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FOREWORD
The Kurds of the former Soviet Union probably number in the region of 500,000, of whom rather more than half live in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Although scattered in nature, relatively few in number and isolated from the wider Kurdish world for much of the century, Soviet Kurds succeeded in maintaining a degree of identity and cohesion despite the depredations and difficulties of life during Soviet times.
Today, however, the Kurds of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two biggest communities in the former Soviet Union, see their separate identity endangered by a combination of circumstance, post-Soviet nationalism and wilful neglect:
- In Azerbaijan, Kurds enjoy limited cultural freedom. But the massive displacement caused by the Ngorno Karabakh conflict and the nervousness many Kurds feel as a result of Azerbaijan's tough Soviet past and its present close friendship with Turkey mean that only a minority of Kurds can benefit.
- In Armenia, which served as a showcase for the Soviet Union's "nationalities" policy and where Kurdish culture flourished (especially in the upper echelons of Kurdish society), Kurds are today threatened by the state's near total disregard for minority rights.
Without far greater attention to minority rights, within the framework of what is possible given the many problems caused by the Ngorno Karabakh war, Armenia and Azerbaijan will not only find themselves in breach of international conventions but will see the Kurdish leadership pass to a younger and more radical generation set on resisting assimilation.
In 1996, in a preliminary report on the situation of the Kurds of the former Soviet Union, the Kurdish Human Rights Project recommended that there be "a substantially more systematic exercise in assembling information" about the least-known comers of the Kurdish map. This report, made possible by the generous support of NOVIB (the Netherlands Organisation for International Development) and based on two fact-finding trips to Azerbaijan and Armenia in the summer of 1998, begins to address that need and will stand as a platform for further research.
Much remains to be done. There has been no investigation of the present circumstances of the Kurds deported in Stalin's Great Terror; no examination of the large Kurdish community that has grown up, in the most difficult conditions, in the Krasnodar region; no analysis of the smaller Kurdish communities of the former Soviet Union. All this is fertile ground for research.
Kerim Yildiz
Executive Director
Kurdish Human Rights Project
Author’s Acknowledgements
The Kurds of the former Soviet Union are the least known of all Kurds. With little on record and everything to learn, I am grateful to the Kurdish scholar Shamil Askerov for gathering together as wide a range as possible of Kurds for me to meet during my all-too-brief visit to Azerbaijan and for sharing with me some of the information he has amassed for publication when funding becomes available. But this report would not have been possible without the warm welcome given me in the displaced camps where ordinary men and women soon put aside their initial misgivings at the intrusion of a foreigner tackling the delicate question of ethnicity. I am also grateful to Oxfam and Children’s Aid Direct for their hospitality in Azerbaijan and for helping me with transport, thereby enabling me to cover as much ground as possible in limited time.
Onnik Krikorian conducted a number of interviews in Armenia but left the project at an early stage. With little information available in the public domain, I owe a great debt of thanks to a number of people who were unstintingly generous with their libraries, contact books and time - prime among them Jonathan Cohen of Conciliation Resources in London; Marina Kurkchian; Jalil Jalile, a Kurdologist of some 40 years’ standing; and a number of expatriate Armenians who prefer to remain anonymous.
The conclusions, of course, are all my own.
Finally, I should like to express my thanks to NOVIB, which funded KHRP for this report, and everyone at the Kurdish Human Rights Project, especially its executive director Kerim Yildiz and its deputy director Alice Faure Walker, for their comment and advice.
Introduction
Kurds are seldom associated with the former Soviet Union. Yet there have been Kurds in what became the Soviet Union for at least a thousand years, as little known as the Kurds of the region often referred to as Kurdistan - Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria - are well known. In the 20th century, two great waves of deportation and displacement have brought tragedy to the Kurds of the southern Caucasus, home to more than half of Soviet Kurds. But their predicament has had little resonance outside their own borders - even when the most compact settlement of Kurds in the former USSR, the Lachin and Kelbajar region of Azerbaijan, was occupied and its entire population dislodged in the course of the conflict over Ngorno Karabakh.
Despite the lifting of the Iron Curtain. Kurds in the former Soviet Union still do not enjoy the attention that has served to highlight - if not always to alleviate - the plight of many of those outside it.
Soviet Kurds are for the most part descendants of the most persecuted groups of Kurdish society who sought refuge in Czarist Russia throughout the 19th century, settling primarily in the southern Caucasus - Azerbaijan, Armenia and, in smaller numbers, in Georgia.
Communities in Siberia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan grew out of the Stalinist deportations that began in 1937 as Kurds in the Caucasus were accused of provoking border incidents and displays of local nationalism were ruthlessly suppressed. In more recent years, a substantial Kurdish community has grown up in the Krasnodar region east of Crimea to where tens of thousands of Kurds displaced by the conflict over Ngorno Karabakh fled from Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The number of Kurds in the former Soviet Union today is a matter of much dispute. In the absence of reliable …
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