The Human Rights situation of the Yezidi minority - UNHCR

Against the wider context of economic collapse, state funding for minority culture institutions
ceased during the 1990s. Staples of Soviet-era minority identity, such as dance troupes and
folkloric ensembles, stopped functioning and Yezidis lost public spaces in which to
convene. 94 This constituted a significant blow to the normal functioning of the Yezidi
minority as an overwhelmingly urban, dispersed minority: these institutions had allowed for a
critical mass of contact within the community allowing for traditions such as endogamy to be
sustained.
Economic collapse also affected Yezidis through the prism of language. Kurdish for Yezidis
in Georgia assumed the status of an ancestral vernacular language – symbolic of a lingering
but threatened identity, used mainly as an expression of solidarity or as a means to
communicate with elders of the community but almost never as a means of access to
opportunity. There were reportedly four schools in Tbilisi in 2003 teaching Kurdish as a
subject, although none had books for students or teachers, while more up to date sources
suggest that there are no schools currently teaching the Kurdish language. 95 This essentially
leaves the responsibility for transmitting the language to parents, who are understandably
more motivated to secure their children’s future by equipping them with more prestigious and
future-oriented languages.
A recent article sums up the impact of the post-Soviet economic context on the Georgian
Yezidi minority in this way:
Mass migrations damaged the financial base of nascent civil society organizations and
complicated attempts to preserve religious traditions, whether through the practice of
rituals with spiritual leaders or through traditional intra-caste marriage. The cessation of
state funding for cultural institutions deprived the community of needed public spaces
to gather and keep much-needed endogamous marriage practices alive. Lastly, choices
to educate their children in the Russian language made by the Yezidi-Kurd minority in
light of economic crises in the 1990s gave little reason for the younger generations to
stay in Georgia without sufficient knowledge of the state language. 96
4.3.5 Threats to the Yezidi Community: Internal Organization
A second key area where the Yezidi minority has been vulnerable is in certain features of its
internal organization. This has been attributed by some observers to the shift from the Soviet
paradigm of institutionalized state support for minorities to the emergence of “ethnic interest
groups” competing for (scarce) resources. 97
The need to compete with other ethnic groups for available resources created a number of
problems for the Yezidi minority. One problem was the issue of self-identification: whether
to identify whole-heartedly with a Kurdish identity or whether to pursue a separate identity as
Yezidi. These debates do not appear to have been anywhere near as prominent as they have
94 Ibid.
95 Chikhladze, G. and I. Chikhladze, Georgia’s Kurdish Community Say They Are in Danger of Losing Their
Culture, Language and Faith, IWPR Caucasus Reporting Service, No.166, 13 February 2003; Szakonyi,
however, maintains that there are no Kurdish-teaching schools in Georgia.
96 Szakonyi
97 Ibid.
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