LONG-PERSECUTED YAZIDIS FIND SECOND HOMELAND IN ARMENIA
Al Jazeera America
Sept 24 2014
Happy in their adopted home, the religious minority watches in horror
as ISIL pursues their people in their homeland
September 24, 2014 5:00AM ET by Liana Aghajanian @lianaagh
ALAGYAZ, Armenia — Just an hour’s drive from Armenia’s bustling
capital city of Yerevan, Vazir Avdalyan sat in his living room in
this rural village and took a long drag off his cigarette, trying to
concentrate on the task at hand. As the director of the village school,
he should have been preparing for the start of the academic year.
But he had more pressing concerns on his mind: the plight of his
people, the Yazidis, in Iraq.
Long considered a minority of a minority in Iraq, these previously
obscure adherents to a religion influenced by Zoroastrianism,
Christianity and the Sufi tradition in Islam found themselves in the
international spotlight last month. Tens of thousands of them had
fled into the ranges of Mount Sinjar to escape the murderous advance
of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, prompting an
international effort to bring them relief.
“We are one of the most ancient people in the world; we need to be
helped,” Avdalyan said. “This religion shouldn’t be lost, even just
for the sake of preserving history.”
It is a religion that has attracted persecution for centuries, from
the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, which forced them
to flee to the Caucasus, to the destruction of Yazidi villages during
Saddam Hussein’s reign in Iraq, in what became known as the Halabja
massacre, when Kurds and other minorities were systematically targeted.
The Yazidis believe in a deity called “Melek Tawus,” the Peacock
Angel, who is identified as “Shaytan” in the Koran, the same name that
Muslims have for Satan, which sometimes creates a misunderstanding
by outsiders that they are devil worshippers.
Avdalyan watched the news unfold out of Iraq in August, horrified at
the stories of what the militants of ISIL had wrought: hundreds killed,
men buried alive, women kidnapped, young girls sold in markets,
children starving or dying of dehydration. And the humanitarian
emergency continues, as many families remain stranded on the
mountain; others have fled to refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan and
Syria. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 Yazidi women and children have
been captured by ISIL militants and are being trafficked for sex,
according to a new BBC report.
Events in their holy land in northern Iraq, where the Yazidis have
previously retreated during times of persecution, weigh heavily on
Armenia’s Yazidi community. Hundreds gathered to protest in front of
the Office of Foreign Affairs in downtown Yerevan, holding up posters
of Iraqi Yazidi children and signs urging a stop to the violence.
The ISIL attack on the Yazidis was, for many outsiders, the first time
they had heard of the faith, which has less than a million followers,
the majority located in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. But there has
been at least one safe space for one Yazidi community: Armenia.
There hasn’t been any place in the world that Yazidis have lived as
normally as they have in Armenia. It’s probably because of this that
I haven’t left yet.
Yazidis have lived in this predominantly Christian country for more
than a century, practicing their customs with little interference.
Perhaps that’s because they have a shared history of tragedy: In the
1915 Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million people were killed, the
Yazidis tried to help Armenians. As a result, many Yazidis perished.
Although the number of Yazidis in the country has decreased, due
to emigration, the 2011 Armenian census shows that more than 35,000
remain.
“There hasn’t been any place in the world that Yazidis have lived
as normally as they have in Armenia,” Avdalyan said. “It’s probably
because of this that I haven’t left yet. We understand each other
well.”
Virtually mono-ethnic and wedged between Turkey and Iran, Armenia
has been an unlikely yet strong cultural center for Yazidis, a
source of pride for community members who can name dozens of Yazidi
intelligentsia in Armenian history. One such figure is Usub Bek,
a member of the Parliament of the First Armenian Republic, in the
early 20th century. The first ever film in Armenian cinema, 1927’s
Zare, focuses on a Yazidi love story that takes place in an Armenian
village. More recently, Armenia-born Yazidi Roman Amoyan, a champion
Greco-Roman wrestler, brought the country its first Olympic medal
in wrestling in 16 years with a bronze at the 2008 Beijing Summer
Olympics.
