Sister of Yezidi (pictured in poster) killed fighting for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in South East Turkey, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1998

The vodka flowed freely on Thursday evening in Alagyaz, one of several urban settlements inhabited by the Yezidi in Armenia. Perhaps that’s why I had to toast our Yezidi hosts after one asked why I moved to Armenia seven years ago. Yes, I am half-Armenian on my father’s side, but it was work undertaken for the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) that brought me to Armenia in June 1998 to examine the situation of the Republic’s largest minority.

During that visit I attended a conference organized by UNDP and the Armenian Foreign Ministry on national minorities and was offered a job by the former.

As a result, I moved to Armenia in October 1998, and while some Armenians warned me not to touch Yezidi or Kurdish issues in the country, I couldn’t resist the temptation. I even wrote an analysis for Radio Free Europe on Armenia’s Kurdish-speaking Yezidi minority in December 1999, and not least because Abdullah Ocalan, President of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighting for autonomy in south-east Turkey, was arrested in Italy.

The arrest last month in Rome of Abdullah Ocalan, president of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has led to a dramatic increase in support for the Kurdish national liberation movement, even among those Kurds living in countries where repression has not been particularly evident in recent years. In Armenia, Ocalan’s arrest has served to accelerate the trend among the country’s 50,000–60,000 strong Yezidi community to identify themselves not only as Yezidi but also as Kurds.

The Yezidi are indeed Kurdish, speaking the same language as the majority of the Kurds (Kurmanji), and all Kurds were originally Zoroastrian before the majority converted to Islam. The Yezidi religion–even with elements of the Zoroastrian, Islamic, and Christian faiths–closely resembles that of the Armenians before the adoption of Christianity, and the PKK has recently acknowledged that fact in an attempt to clarify the origins of the Kurdish nation.

Visiting Armenia in June 1998 in what was most likely a recruiting drive, Mahir Welat, the PKK representative to Moscow and the CIS, affirmed, “I am a Muslim Kurd but I also honor all religions. All Kurds used to be Yezidi [Zoroastrian] in the past. Some of us were forced into becoming Muslim, but now it is our intention to return and to educate ourselves again.”

However, after being shuttled from country to country, Ocalan was finally kidnapped by Turkish agents in Kenya. Those Armenian Yezidi that were beginning to identify with the Kurdish National Liberation Movement led by the imprisoned Kurd were furious and protested outside the United Nations building. They even stormed the building at one point and took the head of UNHCR hostage, threatening to douse him petrol before setting him alight.

Of course, I photographed the demonstrations outside the UN and it was then that the prejudice displayed by many Armenians towards Kurds and Yezidis became most evident and affected me.

Things were not so clear for the United Nations, however, and after being denied access to the UN building for security reasons — all the staff had been evacuated–I went to sit with the Kurds, and to photograph and talk to them. One member of the UN made an official complaint to the UN resident coordinator, and I decided to resign.

Actually, I was pleased to get out of the United Nations who could have been prepared for such an incident had they actually read the endnote I wrote for RFE/RL a few months earlier and which they had to okay before it could be published. Since independence, the fact that some Yezidi are looking towards the PKK has been overlooked by journalists and analysts in Armenia, but thanks to my work conducted for KHRP during the summer of the previous year, I had what was perhaps a unique insight into what was happening in the Yezidi community here.

Previously, only one Diasporan Armenian, Jackline Abramian, had written something on their Kurdish roots and the emergance of both Kurdish nationalism as well as attempts to redefine their identity in Armenia, and it was this article that served as the basis for my own work.

Since the start of the 1988 uprisings in Armenia, the decades old harmonious relations betwen the Kurds and Armenians have been severed. More than 15,000 Moslem Kurds, some intermarried with Azeris living in Armenia, fled Armenia as Armeno-Azeri relations intensified over the disputed are of Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan.

[…]

Simultaneously with the 1988 Armenian uprisings, a strong Yezidi movement began in Armenia, lead by four Yezidi religious and lay leaders: Azize’ Amar, Karame’ Salon, and Sheikhs Hasane Mahmood Tamoian, and Hasane Hasanian. The goal of the Yezidi movement is to separate the Yezidis from the rest of the Moslem Kurdish population, establishing Yezidis as a separate nation.

In 1991, however, the Kurdish academic Mehrdad Izady wrote even harsher words in an article commissioned by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR). However, an Armenian writer convinced the London-based publication not to publish the article that dealt with the cleansing of Moslem Kurds from Lachin and Kelbajar, an area briefly known as Red Kurdistan in the 1920s, during the height of the Karabakh conflict.

