Originally published in GPN, Genocide Prevention Now, Special Issue 5, Winter 2011
Reprinted with Permission
The break-up of the former Soviet Union has given Armenia`s largest minority, the Yezidis, new freedoms. But this has proven to be at mixed blessing, as geopolitical and historical concems have riven the small community.
Nestled at the foot of Mount Aragats, Armenia`s highest peak, the villages of Riya Taza and Alagyaz hardly merit more than a passing glance from motorists heading north towards the border with Georgia.
Elderly women dressed in colourful garb nonetheless line the road, while children play nearby among rusting abandoned vehicles and farmers herd their cattle in the surrounding pastures. Few stop at the makeshift shacks selling basic groceries and provisions on the roadside. In fact, nobody pays much attention at all. But for academics from as far away as the UK, France, Germany and Japan, these small, impoverished villages are a dream come true. Located 60 kilometers from Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Riya Taza, Alagyaz and other villages interconnected by pockmarked roads are home to one of the biggest concentrations of Yezidis in the country.
As a group, the Yezidis are defined by their religion which combines elements from Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism. They are often accused of devil worship by Christians and Muslims because they believe that both good and evil are manifestations of God. The Yezidis are the largest ethnic minority in Armenia, the majority having arrived in the country during the mid-l9th and early 20th centuries. Worldwide, their precise number is unknown, with estimates varying between 200,000 and 500,000. According to a 2001 census, there are just over 40,000 in Armenia.
What makes the Yezidis so interesting to the academic community is the fact that they are considered to be ethnic Kurds who resisted pressure to convert to Islam. Speaking Kurmanji, the dialect of Kurdish spoken in Turkey, Armenia’s Yezidis are considered by many Kurdologists to represent the purest form of Kurdish culture in the region.
Music to their Ears
Nahro Zagros, a 33-year-old ethnic Muslim Kurd, escaped Saddam Hussein’s Iraq seven years ago. Today, he’s studying for a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of York. He has come to Armenia to conduct research into Kurdish musical tradition.
Each day, he strolls through Alagyaz armed with a digital recorder and an uncanny knack of being able to convince almost anyone to burst into song, often at just a moment‘s notice. In the South Caucasus, where culture and tradition are still considered to be of paramount importance, that isn’t too difficult, but there are dangers. Even the most unexpected of guests are often obliged to partake in a few glasses of industrial-strength homemade vodka. Zagros, however, usually manages to avoid this trap. Partaking in food is another matter, however. As he explains, it can be considered an insult for a Muslim Kurd to refuse to eat at the table of a Yezidi.
Wandering from house to house in search of singers to record, Zagros finally ends up at what appears to be a cattle shed. In an adjoining room, the family that lives here is burning dung for heating. An old Yezidi man smokes a cheap cigarette by a stove erected on an earthen floor. Zagros and 75-year-old Bimbash Kochoyan are from very different worlds, but it isn’t long before the room resonates with traditional Kurdish song.
Zagros is spellbound and sports a customary grin. He can barely contain himself and is eager to explain why. “The songs are traditionally very Kurdish, but they don’t exist among the Kurds of Kurdistan,” he says.
Troubled History
There is a certain irony to this sudden interest in the Yezidis’ Kurdish heritage. Although the Yezidis are considered to be ethnic Kurds, there has been a long history of animosity between them and their Muslim counterparts in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Many of Armenia’s Yezidis arrived in the country during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, when an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were massacred during deportation from regions in what is now the Republic of Turkey. Other ethnic groups, including the Yezidis, were also targeted in what is now widely considered (though vehemently denied by Turkey) to be the first genocide of the 20th century.
According to the Yezidis, up to 300,000 of their ethnic kin were killed between 1915 and l9l7, a period that still resonates in modern-day Armenia, with most Armenians and Yezidis believing that Muslim Kurds were among the perpetrators. Later, during the early 1990s. the Yezidis were exasperated by the ethnic conflict between Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan over the mainly Armenian-inhabited territory of Nagorno-Karabagh and began to downplay or even deny their ethnic origin.
About 200,000 Azerbaijanis and Muslim Kurds were forced to flee Armenia when the lighting began, but the Yezidis were spared the tit-for-tat expulsions that saw 300.000 Armenians leave Azerbaijan. It was then that Armenia’s Yezidi leaders began a movement to establish a separate ethnic identity for themselves. Today, things might be changing, with the Nagorno-Karabagh conflict now a distant memory for many Armenians; however, the community remains divided.
