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.’
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