Yezidis, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1998
UNICEF in Armenia have an interesting press release on their web page highlighting new moves to tackle the problem of minority education in the Republic. For sure, school drop out rates are higher among rural minority communities than for Armenian ones with […]
Don’t you just love the local Armenian media? No sense of how to work properly at all, and once again my images have been taken off the Internet and used without permission or even a credit. Worse than that, the news item by ArmenPress is something that doesn’t reflect the reality behind the story.
YEZIDI […]
Sister of Yezidi (pictured in poster) killed fighting for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in South East Turkey, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 1998
The vodka flowed freely on Thursday evening in Alagyaz, one of several urban settlements inhabited by the Yezidi in Armenia. Perhaps that’s why I had to toast our Yezidi hosts after one asked why I moved to Armenia seven years ago. Yes, I am half-Armenian on my father’s side, but it was work undertaken for the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project (KHRP) that brought me to Armenia in June 1998 to examine the situation of the Republic’s largest minority.
During that visit I attended a conference organized by UNDP and the Armenian Foreign Ministry on national minorities and was offered a job by the former.
As a result, I moved to Armenia in October 1998, and while some Armenians warned me not to touch Yezidi or Kurdish issues in the country, I couldn’t resist the temptation. I even wrote an analysis for Radio Free Europe on Armenia’s Kurdish-speaking Yezidi minority in December 1999, and not least because Abdullah Ocalan, President of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighting for autonomy in south-east Turkey, was arrested in Italy.
The arrest last month in Rome of Abdullah Ocalan, president of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has led to a dramatic increase in support for the Kurdish national liberation movement, even among those Kurds living in countries where repression has not been particularly evident in recent years. In Armenia, Ocalan’s arrest has served to accelerate the trend among the country’s 50,000–60,000 strong Yezidi community to identify themselves not only as Yezidi but also as Kurds.
The Yezidi are indeed Kurdish, speaking the same language as the majority of the Kurds (Kurmanji), and all Kurds were originally Zoroastrian before the majority converted to Islam. The Yezidi religion–even with elements of the Zoroastrian, Islamic, and Christian faiths–closely resembles that of the Armenians before the adoption of Christianity, and the PKK has recently acknowledged that fact in an attempt to clarify the origins of the Kurdish nation.
Visiting Armenia in June 1998 in what was most likely a recruiting drive, Mahir Welat, the PKK representative to Moscow and the CIS, affirmed, “I am a Muslim Kurd but I also honor all religions. All Kurds used to be Yezidi [Zoroastrian] in the past. Some of us were forced into becoming Muslim, but now it is our intention to return and to educate ourselves again.”
However, after being shuttled from country to country, Ocalan was finally kidnapped by Turkish agents in Kenya. Those Armenian Yezidi that were beginning to identify with the Kurdish National Liberation Movement led by the imprisoned Kurd were furious and protested outside the United Nations building. They even stormed the building at one point and took the head of UNHCR hostage, threatening to douse him petrol before setting him alight.
Of course, I photographed the demonstrations outside the UN and it was then that the prejudiced displayed by many Armenians towards Kurds and Yezidis became most evident and affected me.
Things were not so clear for the United Nations, however, and after being denied access to the UN building for security reasons — all the staff had been evacuated–I went to sit with the Kurds, and to photograph and talk to them. One member of the UN made an official complaint to the UN resident coordinator, and I decided to resign.
Actually, I was pleased to get out of the United Nations who could have been prepared for such an incident had they actually read the endnote I wrote for RFE/RL a few months earlier and which they had to okay before it could be published. Since independence, the fact that some Yezidi are looking towards the PKK has been overlooked by journalists and analysts in Armenia, but thanks to my work conducted for KHRP during the summer of the previous year, I had what was perhaps a unique insight into what was happening in the Yezidi community here.