Elsewhere, such divisions between Yezidis and Kurds, as well as other Muslims, became apparent in April when a Yezidi teenage girl was stoned to death in northern Iraq. Her crime? Allegedly having a relationship with a Muslim and converting to Islam. But worse was yet to come. In August hundreds died during a series of suicide bombings – later blamed on Islamic extremists or those opposed to calls for an autonomous Yezidi region within Iraqi Kurdistan. No wonder, then, that many Yezidis react with caution towards Kurds and Muslims alike.
Disputed Links
Hasan Tamoyan. deputy president of the National Union of Yezidis is one of those who maintain that the Yezidis have no connection with the Kurds. He is also head of Yezidi language programs at Public Radio of Armenia and, sitting in his office in Yerevan, he even goes so far as to call their language Ezdiki, denying that it‘s Kurmanji, despite the presence on his desk of a Yezidi magazine from Germany written in the dialect, with almost every headline including the words ‘Kurd’ or ‘Kurdistan.’ He responds with threats rather than answers to questions about Armenia’s Kurdish population or suggestions that Kurdish is spoken in the country.
Prominent specialists on the Yezidis disagree. “I have met many Yezidis in Armenia who believe they are also Kurds,” says Dr Christine Allison, a lecturer at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris. “And with the exception of two villages in Iraq, Yezidis speak Kurmanji Kurdish. Their oral and material culture is typical of Kurdistan and pretty much identical to [that of] non-Yezidi Kurds.” Philip Kreyenbroek, head of Iranian studies at the University of Gottingen in Germany agrees, saying, “The Yezidi religious and cultural tradition is deeply rooted in Kurdish culture and almost all Yezidi sacred texts are in Kurdish.” When I relate such opinions to Tarnoyan, I only succeed in making him more irate. “I’d like to pass this conversation on to the government,” he says. ‘Will you be responsible for your statement? Because I will take the recording to the National Security Service [the Armenian successor to the KGB].” Tamoyan‘s position, however threatening, does highlight an important issue relating to Armenia’s Yezidi minority. Discussions about their origin are sensitive. The mixture of increased freedom and economic hardship that has arisen since the break-up of the former Soviet Union has allowed organizations such as the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – which is currently fighting a separatist guerrilla war in Turkey from bases in Northern Iraq – to reach out to Armenia’s Yezidis.
Kurdish Sympathies
Two years ago a Yezidi from the Annavir region of Armenia was killed alongside six other PKK members in the Turkish town of Batman and there has been a notable increase recently in the number of Muslim Kurds from Turkey, Iraq and Syria who have materialized in Armenia to work alongside Yezidis. At weddings, these new Kurdish arrivals perform pro-PKK songs, while senior PKK representatives regularly visit Armenia to speak at Yezidi cultural events such as the annual pilgrimage to Shamiram, a village outside Yerevan that hosts a Yezidi monument.
As sensitive a subject as Yezidi sympathies towards the PKK might be for the Armenian government in villages such as Alagyaz and Riya Taza, PKK supporters are considered a godsend. Largely ignored by the authorities, many villages lack amenities such as running water and gas for heating. Instead, it’s Yezidis such as 36-year-old Fryaz Avdalyan who have taken it upon themselves to provide essential services such as dental and health care often at their own expense.
Avdalyan spent five years with the PKK as a field nurse with guerrillas in northem Iraq. Until recently, she also ran the local cultural centre, where large posters of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned founder of the PKK, took pride of place on the walls. Now studying medicine in Yerevan, Avdalyan’s mobile phone screen still bears a picture of ‘Apo’, as he is affectionately known by pro-PKK Kurds. But for academics such as Zagros, there is something far simpler in the allure of Armenia’s Yezidis. Sitting in a room filled with Yezidi women improvising songs sung to honour their recently deceased patriarch, he is captivated.
“The music, words and narrative are very Kurdish,” he says.
“lt’s about how the Yezidis have no homeland to return to. They are in Armenia as visitors and this isn’t their home. On the other hand, it’s very Yezidi because it only exists among them now.
“ln fact, it’s beautiful.”
Omnik Krikorian is a freelance journalist and photographer from the United Kingdom now based in Yerevan, Armenia. Krikorian is of Armenian and English descent. He has been resident in the Republic of Armenia since 1998. He has published in a wide variety of publications including the Bristol Evening Post, The Independent, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal. His personal web site is http://www.oneworld.am.
Sources:
Krikorian, Omnik (February 21, 2008). Yezidi Minority in Armenia Unsure of Its Identity. Reprinted with permission of California Courier.
Kurd.net (Retrieved August 31, 2010). The Unknown Turkish Genocide of Kurdish Yezidis. http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2008/3/turkeykurdistan1735.htm