Who were these people?
They were the Yezidis. They spoke a language
called Kurmanji. They had been consistently termed as devil worshippers by the
dominant Abrahamic religionists. They worship no devil but a divinity on a
peacock. They have no concept of evil. Their worldview is monist. And they
consider themselves as the original Kurds. For centuries this colourful sect of
people had lived in freedom and had syncretistic assimilation of many streams
of local as well as alien spiritual traditions. But with the advent of
Abrahamic monocultures of belief a new saga of organized persecution started
taking shape. Islamic regimes raided them, displaced them and exploited them.
With the advent of European Christianity the missionary sketches of these
people started fanning a picture of devil worshipping exotic cult. Soon they
entered the popular psyche of modern world through fictionalized accounts. From
pulp fiction writer Robert Howard to philosophical writer George Gurdjieff they
were devil worshippers.
They were the last pagan people of the
Arabian Peninsula. Today after the Turkish caliphs, Iraqi dictators, the
warlords of the colonial period, they are being mercilessly and humiliatingly
being driven to extinction by the dreaded ISIS. Only today the conscience of
the world has woken to the human tragedy of Yezidi extinction. It may be mainly
because of the social media which is more decentralized and hence does not
suffer from the Abrahamic bias of the mainstream corporate media. Throughout
history the massacre, genocide, persecution and extinction of non-Abrahamic
pagan societies have never got the same attention as the persecution of their
Abrahamic counterparts – real or perceived.
For example the world very rightly is
agitated over the holocaust of Jews in the Second World War. But the attitude
of Winston Churchill towards Hindus was as hate-filled as the attitude of
Hitler towards the Jews. And his attitude translated into action in the form of
engineering the great Bengal famine. The holocaust of Gypsies-Roma do not yet
have a memorial though the Gypsies went to the Nazi gas chambers along with
Jews. Even to this day Roma get
persecuted throughout the West. While the anti-Semitism of Idi Amin had been
well documented and criticized, his ethnic cleansing of Indian people from
Uganda had never been criticized or even documented enough to enter the mind of
the world conscience. In 1972 Idi Amin claimed that Allah told him to expel the
Indians from Uganda. Even today 20,000 Indians are unaccounted for. The loss of
20,000 Indian lives is no subject matter for any major Hollywood movie or a
Pulitzer winning literary account.
It is agonizing that it is always ethnic
communities of Indian origin that have been facing the worst persecution for
ages followed by genocide or mass murder. Today it is happening to the Yazidis.
ISIS is abducting women and children and is starving them to death. It is subjecting
them to the worst abuses. Even before ISIS, Yazidis have been systematically
subjected to persecution, torture, humiliation and occasional mass murder. Even
other Kurds who have been otherwise at the receiving end of the minority Sunni
theocracy of Iraq do not worry about the discrimination and suffering the
Yazidis face. Worse, the Arabs have joined ISIS to loot and destroy this
miniscule minority. US tries to help but airlifting these people – what will
happen to them if they are uprooted from their native land and made another
ethnic group in US? They will become prey to evangelical forces in the US
–destroying their spirituality in exchange to US citizenship.
In this connection it is worthwhile to
remember what Swami Vivekananda said about the persecuted communities in the
world history and the approach of India to them. In his September 11 address to
the World Parliament of Religions he spoke of Mother India as : “… a nation
which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all
nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom
the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took
refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to
pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has
sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation.”
Today the cultural and ethnic children of
Mother India settled in different parts of the planet due to various historic
reasons expect the world community to treat them as their Great Mother treated
them all. Is that too much to ask? If not then make it a point to shed a tear
for the Yazidis and raise your voice for their freedom and safety.
Aravindan Neelakandan
YB-ET