Previously, only one Diasporan Armenian, Jackline Abramian, had written something on their Kurdish roots and the emergance of both Kurdish nationalism as well as attempts to redefine their identity in Armenia, and it was this article that served as the basis for my own work.
Since the start of the 1988 uprisings in Armenia, the decades old harmonious relations betwen the Kurds and Armenians have been severed. More than 15,000 Moslem Kurds, some intermarried with Azeris living in Armenia, fled Armenia as Armeno-Azeri relations intensified over the disputed are of Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan.
[…]
Simultaneously with the 1988 Armenian uprisings, a strong Yezidi movement began in Armenia, lead by four Yezidi religious and lay leaders: Azize’ Amar, Karame’ Salon, and Sheikhs Hasane Mahmood Tamoian, and Hasane Hasanian. The goal of the Yezidi movement is to separate the Yezidis from the rest of the Moslem Kurdish population, establishing Yezidis as a separate nation.
In 1991, however, the Kurdish academic Mehrdad Izady wrote even harsher words in an article commissioned by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR). However, an Armenian writer convinced the London-based publication not to publish the article that dealt with the cleansing of Moslem Kurds from Lachin and Kelbajar, an area briefly known as Red Kurdistan in the 1920s, during the height of the Karabakh conflict.
The area between Nagorno-Karabakh and Zangezur became inhabited by nomadic Kurdish tribes in 18th century. Eventually, this population became the majority in most parts of the region, particularly around Lachin, Kalbajar (Kelbajar in Kurdish), and Qubadli (Qûbadlî in Kurdish). The region became a part of Azerbaijan SSR in 1920. In 1923, the region was given the status of oblast and autonomy. Although Kurds constituted the majority of population in some other parts of Azerbaijan, such as Zardaba, Sadarak, and Teyvaz, these territories were not given autonomy or incorporated with “Kurdistan”. The autonomous oblast was named Kurdistan AO, not Kurdish AO, most possibly in an effort to exploit the Kurdish aspirations for independence that fell following the Treaty of Lausanne. Official language was Kurmanji and Kurdish cultural life flourished during the era of autonomy.
Kurdistan AO drew criticism from both Armenia and Azerbaijan, former blaming the Soviet authorities for creating a buffer zone in Lachin corridor, the latter for “stealing” land from Azerbaijani territory. In 1929, the autonomous oblast was dissolved. Following this incident, an ambitious campaign for turkification of Azerbaijani Kurds was started. During the Great Purge, most of its leaders were exiled to Central Asia and Siberia and during the deportation period in 1940 - 1944, the majority of Kurdish population were settled in Kazakh SSR and other republics.
In 1992, Lachin Kurdish Republic was declared by a group led by Waqil Mustafayev. However, during the Nagorno-Karabakh war, all efforts of establishment were hampered. Mustafayev took refuge in Italy.
Indeed, many believe that the war with Azerbaijan led to the continued growth of a Yezidi movement that sought to separate the Yezidi from the Kurds, as I recently wrote for Transitions Online.
Soviet-style demography, which determined communal identity based on language and largely ignored religion, identified the Yezidis and Muslim Kurds living in Armenia together as members of the same ethnic group. But by 1988, during the period of glasnost, some of Armenia’s Yezidi religious and political leaders began to challenge this notion and the “Yezidi Movement” was formed.
The following year an appeal was made to the Soviet authorities requesting that the Yezidis be considered a separate ethnic group. The request was granted, and in the last Soviet census conducted in 1989, out of approximately 60,000 Kurds who had been formerly identified as living in the Soviet Republic of Armenia, 52,700 were for the first time given a new official identity as Yezidis.
During this time of “openness” that defined the last years of the Soviet Union, the Yezidis were not the only people striving to form new national movements. In February 1988, Armenians took to the streets to demand that Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian-inhabited territory within Azerbaijan, be united with Armenia. Azeris responded with attacks on Armenians.
