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  • A people divided

    Geographical
    January 2008

    A people divided

    The break-up of the former Soviet Union has given Armenia's largest
    minority, the Yezidis, new freedoms. But this has proven to be a mixed
    blessing, as geopolitical and historical concerns have riven the small
    community. Text and photography by Onnik Krikorian


    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
    kilometres 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-19th 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 home-made 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 1917, 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-Karabakh and began to downplay or even deny their ethnic origin.

    About 200,000 Azerbaijanis and Muslim Kurds were forced to flee Armenia
    when the fighting 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-Karabakh 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 maintains that the Yezidis have no connection with the
    Kurds. He is also head of Yezidi language programmes 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
    Göttingen 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 Tamoyan, 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 organisations 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 Armavir 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 materialised 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 northern Iraq. Until recently, she also ran the local cultural
    centre, where large posters of Abdullah Öcalan, 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. `It'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. `In fact, it's
    beautiful.'

    ---
    http://geographical.co.uk/Featur es/Yezidis_Jan_08.html
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