Article 18 Alliance of 43 countries that all affirm Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So, the U.S. started this, I believe, in 1998 with Ambassador Sam Brownback, the former Ambassador for Religious Freedom in the United States, and it's since grown. These countries work together, and I have [had] the opportunity to be part of their Council of Experts, so I'm able to also work with them, advise them, brief them, and it's a way of growing religious freedom globally.

But of course, when we look at reports and we look at all the indicators, things are not improving despite all the work. And so, it continues to require lots of eyes, lots of hands, and an understanding [that] the only way for long-term peace and stability is going to be having that social cohesion and having laws that promote that in a country, so people can live together peacefully.

[LZ]: And how do you manage what can be a starking power imbalance between coming in as the United States of America into an environment, with your lenses, with your values and principles, with your ways of thinking, and then com[ing] face to face with behaviors and practices and environments, and social frameworks that you might understand, you might not fully understand… you might not be able to appreciate? How do you handle this power imbalance, and what needs to be done to make sure that communities beyond the faith groups — because international religious freedom isn't just about the faith groups — making sure that they too get to be determining factors and co-decision makers in what they constitute and believe to be a freedom or a violation?

[NM]: It's so important that the United States approaches each community really authentically and that's hard to do sometimes. That's why USCIRF was created; to bring a different lens.

As chair of UCIRF, one of the hearings we convened was on the Fragility Act. It was an important act passed by Congress; it really deals with places that are the most fragile, places like Yemen and others that don't have a lot of governance, that don't fit into the framework for the way that the U.S. monitors things.

And [for] so many of our speakers, one of the recommendations to the United States was: “Stop only talking to people that speak English.” I thought that was so astounding, because it's so easy to go into a country and meet, basically, with the elites of that country, and to not actually go further and listen to the people in the countries that live in the countryside, or that are less educated, or that are less connected, and that's where you're going to understand better about the culture and the conditions in that country.

[LZ]: And that therefore requires, and I know you have, multiple hats on. Because, whilst you're no longer at USCIRF, after two terms, including chair, you now continue to do the hard work. You continue to serve as an independent and consistently credible and authentic — I love that word because I think that's so critical to the work — advisor, deep listener, ambassador, not for U.S. interests, but for the interests of communities that are in a concerned or fearful situation. Or even, as you were telling me just the other day, in an environment that's doing wonderfully, but also those success stories need to come out.

And I know you have important hats on, like the [Co-]Chair of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable at Washington D.C., and the Chair of the Institute for Global [Engagement], the IGE. Why are those different hats and different institutional and non-institutional capacities important for you to be able to deliver comprehensively on your personal mission as an advocate for international religious freedom?

[NM]: I think that the International Religious Freedom Roundtable in Washington D.C. is really mainly advocacy. So, what we do is we find coming together, in [a] multi-faith way to advocate to the U.S. government and advocate to others together, helps us to be far more effective [than] if we're doing it by ourselves.

So, it's really pretty much advocacy-based, where the Institute for Global Engagement is really about building religious freedom, working with countries, working with governments even, to help them with their rule of law.

To help educate religious literacy, which is often about teaching people about each other's religions, but maybe more importantly, teaching them what their own religion shows them in their own scriptures of how to engage with people from other religions. Giving them that permission that you don't betray your faith by having a friend from another faith.

And there are many communities that don't know that, and have never been taught that, and they want to be faithful to their religion, and when they are able to be taught by a member of their own religious community how to interact with one another, it frees them up to be able to have those kinds of relationships that help build that social cohesion.

So, you know, there's the building religious freedom and advocating for religious freedom. It takes a lot of people with a lot of different gifts and a lot of different types of approaches to help us move the needle for improving religious freedom conditions globally.

[LZ]: And I think there's something important to be said here, which is how critical it is to embrace the independence of not being a part of government.

[NM]: Right, or paid by any government, I might add. Because we do know there are actors that come in with funds from governments, and sometimes they're doing really good work, but there still is a different kind of flavor to it.

And in the Middle East, we know it's hard to find a space where there aren't government goals and objectives being pushed upon the governments [and] the people that are working here, and to try to have a lens to not be a part of that, but rather, what does the landscape look like for religious communities? What does social cohesion look like? Can these communities live together in peace? How can we help them live together in peace? What kind of support do they need? What kind of laws could change that, could change the way they see one another? And try to look at it through a longer-term lens than we might see government officials looking at it.

[LZ]: I want to come back to that point on longer-term, but I want to just, you know, mention to you also how that really resonates with our work at ZPO because we are able to do the work with the tenacity, and the patience, and that long-term lens, because of our independence. Because we are not affiliated to any political party, any political institution, [or] any government.

In fact, no donor except for myself and our family business, because we are fully self-funded. And that, if I go back to our communities, that creates and fosters trust at a speed of light that is so critical, because the crimes and the violations that we see here in our region and beyond are often also powering through at a speed of light, and no response is fast enough.

But the ability to foster authentic trust and solidarity is one of the most critical assets in humanitarian diplomacy, and it's at the highest level of accountability because you could do it so well for years and at one point something just goes wrong, even unintentionally, and things will crash, because trust is an institution in the space that we are working in. And the only actors that get to bestow that trust upon you, upon myself, upon our teams, our colleagues, are the communities. Nobody else gets to determine whether we are trustworthy, or not.