In the tit-for-tat expulsions that followed–marking the beginning of an ethnic conflict that remains unresolved–350,000 Armenians fled Azerbaijan and 200,000 Azeris and Muslim Kurds left Armenia. The Yezidi, along with smaller groups of other non-Moslem minorities, remained. By 1991, when the tension over Karabakh broke out in armed conflict, nearly all of the Muslims living in Armenia had already fled the country.
It’s also worth noting that Thomas Goltz says that after Lachin was taken during the Karabakh conflict, Yezidi were sent to the town to fool visiting international reporters into thinking they were local Kurds thankful to Armenians for liberating them from Azerbaijani oppression. The claim is made in Goltz’s excellent Azerbaijan Diary which is recommended for anyone interested in an account of the war from the “other side.”
Next there was Lachin [a small Azerbaijani town between Karabakh and Armenia], attacked under the guise of assisting local Kurds in “revolt”. Strange that the Kurds in question ended up fleeing to Baku, while the “local Kurds” encountered and interviewed by international observers were sent to the region from Yerevan and all seemed to be Yezidi Kurds, meaning that they had come from Armenia itself.
Using the Kurdish issue to confuse the international community was an excellent stratagem and the brainchild of a senior member of Levon Ter-Petrossian’s inner circle, who detailed it for me after we had learned to trust each other for the sake of piecing together a complete history. It was clever because it was built upon the familiar cliché that Azerbaijanis are “Turks” and thus hate “Kurds” and vice versa, as is believed to be the case in Turkey by many in the West.
When I interviewed many significant Yezidi figures in 1998 they confirmed that they had gone to Lachin when it was captured by Armenian forces although did not explain why. Anyway, an excellent chapter on the capture of another Kurdish town, Kelbajar, from Goltz’s book is also available online in full.
Once more, this was news that no one wanted. Armenia was still not officially involved in the conflict–and allowing their territory to be used even by a purely “Karabakh” force could only be regarded as involvement. But the Armenians got away with it again because no one wanted to know–not Washington, the UN or even Ankara. The weirdest and most shameless indifference to the plight of the victims, who were primarily Azeri Kurds, was displayed by international Kurdish organizations. Despite an appeal by Kurdish societies in Azerbaijan to “The Kurds of the World” for aid and assistance or at least condemnation of the Armenian assault, the ethnic cleansing of Kelbajar, like Lachin before it, remained a taboo subject.
Anyway, regardless of the reasons for what many consider to be an artificial division of the minority in Armenia, Kurdish nationalism remains strong, although I personally doubt that it extends to the majority of Yezidi. In the summer of 1998, however, the then representative of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) to Russia and the CIS happened to visit the Yezidi village of Alagyaz on the same day as I did. The local Kurdish cultural center even had a large portrait of a local Yezidi killed fighting for the PKK in Turkey.
However, Welat denied that the Armenian government was involved in supporting those Kurds who had taken up arms against Armenia’s traditional enemy.
We can say it is as if we have a common enemy. It is this situation with the Armenian people historically. We have one enemy - Turkey and Turkish policy. Whatever the propoganda from Turkey about weapons from Armenia it is propaganda against the Armenian Government. That is the policy.
We have many problems in Kurdistan and Turkey is trying to make it more complicated, with more problems, and also bigger. That is why they have such a policy. They say such things to make enemies of friends.
The Armenian Government is a democratic government and is going further in terms of that democracy, and the Kurds are people living in Armenia. The people living here are citizens of Armenia, but they support the national liberation movement in Kurdistan. They support it, and they are never afraid that anyone will blame them. The Armenian Government up to now did not help us because the Armenian Government is in a difficult situation itself.
Everyone knows that Turkey supports Azerbaijan with weapons, economically, and with its policy, but no-one has problems with that. We hope that one day Armenia will be prosperous and at that time Armenians and Kurds may be able to support each other against Turkey.