The area between Nagorno-Karabakh and Zangezur became inhabited by nomadic Kurdish tribes in 18th century. Eventually, this population became the majority in most parts of the region, particularly around Lachin, Kalbajar (Kelbajar in Kurdish), and Qubadli (Qûbadlî in Kurdish). The region became a part of Azerbaijan SSR in 1920. In 1923, the region was given the status of oblast and autonomy. Although Kurds constituted the majority of population in some other parts of Azerbaijan, such as Zardaba, Sadarak, and Teyvaz, these territories were not given autonomy or incorporated with “Kurdistan”. The autonomous oblast was named Kurdistan AO, not Kurdish AO, most possibly in an effort to exploit the Kurdish aspirations for independence that fell following the Treaty of Lausanne. Official language was Kurmanji and Kurdish cultural life flourished during the era of autonomy.

Kurdistan AO drew criticism from both Armenia and Azerbaijan, former blaming the Soviet authorities for creating a buffer zone in Lachin corridor, the latter for “stealing” land from Azerbaijani territory. In 1929, the autonomous oblast was dissolved. Following this incident, an ambitious campaign for turkification of Azerbaijani Kurds was started. During the Great Purge, most of its leaders were exiled to Central Asia and Siberia and during the deportation period in 1940 - 1944, the majority of Kurdish population were settled in Kazakh SSR and other republics.

In 1992, Lachin Kurdish Republic was declared by a group led by Waqil Mustafayev. However, during the Nagorno-Karabakh war, all efforts of establishment were hampered. Mustafayev took refuge in Italy.

Indeed, many believe that the war with Azerbaijan led to the continued growth of a Yezidi movement that sought to separate the Yezidi from the Kurds, as I recently wrote for Transitions Online.

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.

It’s also worth noting that Thomas Goltz says that after Lachin was taken during the Karabakh conflict, Yezidi were sent to the town to fool visiting international reporters into thinking they were local Kurds thankful to Armenians for liberating them from Azerbaijani oppression. The claim is made in Goltz’s excellent Azerbaijan Diary which is recommended for anyone interested in an account of the war from the “other side.”

Next there was Lachin [a small Azerbaijani town between Karabakh and Armenia], attacked under the guise of assisting local Kurds in “revolt”. Strange that the Kurds in question ended up fleeing to Baku, while the “local Kurds” encountered and interviewed by international observers were sent to the region from Yerevan and all seemed to be Yezidi Kurds, meaning that they had come from Armenia itself.

Using the Kurdish issue to confuse the international community was an excellent stratagem and the brainchild of a senior member of Levon Ter-Petrossian’s inner circle, who detailed it for me after we had learned to trust each other for the sake of piecing together a complete history. It was clever because it was built upon the familiar cliché that Azerbaijanis are “Turks” and thus hate “Kurds” and vice versa, as is believed to be the case in Turkey by many in the West.

When I interviewed many significant Yezidi figures in 1998 they confirmed that they had gone to Lachin when it was captured by Armenian forces although did not explain why. Anyway, an excellent chapter on the capture of another Kurdish town, Kelbajar, from Goltz’s book is also available online in full.

Once more, this was news that no one wanted. Armenia was still not officially involved in the conflict–and allowing their territory to be used even by a purely “Karabakh” force could only be regarded as involvement. But the Armenians got away with it again because no one wanted to know–not Washington, the UN or even Ankara. The weirdest and most shameless indifference to the plight of the victims, who were primarily Azeri Kurds, was displayed by international Kurdish organizations. Despite an appeal by Kurdish societies in Azerbaijan to “The Kurds of the World” for aid and assistance or at least condemnation of the Armenian assault, the ethnic cleansing of Kelbajar, like Lachin before it, remained a taboo subject.

Anyway, regardless of the reasons for what many consider to be an artificial division of the minority in Armenia, Kurdish nationalism remains strong, although I personally doubt that it extends to the majority of Yezidi. In the summer of 1998, however, the then representative of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) to Russia and the CIS happened to visit the Yezidi village of Alagyaz on the same day as I did. The local Kurdish cultural center even had a large portrait of a local Yezidi killed fighting for the PKK in Turkey.

However, Welat denied that the Armenian government was involved in supporting those Kurds who had taken up arms against Armenia’s traditional enemy.

We can say it is as if we have a common enemy. It is this situation with the Armenian people historically. We have one enemy - Turkey and Turkish policy. Whatever the propoganda from Turkey about weapons from Armenia it is propaganda against the Armenian Government. That is the policy.

We have many problems in Kurdistan and Turkey is trying to make it more complicated, with more problems, and also bigger. That is why they have such a policy. They say such things to make enemies of friends.

The Armenian Government is a democratic government and is going further in terms of that democracy, and the Kurds are people living in Armenia. The people living here are citizens of Armenia, but they support the national liberation movement in Kurdistan. They support it, and they are never afraid that anyone will blame them. The Armenian Government up to now did not help us because the Armenian Government is in a difficult situation itself.

Everyone knows that Turkey supports Azerbaijan with weapons, economically, and with its policy, but no-one has problems with that. We hope that one day Armenia will be prosperous and at that time Armenians and Kurds may be able to support each other against Turkey.

