ASSESSING KURDISH MILITANCY IN ARMENIA

2006-10-24

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 YEREVAN 001484

SUBJECT: ASSESSING KURDISH MILITANCY IN ARMENIA — SO FAR, NOT TOO MUCH

Classified By: CDA A. F. Godfrey for reasons 1.4 (b, d).

SUMMARY

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¶1. (S) PKK activities in Armenia seem thus far to be fairly low-level, though Armenia’s Yezidi community — an ethnic minority related to Kurds by blood and language — may be receptive to PKK outreach.  Among other things, we have heard reports that the PKK sends money to some Armenian Yezidi and that there are links between Yezidi communities in Armenia and Kurdish militant groups in Turkey. We have also heard that the Armenian government has made lukewarm attempts to hush a freelance journalist who reports extensively on the Yezidi and their affiliations with Kurdish militants. We believe many of these reports to be credible.  END SUMMARY.

¶2. (S) We have undertaken to expand our knowledge of the Kurdish-related Yezidi community in Armenia, and the extent of any ties or sympathies to the PKK terrorist group. The Yezidi are closely related to Kurds; the main difference between the two cultures is religious. While most Kurds are Muslim, the Yezidi practice a distinct religion, rooted in Zoroastrianism, which forbids eating lettuce and wearing the color blue. Some Armenian Yezidi refuse to acknowledge that they speak Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish), insisting instead that they speak “Yezidiki,” which they say is a separate language. (NOTE:  The Yezidi clearly speak Kurmanji. Any differences between Kurmanji and the language spoken in Yezidi villages are small, regional variations. END NOTE.)

This cable represents the first installment of what we hope will be a short series over the next year on Yezidi/Kurdish issues and the possible activities of Kurdish militants in Armenia. (NOTE: Though the organization is now called the Kongra-Gel, almost all of the sources for this cable called it the PKK. For that reason, we will refer to it as the PKK throughout this telegram.  END NOTE.)

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YEZIDI EXPERT SAYS PKK SENDS MONEY TO SOME YEZIDIS

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¶3. (S) As reported reftel, Professor Garnik Asatrian, an expert on the Yezidi and Kurds, told us that the PKK and other “Kurdish political organizations” in Sweden and Iran are sending money to about 20 Armenian Yezidi.  Asatrian said that organizations like the Kurdistan Committee NGO and the Kurdish-Yezidi National Cultural Center “Kurdistan” are shells that exist to collect money, and that they pay people to participate in the groups’ sporadic demonstrations. Though Asatrian discounted the possibility that the Yezidi recipients were involved in any nefarious activity, he said he thought the government should ban all Kurdish organizations from Armenia. “I don’t want Armenia to become an arena for Kurdish political developments. I don’t want it to become another Stockholm,” he said. (NOTE: Asatrian, who speaks Kurmanji, is a social scholar who focuses on Kurdish and Iranian issues. He heads Yerevan State University’s Iranian Studies Department. Though not himself a Kurd, he is plugged-in to the Yezidi community in Armenia and visits Kurdish communities in Iran during his frequent travels there.  END NOTE.)

¶4. (S) Asatrian gave us the names of several prominent Yezidi he said had received money from Kurdish political organizations. One of them, writer Karlene Chachani, edited a Kurdish journal published in 1997 with Asatrian. (NOTE: We have seen various spellings of Chachani’s name, including Karmne Chachani and Karlen Chachami.  END NOTE.) Another one, Charkeze Erash, is a professor and the long-term representative of the Kurdish People’s Congress in Armenia. Asatrian said Erash “advocates the formation of great Kurdistan, including Armenia and extending to the Persian Gulf.”

¶5. (S) Asatrian said he did not know the purpose, the means, or the amount of money the PKK sends to Yezidis.  Asatrian told us Yerevan-based organizations like the Kurdistan Committee and the Kurdish Yezidi National Cultural Center are shells whose main purpose is collecting money from the Yezidis for the PKK, though he noted Yezidis, who are mostly nomadic cattle and goat herders, are not quite an ideal fundraising resource. He said the organizations also pay Yezidi villagers the equivalent of several dollars to participate in Kurdish demonstrations in Yerevan.  (NOTE: The demonstrations are becoming less frequent and less significant. Earlier this year, Yezidi protesters announced their intent to march to the Embassy, but they never showed END NOTE.) Asatrian mused that the PKK needed the Soviet-educated Yezidis to boost its own poorly educated ranks.

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PKK RECRUIT YEZIDI FIGHTERS

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¶6. (S) We have heard reports from several different sources that some Yezidi villagers have taken up the Kurdish nationalist banner and gone to fight alongside PKK forces in Turkey. According to Asatrian, about five years ago, the PKK set off an outcry among the Yezidi when it tried to recruit fighters from Armenian villages. The villagers complained to the government, and the PKK, fearing an investigation, discontinued its efforts.

¶7. (S) Asatrian’s story was corroborated by Hasan Tamoyan, the host of Armenia’s daily Yezidi radio show.  Tamoyan said he knew of at least one case in which a Yezidi youth had been lured out of the country to fight with the Kurds. He would not give specifics.

