The Human Rights situation of the Yezidi minority - UNHCR

issue is the absence of high-ranking Yezidis who would be able to provide protection to their
ethnic constituency. As FIDH observes, “Yezidi Kurds find that they are an easy target for
acts of violence by the forces of order as there are no Yezidis in the police hierarchy”. 122 The
same study found that while Yezidis were exposed to human rights violations by law
enforcement officials, these were not substantively different to violations endured by
representatives of other ethnic groups, including Georgians. On balance it appears likely that
some isolated incidents of police brutality towards Yezidis have been motivated by perceived
impunity, and lack of levers of redress within the Yezidi community. Yet this does not appear
to have taken the form of a consistent pattern of violations directed towards this specific
minority.
Yezidi community leaders, situated precariously at the interface between community and
state, are generally anxious to emphasize cordial relations between majority and minority.
Rostom Atashov, President of the Union of Yezidis of Georgia, said the following in a 2006
interview:
There is no problem from the State. We are accepted as citizens of the Republic of
Georgia like other national minorities as well as [ethnic] Georgians. We are citizens of
this country and there is no problem in that area. We have the same rights as everyone
else. The main problem is that the younger generation is not very aware of the
traditions of their ancestors and this Union [of Yezidis of Georgia] was established to
inform people of their culture and about their heritage. 123
In public pronouncements at least, community leaders are likely to express sympathy with the
state’s claims that it lacks resources to support minority cultures. In other domains
community leaders have stressed commonality of interests between the majority and the
Yezidi minority: a Yezidi Sheikh in a 2003 interview suggested that “we also suffer from the
onslaught of [religious] sects”. 124
In 2002 participants in a conference on issues concerning the Yezidi minority in Georgia
attracted a storm of media attention by suggesting the possibility of violence in order to
“save” Yezidi culture in Georgia. 125 Given the demographic context and the views of the vast
majority of Yezidis in Georgia, however, this suggestion appears more rhetorical than
anything else.
6 Current Migration Trends
All three states of the South Caucasus have been subject to significant depopulation processes
since independence. The statistics are highly politicized and contested, but there is no doubt
that Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have all lost substantial numbers of people to
emigration. Although the official Armenian census results in 2002 indicated that
approximately one million people had emigrated from Armenia since 1991, many observers
122 Ibid.
123 Krikorian, An Interview with Rostom Atashov
124 Chikhladze and Chikhladze
125 Ibid.
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