[NM]: Right. It's so, it's so true. And how can we best serve them? And I know that part of the priorities for you and the work that you do, is the “Do no harm.” Tell me about how you approach that.

[LZ]: Yes. Thank you so much for this question, because it is a question that at the beginning of the Zovighian Public Office, we were afraid of it. We felt it was creating less room for us to do the good work, because we were still new at being this institutional response of high-integrity research, cultural creation, [and] humanitarian diplomacy. We were new at bringing these three powerful methods and forces together. And so, we would always ask at every little, tiny juncture: Are we doing something that could do something wrong, intentionally, unintentionally? If we're working here, what might be happening there? It became a fixation,

[NM]: Yeah, it can actually interfere with the work — the fear of causing no harm.

[LZ]: But then, as we began to build more trust with the communities, the survivors of crimes of atrocity — and you know that the Zovighian Public Office was born because of the Yazidi Genocide — we were the students, and still are the students of the Yazidi people, but we were incubated, through our abilities to respond and capacities to respond alongside them to this incredible genocide that unfolded just like that… with trust, with a lot of honesty, with always asking for the feedback, always asking for: “How do we do things better?” [and] “Let's pause. Are we doing things in the best way possible?”

At a time of crisis and emergency, where everyone is looking at the tip of their noses, to be able to give that permission to hold space and stop time, because we all need to think.

When it began to very quickly happen with them, because they realized that that was important for us to have, not just the courage and the confidence, but almost the right to intervene. Then it was no longer our responsibility alone to do no harm. It was a collective responsibility.

And that continues to be the principle that drives and guides us. But today, it drives us at the pace of speed of light, and no longer as the holding us back, keeping us from moving forward, keeping us from being able to exercise our centers for excellence.

And so, now that we have this very empowering relationship with the Hippocratic Oath, I don't think we know how to do anything without the lens of “Do no harm,” but now it is a force to reckon with, and it is driven and determined by the communities, and then we follow their lead.

[NM]: I still find myself, even from my recent trip to Syria, [I] have all of this information I've only shared on social media a few times, and I still need to process it and figure out how best to use this information to help the communities.

But my instinct is to say and do nothing, because I don't want to cause harm. But yet, I also have to remind myself that doing nothing also is not the best. It seems safer, but it also isn't advocating for the communities that we care about.

So, I still struggle with the kind of information I gather and how best to serve the communities; how to stand up for those who are enduring persecution, and obviously we take the lead from them. Do they want to go public? Do they not? But sometimes they want to go public, and then they change their mind, and then we delete everything. It's a back and forth, like, how do we move forward in a way that honors their wishes, but that also can help move the needle in the places that they live?

And for me, being an American and working so much in foreign policy, how can we move the U.S. government's policies to better support them? And I also brief government officials in other countries. How can those countries weigh in and be more effective, but in a positive way? And that can be a difficult thing.

It's so easy from far, far away to want to burn down countries that violate religious freedom. But then, often the people in the countries don't want to burn the government down, they want to approve the government, they want to be able to stay in their homeland. And so, we're always walking between the advocacy and building. How hard do we push on the advocacy side before we're starting to hurt the building side? And sometimes it's a different group of people doing each. Some of us are doing both. It really depends on the country, but really, “Do no harm” has got to be just mixed in there the whole time.

How do we serve the communities and improve? For us, the goal is always improving conditions on the ground. And you know, if we could use U.S. policy to do it, great. If we could work directly with the government to help them improve laws, help them to better educate their communities, to, you know, bring together clerics. And some of the work that I've done with the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network that we just did in Syria, we're bringing the clerics together to meet each other, to build deeper relationships.

There are so many different things we can do that help build, and we love it, when we're given the space on the ground, to do those things, but sometimes you're not, and then it's a different kind of situation.

[LZ]: But what I'm hearing — and I think one sometimes really needs to name it — I'm hearing all this authenticity, this empathy. You might think, in an American context, an action could make sense, but then it isn't necessarily inaction if you do not pursue something. It is safety and protection.

And so, giving different words to different situations, building that situational awareness, which requires being students of the communities whom we are serving, because you might fly into Syria, but then you're going to fly back out. But all of the community members and the survivors on the ground, they stay on the ground. And so, improving conditions, like you said — it's for them. And that requires a level of pragmatism, a level of strategic tenacity, a level of constantly evaluating and re-evaluating what is going to be the safest, most effective, most ethical way of doing things right.

And so, the intersection between what is most ethical and what is most strategic is constantly a moving target. But, if we don't consistently nail that intersection at every single critical juncture, then our ability to create harm, no matter how unintentionally, the risk just widens immensely and very quickly and with no control — because these are not risks that we get to control.

[Podcast ends]

"Smallest Truths” Podcast

Share:

Podcast by the Zovighian Public Office (ZPO) with Nadine Maenza and Lynn Zovighian

This first of three conversations opens the series with urgency and hope: How do we act with authenticity, protect those enduring atrocity, and still move the needle for justice?