Yezidi child, Armavir Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1998

After my most recent article on the division among Armenia’s largest ethnic minority for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) was translated into German by Dengê Êzîdiyan, news that some of my supporting interviews on the Yezidis have also been translated into the same language by another. A week ago, Karl G. Mund from Yeziden Colloquium contacted me to ask permission to translate my interviews with Dr. Christine Allison, which I of course gave.

A friend at Dengê Êzîdiyan informed me about an interview with Dr. Christine Allison that had just appeared on the IWPR-website (IWPR = institute of war & peace reporting) asking me to translate the piece for publication on their homepage. I was already familiar with the name of Onnik Krikorian since I reported some time before about his extraordinary photo-report about a Yezidi funeral in Armenia.

After finishing that translation I continued surfing through Onnik’s website where I found all the interviews he used for that report including two interviews with Dr. Christine Allison. During a former visit to Mala Êzîdiyan in Oldenburg I had already peered through her scientific work “The Yezidi Oral Tradition in Iraqi Kurdistan”, cf. the review by Dr. Christiane Bulut on our homepage.

Thus I found a veritable raisin to peck for this issue of my column. And looking through other interviews by Onnik Krikorian showed that the conflict he reported for IWPR has been ongoing for about 15 years. Becoming acquainted with the material I realized that there is really a sensitive problem which cannot be solved by keeping silent. It is more connected to historical/political than to religious issues.

And it is deeply connected with the historical situation of Armenians since the late 19th century, also with relations of the Armenian population not only concerning the Turkish population but also to significant portions of the Kurdish population during the last 3 decades of the Ottoman Empire (i.e. approximately 1893 – 1923). I think the recent uproar throughout Turkey over the new genocide-laws in France gives reason for Kurds, both in Armenia as in other countries to review that time with the utmost objectivity and without any trace of prejudice.

As there is a Yezidi Diaspora in Germany it only seems appropriate that some of my material is now available there, although I personally would like to see it also translated into Kurmanji. Anyway, my interviews with Christine Allison are now available in German, while the recent article for IWPR is now available in English, Russian, Armenian and German.

Karl also asked me to write a short background to my interest in the Yezidis which I did, and which he also translated into German.

My interest in the Yezidi community came about by chance after returning from Turkey in 1997 where I worked on a few stories on human rights and the Kurds in the South East of the country. After making contact with the Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) in London they asked me if I would be interested in visiting Armenia for 10 days to examine the human rights situation of the Kurdish minority there. As I hadn’t worked in Armenia since 1994, and more specifically the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh, I jumped at the chance.

However, as most of Armenia’s Moslem Kurds had left along with the Republic’s Azerbaijani population at the start of the Karabakh conflict, this really meant examining the situation of the Yezidi minority and here the problem of identity emerged. In Armenia there is a division among the Yezidi minority as to whether they are ethnic Kurds or no. One side of the community says they are a separate ethnic minority whereas the other says they are Kurds who follow the Yezidi religion.

While working in Armenia in June 1998 I attended a UNDP / Ministry of Foreign Affairs Conference on National Minorities and was offered a job with the United Nations in Yerevan. I accepted and moved to Armenia in October 1998. Most Armenians in the Diaspora I knew advised me to steer clear of writing on the Yezidis in Armenia, but fate was to push me back to this subject. Soon after I arrived in Armenia Abdullah Ocalan fled to Rome and some Yezidis protested outside the UN Building in Yerevan in his support.

Faced with a news story I covered the issue for Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, but then started to focus on social and political issues in Armenia. However, in 2004 various academics working on the Yezidi minority in Armenia such as Robert Langer, Christine Allison and Nahro Zagros contacted me after reading my interviews from 1998. Thus, I was brought back to writing and photographing Yezidis here. As the virtually mono-ethnic nature of Armenian society can get tedious after a while, the chance to immerse myself in the Republic’s largest ethnic minority was welcomed.

Throughout this time I have been well aware that the issue of identity for Armenia’s Yezidis is a very sensitive matter, and unlike most local journalists, I do believe that is up to each individual to define themselves. However, the division within the Yezidi minority in Armenia is troublesome because in many senses, it seems somewhat artificial with some factions even going so far as to say that the Yezidi language is unintelligible to ethnic Kurds and vice-versa. As such, I feel I have some kind of obligation as a journalist to continue to research and monitor the situation.

Because of this I have always made available the full transcripts of all my interviews with Yezidis, Kurds, officials and academics on both sides of the divide on my blog and on the website of the Armenian News Network – Groong. The issue is unfortunately too sensitive not to do otherwise, especially in a country where the main reason for this divide appears to be political.

As I said above, almost all of my interviews on the Yezidis in Armenia and Georgia since 1998 are available on a special page set up by the Armenian News Network — Groong. There’s also the Yezidi category on this blog for photographs and other related stuff encountered along the way.