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Armenia: Kurdish Yezidi Identity Battle
3.11.2006
By Onnik Krikorian in Yerevan |
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New textbooks highlight division within Armenia’s
Yezidi community.
Yezidis in the western Aragatsotn region of Armenia
have taken a dim view of government efforts,
supported by the UN children’s agency, UNICEF, to
bolster minority education in the republic.
At the beginning of September, at an event staged in
the Yezidi village of Alagyaz, government officials
said that new textbooks in minority languages would
be distributed to schools in minority-populated
villages, while UNICEF said it would provide
stationary and other supplies.
Less than a month later, however, Yezidis in Alagyaz
and ten surrounding villages were complaining. Their
language is the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, but the
books funded and provided by the government were
instead written in Ezdiki. While the latter is still
Kurdish by another name, the alphabet chosen for
publication was in the unaccustomed Cyrillic
alphabet instead of the more usual Latin or Arabic
scripts.
“All schools have at present is old Soviet-era
textbooks,” said Gohar Saroava, a young journalist
with the Mesopotamia newspaper in Yerevan and one of
the few Muslim Kurds remaining in Armenia. Others,
however, are more outspoken. “These [new] books are
a shame and we don't want to have this rubbish,”
said Torkom Khudoyan, vice-president of the National
Committee of Yezidis of Armenia.
Speaking to IWPR, both UNICEF and Hranush Kharatyan,
head of the Armenian government’s department for
national minorities and religious affairs, confirmed
reports that the new textbooks are being rejected,
but said that it was outside their remit to
intervene. Critics, however, argue that the
situation should never have arisen in the first
place and allege it is part a continuing attempt to
promote a non-Kurdish identity among Armenia’s
Yezidis.
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. Although the Yezidis are generally
considered to be Kurds who resisted pressure to
convert to Islam, there have been attempts to
identify them as a separate ethnic group in Armenia
since the last years of Soviet rule.
In 1988, an appeal was made to the Soviet
authorities by some Yezidi leaders requesting that
they be designated as an ethnic group. This
coincided with the beginning of the
Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorny Karabakh,
as a result of which, thousands of Muslim Kurds fled
Armenia, alongside ethnic Azerbaijanis. Yezidis,
however, were spared.
In 1989, the request was granted, and in the last
Soviet census conducted the same year, out of
approximately 60,000 Kurds who had been formerly
identified as living in Armenia, 52,700 were for the
first time given a new official identity as Yezidis.
The 2001 census put the number of Yezidis and Kurds
in the republic at 40,620 and 1,519 respectively.
Hasan Tamoyan, editor of the Armenian-language
Yezidikhana newspaper and head of the Yezidi
programme on Armenian Public Radio, eagerly cites
the last census as evidence that Yezidis are not
Kurds. Tamoyan is also one of the authors of the
controversial new school textbooks.
“There are over 40,000 people who identified
themselves as Yezidis and only around 1,500 that
identified themselves as Kurds,” said Tamoyan.
“Aren’t you inclined to believe the official data?
Is Kurmanji listed as a language in the census? The
Kurdish language is not even mentioned. There is
only the Yezidi language, Ezdiki.”
However, few specialists on the Yezidis outside of
Armenia agree.
"The Yezidi religious and cultural tradition is
deeply rooted in Kurdish culture and almost all
Yezidi sacred texts are in Kurdish," said 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.
Dr Christine Allison, a lecturer at the Institut
National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales,
INALCO, in Paris currently conducting fieldwork
among Yezidis in Armenia, agrees. “I have met more
Yezidis in Armenia who believe they are also Kurds,”
she said, “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 non-Yezidi Kurds.”
Nahro Zagros, an ethnic Kurdish PhD student from
Iraq studying the ethno-musical traditions of
Yezidis at the University of York, concurs. Zagros
says that he also stumbled upon what many consider
to be the artificial division of the community on a
recent visit to Armenia. “The school in Shinkani has
refused these textbooks, and teachers from Rya Taze,
Alagyaz, Dirik, Orta Chia, Amri Taze and Jamushlow
have also rejected them,” he said.
The situation in Armenia also differs markedly from
that in neighbouring Georgia, home, according to
official statistics, to 18,000 Yezidis.
“There are problems in Georgia, but we [Kurds] are
one nation,” said Pir Dima, a Yezidi religious
leader from Tbilisi visiting Armenia in September.
“It’s just that our religion is different. However,
the problem in Georgia is nowhere near as serious as
it is in Armenia. Yezidis here [in Armenia] don’t
want Armenians to know that they are Kurdish because
Muslim Kurds killed Armenians as well as Yezidis
[during the 1915 genocide].”
Rostom Atashov, president of the Union of Yezidis in
Georgia, told IWPR his community uses the Kurmanji
dialect and the Latin script. “We are both Yezidis
and Kurds,” he said. “We have one language and it is
Kurdish, and if you look at where the Yezidis came
from geographically, it is Kurdistan. In Georgia,
we’ve never even debated this problem. Yezidis are
Kurds, and we all believe that.”
Atashov also says he believes that the division has
opened up Armenia’s Yezidi community to the appeal
of organisations such as the outlawed Kurdistan
Workers Party, PKK, currently fighting a separatist
guerrilla war in Turkey. “The Armenian government
doesn’t want to recognise Yezidis as Kurds so the
only people willing to help Yezidis in Armenia with
establishing their identity are groups such as the
PKK,” he said.
And that certainly seems to be the case in at least
six Yezidi villages in the Aragatsotn and Armavir
regions of Armenia visited by IWPR this autumn.
While many Yezidis openly identified themselves as
such, all also said they were Kurmanji-speaking
ethnic Kurds. They additionally expressed support
for the PKK and displayed portraits of Abdullah
Ocalan, the organisation’s imprisoned leader, in
their homes, cultural centres and schools.
In recent years, several PKK representatives have
also openly visited Armenia to tour Yezidi villages.
Last year, Yusuf Avdoyan, a Yezidi from the Armavir
region of Armenia, was killed along with six other
PKK members fighting in Batman, Turkey. According to
the Kurdistan Committee in Armavir, his sister has
now also joined the PKK and is currently fighting
with them.
Some experts believe that the government has only
succeeded in alienating the Yezidis through its
education policies. One academic from Europe
speaking to IWPR on the condition of anonymity said,
“The state seems to be distinctly encouraging the
Ezdiki faction and has not latched on to the fact
that Kurmanji and Ezdiki, which were the same
language for the entire Soviet period, are still the
same. The most obvious and cost-effective compromise
would be to produce Ezdiki-Kurdish schoolbooks in a
mutually agreed alphabet.”
Kharatyan says that she proposed a solution such as
this to resolve this conflict over language, but was
threatened by both sides of the Yezidi community
instead. The government has since said it will
monitor the distribution of the controversial
textbooks, but the Kurdistan Committee is now
printing its own textbooks in the Latin script for
distribution to Yezidi schools during the second
half of November.
Knyaz Hassanov, head of the Kurdish community in
Armenia, told IWPR, “These books do not concern us.
They are not important and we have decided to
publish our own. The overwhelming majority [of
Yezidis in Armenia] consider themselves Kurds, so if
1-2,000 do not feel the same it’s not significant
enough of an issue for us. Besides, it’s also their
right.”
Onnik Krikorian is a British-born journalist and
photojournalist who has written on Yezidis in
Armenia since 1998. He has a blog from Armenia at
http://oneworld.blogsome.com.
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