In 2012, a Yazidi temple was built in western Armavir province,
financed by a wealthy member of the Yazidi diaspora. It was the
first religious site built outside of their holy land in Lalish,
Iraq, to which Yazidis are expected to make a pilgrimage at least
once in their lifetime.
Most Armenian Yazidis make their living from sheepherding and other
forms of animal husbandry and live in the rural villages of Aragatsotn
province, in the west, near Mount Aragats, the country’s highest
point. Life is anything but easy here. Winters are unbearably
cold, and the chill often manages to penetrate summer nights,
too. Families burn cow dung to keep warm, recreational activities
for children are virtually nonexistent, and many of the villages face
enormous challenges when it comes to medical facilities and adequate
infrastructure for schools.
Armenia’s high poverty rate and depressed job market have led to a
serious emigration problem with all citizens, not just Yazidis. With
close to a hundred thousand people interested in migration, many
families rely heavily on remittances, Yazidis among them. In the
villages of Alagyaz, Rya Taza and Jamshlu, Yazidi strongholds, the
number of residents is dwindling. Many have gone to Russia and Western
Europe in search of employment. A good chunk of them, village elders
said, do not return.
Still, the connection to the South Caucasus country is deeply
entrenched; when Armenian-born Yazidis die abroad, their bodies are
sent back to Armenia for burial, according to several Yazidi village
leaders in Armenia.
Though life for the Yazidis has been relatively peaceful in Armenia,
there have been incidents of marginalization, too. A 2008 report from
the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees noted
that Yazidis in Armenia face problems with land privatization and
land ownership, lack of political representation and social exclusion.
In Armenia, everyone is a Yazidi, not a Kurd. Armenia was the first
country to recognize Yazidis as a separate nationality.
Khdr Hajoyan
Yezidi National Union
They’ve also faced a markedly different kind of battle than Yazidi
populations in Syria or even neighboring Georgia, where many
Armenia-born Yazidis immigrated after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Issues of identity have long plagued the Yazidi community in Armenia,
creating divisions for an already small and diminishing people. During
the years of the Soviet Union, Armenia’s Yazidi population was not
classified by religion, but by ethnicity. As a result, during those
years, Yazidis were considered Kurdish.
While scholars mostly identify Yazidis by religion and Kurds by
ethnicity, the Yazidi national movement that bubbled up in the late
1980s in Armenia sought to define Yazidi and Kurd as two separate
ethnic identities. This effort was born during the conflict between
Armenia and Azerbaijan over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh,
during which thousands of Muslim Azerbaijanis and Kurds were expelled
from Armenia.
The Yezidi National Union, led by Aziz Tamoyan, is the main
organization pushing the idea that Yazidis are separate group from
the Kurds, not just on the basis of religion but also ethnicity. The
group publishes its own newspaper, called Yezidkhana. Khdr Hajoyan,
the vice president of the National Union, said that referring to
Yazidis as one ethnic part of the Kurdish community simply isn’t
accurate, especially in Armenia.
Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect who fled the violence in
the Iraqi town of Sinjar, wait for aid at an abandoned building that
they are using as their main residence, outside the city of Dohuk,
Iraq, on August 25, 2014. Youssef Boudlal / Reuters
“In Armenia, everyone is a Yazidi, not a Kurd. Armenia was the first
country to recognize Yazidis as a separate nationality,” he said. “We
don’t want anyone confusing Yazidis and Kurds with each other. They
are not the same people. We have no ties with the Kurds.”
But not all in Armenia agree. “Everyone has the right to self-identity
as they wish, but Yazidis are just one branch of Kurds. Some
are Muslim, but we are the same people,” says Jasim Mahmudyan, an
economist and Yazidi who was born and raised in Alagyaz. “As a man,
as an individual, I identify as a Kurd, but as a Yazidi Kurd.”
But both sides are agreed on one thing: their frustration and grief
over the situation of their fellow Yazidis in Iraq.
“My heart is bleeding when I see what is happening,” Hajoyan says.
“This is genocide. The world is closing its eyes to genocide.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/9/24/a-second-homeland.html