ARMENIA: YEZIDIS ENDURE YEARS OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
By Gayane Mkrtchian in Zovuni
Institute for War and Peace Reporting, UK
Oct 26 2007
Ethnic minority blames official discrimination for failure to remove
potentially lethal electricity pylons from their village.
Electricity has its own voice here – it cracks and hisses, and it
defines the village of Zovuni in central Armenia where power lines,
erected in 1965, are within touching distance of the rooftops. The
5,200 inhabitants, almost a fifth of whom are from the Yezidi ethnic
minority, have asked to be moved away from the power lines for decades,
to no avail. "Forty years of crackle and chatter. We go to sleep with
this sound and wake up with it. In rainy or windy weather, the chatter
turns into a violent hissing. The power lines start yelling and we
think the end is near," said Uso Avdalian, 75. Officials say they
cannot afford to move the pylons but the Yezidis, who have their own
language and religion and for cultural reasons like to live among
their own community, suspect official discrimination. "Being under
high voltage lines is harmful for people’s health. It’s like being in
radioactive area. It leads to cancer and heart disease," said Mikael
Mardumian, head of the internal control department at the Armenian
electricity grid. "But technically it’s impossible for us to move
the power lines. It requires a huge amount of money. Why should the
company do this at its own expense?" Avdalian escorted us through
the village, showing the beginning and the end of the pylons. As he
passed into the neighbour’s yard, he spoke some quiet Yezidi words
to calm the barking dogs, then pointed up to the roof of his home.
"When I lift the pitchfork to fetch some hay from the roof, sometimes
I happen to slightly touch the lines. Once I got an electric
shock. When the rains start, the situation gets more dangerous,"
he said. Avdalian’s wife, one of a group of brightly head-scarfed
women washing clothes in the yard, asked her husband for permission
to speak – as is required by Yezidi custom – and let out a torrent
of words. "When it rains or thunders I run to my neighbour’s house,
away from the power lines. We live close to death," the 51-year-old
said at last. Avdalian’s ancestors settled in this village in 1915 when
they fled Turkey, where Yezidis were persecuted by Muslims who accuse
them of devil-worship. "These power lines were set up in 1965. They
promised to move us out of here and reimburse the cost of our houses,
but we are still here," he said.
The Yezidis have been complaining for years. Soviet Armenia’s
agriculture minister Vladimir Movsisian visited in 1988 and pledged
action, but the efforts to move the lines were disrupted by a
devastating earthquake that struck Armenia. "All the machinery that
was brought to work in the village was sent to the disaster area. We
could hardly complain about it, because those people were in a
far worse situation then us," said Avdalian. Movsisian was not the
last politician to promise action for the Yezidis. Before the 2003
presidential election, President Robert Kocharian pledged to remove
the power lines and so did Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian on the eve
of the 2007 parliamentary elections. Village mayor Serzhik Avetisian
is at the end of his tether. "Who else can we appeal to?" he asked.
The Yezidis are the largest ethnic minority in Armenia, with
most having arrived in the country in the mid 19th and early 20th
centuries. Widely dismissed as devil worship, Yezidism in fact combines
elements from Zoroastrianism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Unlike
Armenians, they are Kurdish-speakers, and there are around 60,000 of
them in the country. The Yezidis in Zovuni have asked the government
for land they can use as a "lalesh" or a shrine but officials demand
money that the Yezidis do not have. They also want a new cemetery,
complaining that the piece of land allotted to them is too rocky,
and is unsuitable for as a burial site because it is wedged between a
lemonade factory and some stables. None of the three Yezidi candidates
running for the recent Zovuni council elections were successful, which
they say was no accident. They want to see at least one Yezidi employee
in the local administration who will deal with their problems. "If
the government wants to drive away these people, let them set up a
commission for expelling them.
Seven hundred Yezidis left the village during the past years. Their
cattle stock has also decreased by 30,000, to just 10,000 now,"
said Aziz Tamoyan, chairman of the National Union of Yezidis. Gayane
Lazarian is a member of IWPR’s Cross Caucasus Journalism Network,
based in Armenia.