Car bomb killed my husband
Sheri Laizer is an expert on the Middle East, has dedicated her life to travelling the turbulent region and documenting events there.
She has become deeply entwined with the cruel realities of life there, marrying a political Kurd and seeing him killed in a car explosion last year.
She also lives in Hunstanton. Reporter Louise Brain met her to discover the path that led her from Iraq to west Norfolk.
Sheri Laizer's vast and beautiful home has a serene and private garden, a swimming pool and a new-style VW Beetle parked outside.
Inside it is slightly surreal to discover a bulging collection of vintage Barbie dolls stacked neatly in display cabinets.
It couldn't be further away from the Middle Eastern environment in which Ms Laizer (52) is equally at home and even more consumed.
Ms Laizer cannot fully explain what first drew her to the Middle East but it was a pull so hard that in 1983, still in her 20s, she packed a suitcase "full of books" and headed to Egypt.
She had studied ancient history at University in New Zealand, where she was born, and says she gradually slipped from the past into the present.
In 1992, having set up a base for herself in North London, lived for three years in Turkey, studied Arabic and learned Kurdish and Turkish, she returned for a final time to New Zealand following the death of her grandmother.
She had been left a picture of Sir William Hoste, a protg of Lord Nelson, whom she discovered was a distant ancestor and was hit by a need to dig out her heritage.
By 1998 she had moved to Hunstanton, following the instincts that have led her through life.
"When I came to Norfolk I felt the soles of my feet tingling," she said. "I had just had enough and wanted to look more into my own roots and came up here and found tranquillity."
Now, Ms Laizer's Hunstanton home is her retreat from the harsh Middle Eastern world which her mind is constantly focused on. Her depth of experience of the region's history and current situation means she is now constantly involved in up to six legal cases at a time, involving the worst sides of humanity, torture and honour killings included, where solicitors call upon her as a country expert. She has written and compiled numerous books and provides reports for news programmes and documentaries, in a bid, she says, to ensure the facts of what is happening in these countries is reported without spin.
"I can sit here in this environment of my garden at home and all the time in my mind is this other world I also inhabit where people are just scrambling for a basic existence." She said.
"It's like having lots of different lives all running in parallel. I'm never free of it and never will be."
Ms Laizer has sacrificed having a family in order to continue with the work she is so devoted to, saying she felt she must continue as she was doing something not many others could.
However, she did find a man who she felt was her equal to share it with.
Ms Laizer married Kurdish Kani Yilmaz, a break-away former European spokesman for the PKK – the Kurdish Workers Party, a group which has been fighting for an ethnic homeland since 1984 and is branded a terrorist organisation by the EU.
When they met Ms Laizer was working with Kurdish refugees in London, he was later held by the Government in Belmarsh prison and extradited to Germany where he was convicted of being involved with a terrorist organisation.
Kani was released in 1998 and returned to Iraq where the couple married in November 2005.
Ms Laizer described her husband as an intelligent, warm, campaigner for Kurdish rights, adding: "I met him as a person and not a political animal."
Kani Yilmaz was killed when his car exploded in Iraq in February 2006.
Ms Laizer said she never expects a full investigation but is in no doubt it was a car bomb.
She managed to get access to the car and study it herself.
"Finding the car was more important than going to where the family built a memorial grave," she said. "I just didn't want to leave that car, that was where everything ended."
Adding: "The scale of things there is beyond anybody's control. It is easy to kill anybody in Iraq. Life is cheap in that part of the world and very easily eclipsed."
Ms Laizer is in no doubt American and British troops should never have been sent into Iraq - the mess there far too great for a "quick fix", she says - and she believes the only way forward now is a gradual withdrawal.
She feels the action has made the UK much more of a target for fundamentalists.
Ms Laizer does not ever see herself withdrawing from her work with the Middle East.
She visits every time her research alerts her to a possible shift in things there and spends ten days to a fortnight at a time getting what she needs to document it, driven by the affinity she feels with the people there.
"I've got no fear, I have worked out there for so long," she said. "I go and think each trip could be my last."
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Sunday 27 May 2012
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