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  • Being Yezidi

    Being Yezidi
    by Onnik Krikorian
    10 November 2004

    Transitions Online, Czech Republic
    Nov 11 2004

    Caught between competing ideological interests, members of Armenia's
    most numerous minority struggle to define their identity.

    YEREVAN, Armenia--When Aziz Tamoyan sits behind his desk in the cramped
    and dilapidated room that serves as his office in the Armenian capital,
    he says that he does so as president of the country's largest ethnic
    minority, the Yezidis.

    Yezidi children, Armavir region. The Yezidi here say they are not
    Kurdish.

    Pointing at the handmade posters stuck on the wall to one side of his
    cluttered desk, Tamoyan reads aloud the slogan that also serves as
    the motto for his newspaper. "My nationality is Yezidi, my language
    is Yezideren, and my religion is Sharfadin," he proclaims, opening a
    copy of Yezdikhana to reveal the results of the last census conducted
    in Armenia three years ago.

    "There are 40,620 Yezidis and 1,519 Kurds living in Armenia," he
    continues. "These are the official figures from the census and that
    should be all that you need to know. The Yezidis have no connection
    with the Kurds and there are no Muslim Kurds in Armenia. According
    to the census, nobody speaks Kurdish in Armenia."

    But Philip Kreyenbroek, head of Iranian studies at the University of
    Goettingen in Germany and a leading specialist on the Kurds and the
    Yezidis of Turkey and northern Iraq, disagrees.

    "The Yezidi religious and cultural tradition is deeply rooted in
    Kurdish culture and almost all Yezidi sacred texts are in Kurdish," he
    says. "The language all Yezidi communities have in common is Kurdish
    and most consider themselves to be Kurds, although often with some
    reservations."

    As if to illustrate how these reservations have manifested themselves
    as a problem far out of proportion to the size of the community, next
    door to Tamoyan's office sits Amarik Sardar, editor of Riya Taza,
    established in 1930 and still the oldest surviving Kurdish newspaper
    in the world.

    "Unlike some people who confuse nationality with religion, I
    recognize the distinction," he says. "I am Yezidi by religion but
    also consider myself to be a Kurd. The majority of Kurds in Armenia
    are also Yezidis but apart from this religious distinction there is
    no other difference."

    Back next door, Tamoyan reacts angrily. "Nobody has the right to say
    such things. If we are Kurds, why were 300,000 Yezidis killed along
    with 1.5 million Armenians during the genocide [in Ottoman Turkey]?
    Why did the Turks and Kurds deport us? The Kurds are the enemies of
    both the Armenians and the Yezidis."

    Indeed, most of Armenia's Yezidi minority fled persecution and
    massacre in Ottoman Turkey at the beginning of the 20th century,
    and it is perhaps this shared experience that makes the issue so
    sensitive in Armenia today.

    THE YEZIDI MOVEMENT IN ARMENIA

    The Yezidi community is the largest ethnic minority in Armenia even
    though it numbers just a few tens of thousands of adherents. Although
    their precise number worldwide is unknown, the followers of this
    ancient religion are spread throughout Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Georgia,
    Armenia, and, as recent immigrants and refugees, Germany.

    Widely misconceived as "devil worship," Yezidism in fact combines
    elements from Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Yet
    despite the widespread belief that they are also ethnic Kurds who
    resisted pressure to convert to Islam, there have been attempts in
    Armenia to identify the Yezidis as a separate ethnic group since the
    last years of Soviet rule.

    Soviet-style demography, which determined communal identity based
    on language and largely ignored religion, identified the Yezidis and
    Muslim Kurds living in Armenia together as members of the same ethnic
    group. But by 1988, during the period of glasnost, some of Armenia's
    Yezidi religious and political leaders began to challenge this notion
    and the "Yezidi Movement" was formed.

    The following year an appeal was made to the Soviet authorities
    requesting that the Yezidis be considered a separate ethnic group.
    The request was granted, and in the last Soviet census conducted
    in 1989, out of approximately 60,000 Kurds who had been formerly
    identified as living in the Soviet Republic of Armenia, 52,700 were
    for the first time given a new official identity as Yezidis.

    During this time of "openness" that defined the last years of the
    Soviet Union, the Yezidis were not the only people striving to form
    new national movements. In February 1988, Armenians took to the
    streets to demand that Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian-inhabited
    territory within Azerbaijan, be united with Armenia. Azeris responded
    with attacks on Armenians. In the tit-for-tat expulsions that
    followed--marking the beginning of an ethnic conflict that remains
    unresolved--350,000 Armenians fled Azerbaijan and 200,000 Azeris
    and Muslim Kurds left Armenia. The Yezidi, along with smaller groups
    of other non-Moslem minorities, remained. By 1991, when the tension
    over Karabakh broke out in armed conflict, nearly all of the Muslims
    living in Armenia had already fled the country.

    Proponents of the Yezidis' claim to be a nation separate from the
    Kurds insist, however, that there was no connection between the
    Karabakh conflict and the promotion of a separate Yezidi identity.

