Ferik, Armavir Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2008

As mentioned in a previous post, yesterday saw a return visit to Ferik, a small Yezidi-inhabited village in the Armavir region of Armenia. According to the locals, Ferik was a predominantly Azerbaijani village until they fled persecution in Turkey a year before the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The village was then named after Ferik Polatbekov, the son of a Kurdish chieftain deported to Siberia.

This young revolutionary poet, who became the main leader of the Red Army in Siberia and was finally killed by the Whites, remained totally unknown in Kurdistan. The same applies to a number of Kurdish writers and poets who achieved fame in the Soviet Union.

A People Without a Country, Gérard Chaliand, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, Marco Pallis

The full post accompanied by photographs is available on The Caucasian Knot.

Full coverage of the military confrontation between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territory of South Ossetia can be found on The Caucasian Knot. In particular, the site links to opinion and commentary from bloggers, journalists and analysts. The Caucasian Knot is at http://blog.oneworld.am,

Armenian-Turkish border, Khor Virap, Ararat Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2003

As one of the oldest nations in the world, Armenia occupies a fraction of its ancestral lands. Invaded and subjugated to foreign rule throughout the centuries, many of Armenia’s present day policies have been shaped by unresolved conflict and disputes with its neighbors. As a landlocked country with few natural resources, its full potential for economic development has been frustrated by effective isolation from the surrounding region. More than a million Armenians have emigrated to seek better lives abroad.

Millennium Development Goals

In August 2003, the Armenian government finalized its long-awaited Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) which aims to reduce poverty to 19% by 2015. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), most of the PRSP’s objectives are in line with achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which include combating poverty, improving the environment and addressing other pressing social issues.

However, the 2005 MDG progress report produced jointly by the government and UN agencies still considers it unrealistic for Armenia to halve the number of people living in poverty by 2015 compared to 1990 levels. Because of insufficient funding levels and inadequate access to healthcare for the poor, reducing infant and maternal mortality by 2015 might also prove unreachable.

Given the rate of deforestation in Armenia, environmental sustainability is unlikely to be achieved by 2015. New indicators concerning the country’s Lake Sevan have been added to dress concerns with lowering water levels. Access to drinking water is also a concern with 81 percent of rural areas having a centralized water supply according to 2003 data. The figure was 98 percent for urban areas.

However, having already achieved universal primary education, MDG goals in this area have been modified to include secondary education. Secondary professional, professional graduate and postgraduate education has also been mentioned of special significance as is improving its general quality.

The full post is available on The Caucasus Knot.

Ortachiya, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2006

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.

The full feature story accompanied by photographs is available in the January issue of Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, or online at http://www.geographical.co.uk/Magazine/Yezidis_Jan_08.html.

Simon Maghakyan at Blogian just sent me an email to draw my attention to a new site he’s partly responsible for — the Djulfa Virtual Memorial and Museum. Interestingly, and somewhat commendably in my opinion, there’s also a blog component, Djulfa Blog: Sacred Stones Reduced to Dust.

Armenia Now reports that an analyst believes that Armenians voting for the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, in last week’s election in fact voted against NATO membership. It’s kind of a bewildering argument, but anyway.

Seyran Petrosyan, based in the Armenian-populated town of Akhalkalaki, contends that Saakashvili’s clear victory in areas where ethnic Armenians live is a paradoxical reflection of the reluctance of Georgian-Armenians to see Georgia as a NATO member for fear of increased Turkish influence and a diminished role of Russia.

[…]

The data released by Georgia’s Central Election Commission shows that Saakashvili was a clear winner in all Armenian-populated areas of Georgia, with a high voter turnout registered in the Armenian-populated region of Samtskhe-Javakheti. Thus, the voter turnout in the most densely populated Armenian town of Akhalkalaki exceeded 65 percent.

However, chairman of the Javakhk compatriotic union in Armenia Shirak Torosyan claims the Armenian population of Javakheti treated the presidential polls in Georgia “with passivity bordering on total indifference.”

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The BBC reports that voting has begun in a snap presidential election in Georgia called after opposition protests turned violent and a state of emergency was declared in the former Soviet republic. Georgians are also taking part in a referendum to determine when the country’s parliamentary election should be held.

According to the report, albeit somewhat controversially, many opinion polls show the Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili leading the pack of seven candidates in the vote, but it is uncertain whether victory can be attained in a first round.

The polls also suggest that Mr Saakashvili’s closest rival will be Levan Gachechiladze, the wine businessman and independent MP chosen by the main opposition bloc as their candidate.