Last week’s visit to Alagyaz reinforced the feeling I had in 1998 that Alagyaz and the surrounding villages were a hotbed for pro-PKK Kurdish nationalism. Not one Yezidi home I entered watched Armenian TV, for example. Those families that had TV sets were instead glued to half a dozen Kurdish TV stations broadcast by satellite. Every single home also had portraits of Abdullah Ocalan and photographs of Kurdish guerillas fighting in the mountains of Turkey or Northern Iraq hung on their walls.

Even the local school displayed a portrait of Ocalan while every child playing outside their homes greeted visitors with the traditional PKK term of “heval” — comrade.

Indeed, it reminded me of a visit with the head of UNICEF, Sheldon Yett, to another Yezidi village last year. In Barozh, not only did teachers openly say that the language their pupils were learning was [Kurmanji] Kurdish, but they also knew other traditional PKK-linked greetings such as “Rojbash.” Ironically, however, when Yett entered one family home, the head of the household was most adament that the Yezidi were not Kurds to the astonishment of his wife and eldest daughter. It was then that I noticed the large portrait of Ocalan on the wall behind him.

“Oh,” he said, somewhat embarrased. “We didn’t know who it was. We just liked the colors.”

Yeah, right. I couldn’t be bothered to ask him about the photographs of PKK guerillas that were hung below the portrait.

Yezidi Cultural Center, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006

However, regardless of the situation in Alagyaz and Barozh, this problem with identity and the division within the Yezidi community has now become serious and exaserbated by the 2001`census in Armenia as another PKK representative, Heydar Ali, explained to me in 2004.

They artificially created this division and came up with the figure of 41,000 Yezidi and 1,519 Kurds, stating that these two groups spoke different languages. This was such a shameful event that has never happened anywhere else in the world. Religion is not mentioned — only that there are this many Yezidi and that many Kurds in Armenia.

If they are giving this figure of 1,519 Kurds then it should be pointed out that there are definitely not this many Moslem Kurds in Armenia. At most, there are 500-600 so this means that the remainder must be Yezidi-Kurds. The Kurdish community did not know that the officials that came around asking questions were conducting a census and that the results would be used to officially divide the community. They didn’t understand what objective this process had.

Unfortunately, with education in a pitful state in Armenia, and especially the regions of the country, this division has not helped Yezidi schools. A still unpublished report by UNICEF and the Armenian Government which I have a first draft of explains the problem.

In the approximately 20 locations included in this study, the ethnicities of “Kurd” and “Kurd Yezidis” were chosen by respectively 13 and 5 school students. Out of the planned number of 336 school students from Yezidi and Kurd communities, were interviewed 332 students (313 called themselves “Yezidis”, 13 - “Kurds” and 5 “Kurd-Yezidis”).

As a result, because most respondents identified themselves as Yezidi and only a minority acknowledged their Kurdish roots, the Armenian Government and the Ministry of Education treats the two groups as separate ethnicities even though outside of the country they are considered the same. And while it is the right of every community to define their own identity, it gets a bit ridiculous when the Armenian Government ratifies both “Ezidiki” and “Kurdish” as two separate languages under the European Charter.

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.

True, nobody knows how many Yezidi really acknowledge their Kurdish roots, but it does mean that Armenia’s largest minority risks isolating itself from Yezidi living outside of the Republic if this alledgedly artificial division as to identity continues. It is only in Armenia that academics such as Garnik Asatrian continue to push forward the idea that the Yezidi are not Kurds.

In Europe, academics such as Philip Kreyenbroek, head of Iranian studies at the University of Goettingen in Germany, is quite clear on the matter.

“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.”

[…]

“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.”

Indeed, the always excellent Wikipedia also describes the Yezidi as such.

The Yazidi or Yezidi (Kurdish: Êzidîtî or Êzidî) are adherents of a small Middle Eastern religious sect with ancient origins. Yazidi belong to the minor of the three branches of Yazdanism. Due to the traditions of secretiveness when stating their true confession, estimates vary, but a rough figure says that today in Kurdistan still close to one third of the population are yazdanism followers. The other two more populous branches are Alevism and Yarsanism, which differ from Yazidism by recognizing islamic taqiyya (dissimulation). The three branches are geographically split and mutual contacts are rare. They are primarily ethnic Kurds, and most Yazidis live near Mosul, Iraq with smaller communities in Syria, Turkey, Iran, Georgia and Armenia, and are estimated to number ca. 500,000 individuals in total. There are also Yazidi refugees in Europe.

Regardless, it’s been good to get back to this topic again, and not least since Alagyaz was delightful. The surrounding landscape was gorgeous and the kids even more so. Certainly I hope to do more on the Yezidi as well as other minorities in Armenia over the coming months, although Hasmik Hovhannisyan from Hetq Online will also be writing some articles based on our visit. In the meantime all my interviews on the Yezidi in Armenia since 1998 can be found here.