¶8. (SBU) An Internet search turns up dozens of Turkish-language Web pages, and a few in English, that mention Armenian Yezidi Yusuf Avdoyan, a guerrilla of the Kurdish militant People’s Defense Forces (HPG), who was captured by Turkish forces and killed in late August 2005. A Yerevan-based Western freelance journalist, Onnik Krikorian (strictly protect), told us that after Avdoyan’s death, one of his sisters went to Turkey to take up arms with the HPG, the PKK’s militant wing. Avdoyan was from the region of Armavir, which is the hub of the Yezidi community in Armenia.

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JOURNALIST: GOAM IS AWARE OF PKK PRESENCE

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¶9. (S) Krikorian is a UK citizen who has reported on the Yezidi for eight years, and likely is the most knowledgeable Western expert on the Armenian Yezidi community today. During a two-hour conversation with Poloff, Krikorian told stories of PKK uniforms and portraits of Abdullah Ocalan adorning walls in Yezidi homes, and of Yezidi villagers greeting each other with the customary PKK salutation of “heval,” the Kurmanji word for “comrade.” He has published on his blog (http://oneworld.blogsome.com) interviews with prominent Yezidis and unnamed PKK representatives from Turkey and Syria. During recent visits to several Yezidi village, Krikorian said many villagers asked him what he knew about Ocalan’s situation. Krikorian said that, though government officials had denied PKK presence in Armenia and manifested a general lack of interest in the issue (reftel), he believed the terrorist group was on the GOAM’s [Government of Armenia] radar.

¶10. (S) Krikorian told us that a Yerevan State University professor approached him in 2004 and asked him to take a group of students to Georgia on a reporting trip. When Krikorian agreed, he says, he was asked to name his price, which struck him as quite unusual. The professor then took out a sheaf of papers, which Krikorian recognized as his writings on the Yezidi.  “Every reference to the PKK was underlined,” Krikorian said.  He said the official told him that, if he were to accept YSU’s offer of employment, he would have to stop writing those articles, because the topic was a “very sensitive” one for the Armenian government. Krikorian, who is a diasporan Armenian, said the professor tried to appeal to his sense of nation to convince him to stop writing about the PKK. The professor said his friends at the MFA had told him that passportless PKK fighters were slipping through unattended pockets of Armenia’s western border, implying that there was nothing the MFA could do about it, Krikorian said. (NOTE: Professor Asatrian, who is not the professor to whom Krikorian referred, told Poloff during a separate conversation that he had heard reports of PKK militants entering Armenia through gaps in the western border, in order to receive medical treatment. END NOTE.) Unswayed, Krikorian said he declined the job offer — which he considered a bribe — and left the office.

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MANY YEZIDI IDENTIFY WITH PKK CAUSES

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¶11. (S) Many prominent Yezidi, including Yezidi radio personality Tamoyan, publicly and adamantly disassociate themselves from the Kurds. Those who identify with the Kurds accuse Armenian nationalists of using anti-Kurdish propaganda during the late 1980s and early 1990s to turn the Yezidi against their Kurdish brethren.  (NOTE: Armenian attitudes toward Kurds are complicated by the fact that many Eastern Anatolian Kurds cooperated with Turks in the deportations and massacres of Armenians in 1915, though of course more recently the Kurds have often themselves been the victims of Turkey’s less-enlightened minority policies. END NOTE.)

¶12. (S) Though many Yezidi leaders disavow Kurdish roots, Krikorian said most Yezidi he had met identified with Kurdish political causes. Earlier this month, Krikorian blogged about a Yezidi wedding he had attended in Armavir, where guests danced and sang along to PKK songs. Krikorian said that while many Yezidi he had met in villages were very open about their PKK sympathies, some were reluctant to express them to him because of his Armenian heritage.

¶13. (S) Tamoyan told us the GOAM had not taken action to expel the PKK representatives because the government subscribed to the idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Nonetheless, Yezidi may often prefer to hide PKK sympathies from the Armenian government. Tamoyan, who told us he believed the government should expel PKK representatives, characterized his own pro-Armenian position as a question of loyalty to the government that finally recognized the Yezidi as a distinct ethnicity after years of Soviet insistence that the Yezidi were Kurds. He said the Kurds propagandized against the Yezidi, and that they falsely accused the GOAM of anti-Yezidi discrimination. However, Tamoyan’s views do not appear to be broadly representative of his community. Journalist Krikorian has found that only a few Yezidi completely deny ethnic and lingual ties to the Kurds. Many of them say they are both Kurdish and Yezidi. As many Yezidi do not seem to make the same sharp distinction between Yezidi and Kurdish national identity that Tamoyan does, it is possible they do not feel the same degree of warmth toward the GOAM for acknowledging the distinction. Similarly, they also may be more receptive than Tamoyan to PKK overtures.

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COMMENT

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¶14. (S) Though Armenia is hardly a hotbed of terrorist activity, its porous borders, minority with Kurdish sympathies, and governmental lack of interest in the PKK combine to create a non-threatening environment for Kurdish militants. We discount unsubstantiated reports of Kurdish militant training camps around Lake Sevan, but such developments in remote areas are not out of the question. The Yezidi live and work for the most part undisturbed, and by some accounts, forgotten, by the Armenian government, which might not even notice if the PKK were to take a more active role here.

GODFREY