Last week’s visit to Alagyaz reinforced the feeling I had in 1998 that Alagyaz and the surrounding villages were a hotbed for pro-PKK Kurdish nationalism. Not one Yezidi home I entered watched Armenian TV, for example. Those families that had TV sets were instead glued to half a dozen Kurdish TV stations broadcast by satellite. Every single home also had portraits of Abdullah Ocalan and photographs of Kurdish guerillas fighting in the mountains of Turkey or Northern Iraq hung on their walls.
Even the local school displayed a portrait of Ocalan while every child playing outside their homes greeted visitors with the traditional PKK term of “heval” — comrade.
Indeed, it reminded me of a visit with the head of UNICEF, Sheldon Yett, to another Yezidi village last year. In Barozh, not only did teachers openly say that the language their pupils were learning was [Kurmanji] Kurdish, but they also knew other traditional PKK-linked greetings such as “Rojbash.” Ironically, however, when Yett entered one family home, the head of the household was most adament that the Yezidi were not Kurds to the astonishment of his wife and eldest daughter. It was then that I noticed the large portrait of Ocalan on the wall behind him.
“Oh,” he said, somewhat embarrased. “We didn’t know who it was. We just liked the colors.”
Yeah, right. I couldn’t be bothered to ask him about the photographs of PKK guerillas that were hung below the portrait.
Yezidi Cultural Center, Alagyaz, Aragatsotn Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2006
However, regardless of the situation in Alagyaz and Barozh, this problem with identity and the division within the Yezidi community has now become serious and exaserbated by the 2001`census in Armenia as another PKK representative, Heydar Ali, explained to me in 2004.
They artificially created this division and came up with the figure of 41,000 Yezidi and 1,519 Kurds, stating that these two groups spoke different languages. This was such a shameful event that has never happened anywhere else in the world. Religion is not mentioned — only that there are this many Yezidi and that many Kurds in Armenia.
If they are giving this figure of 1,519 Kurds then it should be pointed out that there are definitely not this many Moslem Kurds in Armenia. At most, there are 500-600 so this means that the remainder must be Yezidi-Kurds. The Kurdish community did not know that the officials that came around asking questions were conducting a census and that the results would be used to officially divide the community. They didn’t understand what objective this process had.
Unfortunately, with education in a pitful state in Armenia, and especially the regions of the country, this division has not helped Yezidi schools. A still unpublished report by UNICEF and the Armenian Government which I have a first draft of explains the problem.
In the approximately 20 locations included in this study, the ethnicities of “Kurd” and “Kurd Yezidis” were chosen by respectively 13 and 5 school students. Out of the planned number of 336 school students from Yezidi and Kurd communities, were interviewed 332 students (313 called themselves “Yezidis”, 13 - “Kurds” and 5 “Kurd-Yezidis”).
As a result, because most respondents identified themselves as Yezidi and only a minority acknowledged their Kurdish roots, the Armenian Government and the Ministry of Education treats the two groups as separate ethnicities even though outside of the country they are considered the same. And while it is the right of every community to define their own identity, it gets a bit ridiculous when the Armenian Government ratifies both “Ezidiki” and “Kurdish” as two separate languages under the European Charter.
And it is language that might prove to be the most vexing problem facing the community in Armenia. According to Hranush Kharatyan, head of the government’s department for national minorities and religious affairs, so significant is the issue that it is now “the most actual problem existing among national minorities in Armenia.”
When the Armenian government considered ratifying Kurmanji as the name for the language spoken by the Yezidis and Kurds, for example, emotions ran high and Kharatyan says she was accused and threatened by both sides. In particular, she says, Yezidi spiritual leaders demanded that their language instead be classified as “Yezidi” even if in private they acknowledge that it is Kurmanji.
Unable to satisfy both sides of the community, the government ratified both Yezidi and Kurdish under the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. Although there is a sizeable but still-unknown number of Yezidis who consider themselves Kurds, there are just as many who do not. As a result, says Kharatyan, the government was right not to come down on one side or the other.