At a polling station in the capital, Tbilisi, Nodar Zardiashvili, said he had voted for Mr Saakashvili.

He told the AFP news agency that he backed the president “because he is doing the right thing by taking the country into Nato and the European Union”.

Nino Saladze, another voter in the capital, said she was supporting Mr Gachechiladze.

“We’ve had enough of Mr Saakashvili, November was the last straw,” she told the AFP.

[…]

On the eve of the elections, Mr Saakashvili said Georgia was still a democratic pioneer among former Soviet republics, despite the crackdown on the opposition protests in November.

[…]

“We have to show the whole world that Georgian democracy is still alive,” he told thousands of supporters at a final campaign rally in the capital, Tbilisi.

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Reuters reports that Turkey will finally consider amending Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code which has long been considered an obstacle to democratization and freedom of speech in the country. In particular, the article which makes “insulting Turkishness” a crime, has been used to prosecute Turkish intellectuals, activists and writers such as Orhan Pamuk as well as Turkish citizens of ethnic Armenian or Kurdish extraction such as Hrant Dink.

Indeed, many pro-democracy and freedom of speech activists consider that Article 301 was indirectly responsible for Dink’s murder in Istanbul earlier this year. Anyway, Reuters says that the amending the article is not guaranteed, but with growing pressure from both inside and outside Turkey to do so, let’s hope it is.

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey is preparing to amend a controversial law on freedom of speech that has been criticized repeatedly by the European Union and could slow EU accession talks with Brussels.

The justice ministry will hand the draft amendment to article 301 of the penal code, which makes it an offence to “insult Turkishness,” to the cabinet within 15 days, Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin told reporters on Tuesday.

It was not clear when the cabinet would approve the amendment.

Article 301 has been used to prosecute Turkish writers and thinkers, notably for comments on the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 under the Ottoman Empire.

Two years ago the government tried Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk under article 301 for his remarks on the events of 1915-16, but he was acquitted on a legal technicality.

The European Commission’s annual progress report on Turkey, published in November, called on Ankara to make “significant further efforts” on freedom of expression and religion, and noted that more people had been prosecuted under article 301 last year than in 2005.

[…]

Critics say Turkey’s centre-right government is dragging its feet, fearing that amending the law could spark a nationalist backlash at a time when EU membership is becoming less popular among Turks.

EU officials said the law was poisoning Turkey’s relations with Armenia and weighing on the media and non-government organizations in Turkey.

Yezidis, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1998

My feature article and photographs for Geographical, the magazine of the Royal Geographical Society, were meant to be published in the January 2008 edition, but now it looks like it’s already been published in the December issue. Unfortunately, the full text of the article is not available online yet, but when it is I’ll post another link and an excerpt. Until then, this is what Geographical has for now.

A people divided

Armenia’s Yezidi people practise one of the purest versions of Kurdish culture, but, as Onnik Krikorian discovers, outside forces have riven the small community.

My last published article on Yezidis in Armenia was for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and can be read online here, and many of the transcripts of the interviews I’ve done since 1998 are here. Also, until the full Geographical article can be read online, there’s plenty of posts and links to previous articles on Yezidis in Armenia and Georgia under the relevant category.

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One topic that I’ve covered constantly since June 1998 has been that of Yezidis and Kurds in Armenia. Considered to be ethnic Kurds that resisted attempts to convert to Islam, Yezidis in Armenia are the republic’s largest minority. However, local factors such as the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh and a shared history with Armenians of persecution at the hands of Moslem Kurds in Turkey during the Genocide have given way to divisions within the Yezidi community in Armenia.

It’s a topic I’ve constantly returned to with my latest feature article due to be published in the January 2008 issue of Geographical. The last article on this subject was for the Institute of War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) last year and examined the impact this division had on minority education for the Yezidis in Armenia.

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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. […]

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Ortachiya, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2006

As mentioned earlier, Geographical will be publishing an article and photos by yours truly on Yezidis in Armenia, the division within the community regarding Kurdish identity, and the work of academics researching the largest minority in the country in their January 2008 issue.

The physical version of the magazine is apparently going to the printers tomorrow. Until the article and photos are out or up online, some previous articles on the Yezidis in Armenia are at the following URLs:

http://www.oneworld.am/journalism/articles/yezidi.html
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=crs&s=f&o=325045&apc_state=henh

As always, my interviews on Yezidis in Armenia since 1998 are at:

http://www.groong.com/orig/yezidi.html

And there’s lots of coverage on this blog too:

http://oneworld.blogsome.com/category/yezidis/