    Garnik Asatrian, the director of the Caucasian Center for Iranian
    Studies in Yerevan, has argued that rivalry and animosity have long
    characterized relations between the two groups. It was only natural
    that the resurrection of an independent Armenian state pushed the
    Yezidis to try to regain their own identity and religion, he believes.

    IDENTITY POLITICS

    While the Yezidis practice a religion dramatically different from
    that of most Kurds, it seems that political ideology is attracting
    some Yezidis to the Kurdish cause.

    At a recent event in a predominantly Yezidi-inhabited village, the
    audience listened to pro-Kurdish speeches and songs, including some
    sung by Yezidi children. One of the speakers at the event was Heydar
    Ali, a Kurd from Iraq who openly identifies himself as the Caucasus
    representative of Kongra-Gel, the organization formerly known as the
    Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

    Engaged in a separatist conflict in the southeastern regions of
    neighboring Turkey, the organization is considered a terrorist group
    by the United States and the European Union. The PKK lost momentum
    when Turkey arrested its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999 but is
    still active in Turkey and abroad.

    "Certain officials are using this artificial division in the community
    for their own interests," Ali says. "In fact, the Yezidi religion is
    the original faith practiced by the Kurds before most were converted to
    Islam--just as Armenians were pagan before converting to Christianity.

    "Of course, when the Muslim Kurds and Azeris left Armenia at the
    beginning of the Karabakh conflict, some Yezidis might have hid
    their Kurdish identity because they were scared," he continues,
    "but in general, the attitude of Armenian society toward Kurdish
    issues is positive. We have lived together for centuries and we also
    have some common interests."

    Gohar Saroava helps a Yezidi girl get ready for a pro-Kurdish event.

    Nineteen-year-old Gohar Saroava, who was also present at the event
    held in September, agrees.

    One of the few Muslim Kurds who remain in Armenia, she says that her
    family and two Kurdish neighbors living in an Armenian village have
    never experienced discrimination. As a young journalist working for
    the Kurdistan Committee in Yerevan, she is very open about her views
    on the Yezidis.

    "I write about Kurdish life in Armenia and about our leader, Abdullah
    Ocalan," she says. "I have come to this [Yezidi] event today because
    we are Kurds. Our religions may be different but we are from the
    same nation."

    Saroava is one of a tiny and dwindling number of Muslim Kurds left
    in Armenia. According to reliable estimates, at most a few hundred
    individuals remain. Even government officials privately acknowledge
    that the 1,519 Kurds recorded in the 2001 census are mainly those
    Yezidis who instead identified themselves as Kurds.

    "Another complicating factor seems to have been the lure of PKK
    ideology, which attracts some Armenian Yezidis as it does many others,"
    Kreyenbroek explains. "As the PKK stresses that Kurdish identity takes
    precedence over religious affiliations, those who are influenced by
    it naturally go back to calling themselves Kurds. On the other hand,
    more traditional [Yezidis] feel threatened and deny the connection
    between the Kurds and Yezidis all the more strongly. To a lesser
    extent the same developments can be seen in Germany, where dislike
    of the PKK causes some Yezidis to play down their Kurdish identity,
    stressing the Yezidi aspect."

    TONGUE-TIED

    "The division of the Armenian Yezidis into one smaller group
    identifying themselves as Kurds and Kurmanji [Kurdish]-speakers and
    one group defining themselves as Yezidis with their own language is
    part of the post-Soviet search for identity," says Robert Langer, a
    scholar at the University of Heidelberg in Germany who is researching
    the rituals and traditions of the Yezidis in Armenia.

    Alagyaz, Aragatsotn region, a predominantly pro-Kurdish village.
    And it is language that might prove to be the most vexing problem
    facing the community in Armenia. According to Hranush Kharatyan, head
    of the government's department for national minorities and religious
    affairs, so significant is the issue that it is now "the most actual
    problem existing among national minorities in Armenia."

    When the Armenian government considered ratifying Kurmanji as the
    name for the language spoken by the Yezidis and Kurds, for example,
    emotions ran high and Kharatyan says she was accused and threatened
    by both sides. In particular, she says, Yezidi spiritual leaders
    demanded that their language instead be classified as "Yezidi" even
    if in private they acknowledge that it is Kurmanji.

    Unable to satisfy both sides of the community, the government ratified
    both Yezidi and Kurdish under the European Charter for Regional and
    Minority Languages. Although there is a sizeable but still-unknown
    number of Yezidis who consider themselves Kurds, there are just as
    many who do not. As a result, says Kharatyan, the government was
    right not to come down on one side or the other.

    "Despite the fact that I am an ethnologist and a scientist, I will
    call people with the same name that they are calling themselves,"
    Kharatyan says. "I understand that during the establishment of
    a national identity this transformation brings with it some very
    difficult and serious problems and because of this, the government
    of the Republic of Armenia will not interfere.

    "I don't know what will happen to both sides of the community," she
    concludes, "but in the world, this is not the only example. Croatians
    and Serbs are enemies even though genetically they are from the
    same nation. However, nations are social and from time to time,
    things change."


    Onnik Krikorian is a freelance journalist and photojournalist from
    the United Kingdom living and working in Armenia.

    Photos by Onnik Krikorian.
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