True, nobody knows how many Yezidi really acknowledge their Kurdish roots, but it does mean that Armenia’s largest minority risks isolating itself from Yezidi living outside of the Republic if this alledgedly artificial division as to identity continues. It is only in Armenia that academics such as Garnik Asatrian continue to push forward the idea that the Yezidi are not Kurds.
In Europe, academics such as Philip Kreyenbroek, head of Iranian studies at the University of Goettingen in Germany, is quite clear on the matter.
“The Yezidi religious and cultural tradition is deeply rooted in Kurdish culture and almost all Yezidi sacred texts are in Kurdish,” he says. “The language all Yezidi communities have in common is Kurdish and most consider themselves to be Kurds, although often with some reservations.”
[…]
“Another complicating factor seems to have been the lure of PKK ideology, which attracts some Armenian Yezidis as it does many others,” Kreyenbroek explains.
“As the PKK stresses that Kurdish identity takes precedence over religious affiliations, those who are influenced by it naturally go back to calling themselves Kurds. On the other hand, more traditional [Yezidis] feel threatened and deny the connection between the Kurds and Yezidis all the more strongly. To a lesser extent the same developments can be seen in Germany, where dislike of the PKK causes some Yezidis to play down their Kurdish identity, stressing the Yezidi aspect.”
Indeed, the always excellent Wikipedia also describes the Yezidi as such.
The Yazidi or Yezidi (Kurdish: Êzidîtî or Êzidî) are adherents of a small Middle Eastern religious sect with ancient origins. Yazidi belong to the minor of the three branches of Yazdanism. Due to the traditions of secretiveness when stating their true confession, estimates vary, but a rough figure says that today in Kurdistan still close to one third of the population are yazdanism followers. The other two more populous branches are Alevism and Yarsanism, which differ from Yazidism by recognizing islamic taqiyya (dissimulation). The three branches are geographically split and mutual contacts are rare. They are primarily ethnic Kurds, and most Yazidis live near Mosul, Iraq with smaller communities in Syria, Turkey, Iran, Georgia and Armenia, and are estimated to number ca. 500,000 individuals in total. There are also Yazidi refugees in Europe.
Regardless, it’s been good to get back to this topic again, and not least since Alagyaz was delightful. The surrounding landscape was gorgeous and the kids even more so. Certainly I hope to do more on the Yezidi as well as other minorities in Armenia over the coming months, although Hasmik Hovhannisyan from Hetq Online will also be writing some articles based on our visit. In the meantime all my interviews on the Yezidi in Armenia since 1998 can be found here.
Specialized Boarding School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimeda 2002
Since 2002, one of my main projects has been the issue of children enrolled into state-run residential institutions. Despite its smaller size, somewhere between 11-12,000 children attend or reside in over 50 boarding schools and children’s homes in Armenia. In neighboring Georgia, where initiatives to de-institutionalize children are years ahead of Armenia, there are only 5,000. It’s therefore with great interest that I read ArmeniaNow.com’s article on plans to close 12 specialized boarding schools.
Angry teachers have condemned a government decision to close secondary schools for nearly 1,000 orphaned and socially vulnerable children.
Officials in the Ministry of Education and Science want to integrate children in the 12 special secondary institutions into mainstream schools. They argue that separate schools for orphans and other children who lack proper parental care simply isolates them from the rest of society.
But staff in the schools insist that their children face special problems and that closure will damage their emotional and educational welfare.
According to the government’s decision, the special schools should be converted into regular secondary schools by the end of 2007. Special boarding centers would be created to meet the needs of children who were unable to go home.
“These children are by no means deficient compared to their peers, they don’t need special education; so why separate them from the society?! Implementation of this decision will integrate them into society,†says Louiza Gharibyan, representative of the Agency for Family Issues at the Ministry of Labor and Social Issues.
However, I don’t like the use of the word “orphans” in this article because the vast majority of children attending specialized boarding schools have parents and families. Instead, these kids attend boarding schools generally intended for children with disabilities because they can receive food, and even though these schools have facilities for children to stay overnight, most attend on a daily basis or at the very least return to their families at weekends. Nevertheless, the Directors of such schools are not happy with plans to close or convert them.
“It will be the same with these schools as it was with the vocational colleges when they closed them and now spend huge sums to restore them,†says Simon Simonyan, Principal of the Yerevan Special School for Orphans and Children Deprived of Parental Care # 3.
Simonyan believes there is still a need in this type of school and it will be possible to close them only in 10 to 15 years, when social conditions in Armenia have improved.
“You will simply kick 1,000 children into the street by eliminating this type of school, for many here are on the edge of delinquency and need special attention and pedagogical work, something an ordinary school cannot provide,†he says.
Samvel Mktrchyan, Principal at the Special School #7, thinks that the problems faced by these children will not disappear because of the entrance into force of this new law. They exist and need special attention, he says.
“There is no need to develop theories, just look at the reality with an open mind. Children of this category cannot integrate into a group of well-off and indulged children; they will not go to ordinary school,†says Mkrtchyan.
According to Mktrchyan the main reasons for not going to a mainstream school are social and psychological.
“Take the simplest situation: the pupil will not able to pay for textbooks, will not be able to pay for a party with the class, and will not be able to take part in buying a present for a teacher. This will isolate him from school and society even more, a bigger psychological complex will develop in him, more than it would if he had stayed in this kind of school,†Mktrchyan explains.
Specialized Boarding School, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimeda 2002
Sorry to sound cynical, but they would say that as these children represent their livelihood. Indeed, there is no question that most of these schools should be closed down. After all, such establishments don’t exist in the West where alternative models of care exist for children that are really deprived of parental care. For example, there is fostering and kinship care or integration into and normal schools, and it is these models that the Armenian government, international organizations and the World Bank are now looking at. I touched upon this in a recent article for UNICEF.
“There are many reasons why children with parents are deprived of parental care in Armenia,” explains Avetisyan. “First of all there is poverty, then centralization of special education within the boarding school system and finally, the absence of alternatives and community-based support services for vulnerable families at risk.”
In 2000, UNICEF invited an international consultant to conduct a study on residential care institutions in Armenia.
Based on the recommendations of the resulting report, alternatives to institutionalization were discussed in round table discussions with the Ministries of Health, Education, Social Welfare, Justice and Police. A three year plan of action was developed and UNICEF, the Armenian Government and NGOs collaborated together on the implementation of a work plan.
[…]
Now, the Armenian Government is interested in de-institutionalization through family reintegration, foster care and the prevention of institutionalization through community-based support centers. It has also developed a law that obliges the state to provide support to “graduates” from Children’s Homes once they reach the age of 18.
“Even if you create excellent conditions in the institution, when the children leave this artificial environment they have no life skills or the capacity to deal with daily problems,” Avetisyan says. “For example, studies show that as a result, many of these children end up in conflict with the law and some girls become prostitutes and are more prone to trafficking.”
Specialized Boarding School, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimeda 2002
Perhaps the main issue that many overlook is that the majority of children enrolled into specialized boarding schools intended for kids with disabilities are actually not disabled at all. At the same time, those children with disabilities are often prevented from attending schools set up for them because it is easier for teachers to deal with “normal” children instead even if it means that they will not develop their full potential. Again, I touched upon this in an article written in 2002.
A mother waits patiently to enroll her son at an Auxiliary Boarding School for children with learning disabilities somewhere in the heart of the Armenian capital. It doesn’t seem to matter to the staff that the twelve-year old isn’t disabled, all the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate.
But, with salaries low in the medical sector, many doctors are all too willing to provide fake diagnosis to parents wishing to enroll their children into residential institutions. In fact, Dennis Loze, Project Coordinator for Mission East’s Mosaic Program in Armenia says that 85% of children already residing in Auxiliary Boarding Schools are falsely diagnosed.
“They are accepting children with no problem whatsoever because parents cannot afford to clothe and feed them,” he says, adding that Mission East had to literally fight to have three children with Down’s syndrome admitted into one boarding school after being told by the Director that she now only accommodated ‘normal’ children.
Suspicions that this was not the case were later confirmed by the Ministry of Education and Science. However, so serious is the problem that the Armenian Government has decided to address the issue in a national program of actions targeted towards the protection of children’s rights, including reform of the admission system.
“With the declining level of services in residential institutions, the current trend is creating an underclass of children marked by poverty, stigmatization and a lack of proper care and education who are likely to lack opportunity as adults,” writes Aleksandra Posarac and Jjalte Sederlof in the World Bank’s Armenian Child Welfare Note for June 2002.
“To the extent that such children end up in institutions for the mentally disabled, which offer only a special education syllabus for children with mental disability,” they continue, “their development will be seriously hampered by lack of educational opportunities.”
Boarding Schools were established during the soviet era for children with developmental, physical and emotional disabilities and while a 1985 Soviet Decree permitted the admission of children from vulnerable families into Secondary Boarding Schools, Auxiliary Boarding Schools were only meant to cater for children with specific medical or psychological needs.
But, with a sizeable proportion of the population living below the poverty line, many families are increasingly looking to residential institutions to provide what the First Deputy Minister of Social Security, Ashot Yesayan, calls in a report to be published by Family Support America next year, “the primary ‘social safety-net’ for their children.”
[…]
“Children are removed from their families as the only alternative to remaining hungry,” says Nicholas McCoy, the author of the report. “Even if that means committing them to a residential institution or sending them out onto the streets to work, research shows that vulnerable children are not necessarily the victims of earthquake and war but come primarily from economically deprived families.”
Specialized Boarding School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimeda 2002
At the Boarding School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Yerevan, for example, only 40 percent of the kids can’t see. The rest are from socially vulnerable families. In other cases, international organizations have had to fight to get children with disabilities enrolled into the very institutions they’re meant to be, although that’s not to say that many couldn’t be integrated into mainstream education.
I also have good reason to suspect that the best interests of the children are furthest from the mind of staff at some boarding schools. One international aid worker gave me an example of this four years ago, although one hopes this the exception rather than the rule.
[…] while Children’s Homes in Armenia have received substantial support from the large Armenian Diaspora, conditions in over fifty Boarding Schools have deteriorated considerably since independence. One Director, for example, is believed to keep conditions as bad as possible in order to attract extra finance from international organizations working in the republic — money that the children will never see.
“Mission East has stopped dealing with this Director completely because we understand that there is a greater incentive for him to keep conditions as they are,” says Loze. “Whatever resources directed to him will simply disappear.”
But Naira Avetisyan, UNICEF’s Child Protection Officer, is quick to point out that the staff at most boarding schools and children’s homes in Armenia are genuinely concerned with the well-being of those entrusted into their care. “However,” she adds, “the importance of strengthening vulnerable families by providing them with job opportunities has to be emphasized rather than supporting the institutions.”
But, with few exceptions, conditions in Armenia’s Boarding Schools are poor, with international organizations having to operate feeding programs in some schools so that the children can at least receive their basic nutrition. The Armenian Relief Society (ARS), for example, operates three such feeding programs in Yerevan alone, but for the most part, children are undernourished.
“This can easily be observed in the faces and stature of most of these children,” says McCoy. “They are noticeably thin, have drawn faces and many are stunted in growth and small for their age. At the majority of boarding schools, the diet consists mainly of carbohydrates such as pasta, potatoes and bread while few can afford to serve fruit, vegetables or meat.”
Specialized Boarding School, Kapan, Siunik Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimeda 2002
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that most of Armenia’s specialized boarding schools should be closed and, as the Georgian and Armenian government consider is best, with those children really deprived of parental care placed in foster or kinship care less, and those with less than severe disabilities being integrated into mainstream education as NGOs such as Bridge of Hope and World Vision are doing in the Tavoush, Shirak and Siunik regions. Attitudes also need to change.
“My daughter was born with Cerebral Palsy,” says one mother whose child has benefited from the work of the NGO. “Relatives tried to convince me that my daughter, Ashkhen, wasn’t normal and would destroy my life and that of my family. My husband abandoned me and I was left alone with my child.”
Ashkhen grew up in isolation and was deprived of the opportunity to interact with other children until she was later enrolled into a specialized boarding school that offered only a watered-down curriculum for children with learning disabilities. Separated from her mother for most of the week, Ashkhen returned home on weekends. In 1996, however, when her mother heard about the Bridge of Hope NGO, Tatevik was eager to find out more.
“When I entered the center the first thing I noticed was that there were non-disabled children there,” she says. “I never thought that disabled and non-disabled children could relate to each other.” Sixty percent of the children that attend are not disabled and of those that are, nearly half are diagnosed with cerebral palsy and a third with Down’s Syndrome.
Over the years, while still attending the specialized school, Tatevik says that Ashkhen developed quickly, becoming more communicable and confident. In 1999, at the age of 15, Bridge of Hope helped Ashkhen make the move to a regular school close to where she lives. She is now one of the most active and high-achieving children in her class and thanks to including both disabled and non-disabled children in the centers, stereotypes are being broken down.
Of course, there will be problems if alternative models of care, including community care centers, are not established first.
“There are many reasons why children with parents are deprived of parental care in Armenia,” explains Avetisyan. “First of all there is poverty, then centralization of special education within the boarding school system and finally, the absence of alternatives and community-based support services for vulnerable families at risk.”
“The majority of children in children’s homes and boarding schools are not orphans,” she continues. “They have parents and the right to live with their families.”
But, while some organizations conclude that Armenia’s Boarding Schools should be closed, such plans could create additional problems unless the root cause of the problem is addressed. UNICEF and the Armenian Ministry of the Interior estimate that there are as many as 400 children street children in Yerevan and numbers could increase if others are removed from care and effectively thrown out onto the streets.
Susanna Hayrapetyan, Social Sector Operations Offer for the World Bank’s Office in Yerevan, says that the international financial organization favors a phased approach as part of the Armenian Government’s overall Poverty Reduction Strategy. “It can’t happen overnight,” she explains. “It needs special consideration and a transition phase of at least a year and a half.”
As a result, in a wide-ranging ten-year National Program for the Protection of Children’s Rights in Armenia, the Armenian Government and NGOs working in this area propose introducing measures that will include steps taken to prevent the enrolment of children into boarding schools and the return of those already in residential institutions to their families.
“It is extremely difficult to measure the impact that removing a child from their home environment has,” says McCoy. “And, although it is too early to substantiate claims that the well-being of children placed in residential care will be affected, it may very well take an entire generation before we fully understand the social and psychological ramifications of this phenomenon.”
“However,” he concludes, “institutionalizing children only perpetuates the problem of social vulnerability in Armenia by seriously undermining the development of programs that could support the family and keep children out of institutions.”
Specialized Boarding School, Sisian, Siunik Region, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimeda 2002
The one exception, perhaps, would be the Specialized Boarding School for the Deaf in Nor Nork where all the children can’t hear. Moreover, the staff and parents are all very active in creating the best school for the children that they can given modest expenditure from the State Budget. Apparently, the deaf community in every country is always well organized and active, and it’s nice to see that Armenia is no exception. If any institution deserved support it’s this one.
Specialized Boarding School for the Deaf, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimeda 2002
