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On Yazidi techno and a painful past


Malkhas

Malkhas is a Yazidi living in Pyatigorsk in the Russian North Caucasus. When we were driving with him, he played cutting edge electronic music with Yazidi and German vocals. In fact, like many Yazidis he speaks pretty good German. A large number of his countrymen have traditionally been seeking refuge in Germany, such as the majority of Yazidis fleeing from ISIS who conquered most of their heartland in Iraq in summer 2014. Yazidis share a history of persecution and speak of surviving 74 genocides throughout their tormented history. One of those terrible episodes happened during the events of the Armenian genocide in 1915-1918, when Yazidis were targeted by the Ottomans along with the Armenians. It was during that time that Malkhas family fled as refugees from the Ottoman to the Russian Empire, where they settled in Georgia. In the 1990s, Malkhas did not feel home in Georgia anymore, as his minority was one of the groups coming to suffer under the new nationalism after the collapse of the ethnically more tolerant Soviet state. He felt easier with Russian culture and language and decided to move over the border to settle in Pyatigorsk in 1996. He speaks German, Georgian and Russian, as well as some Kurdish.

Beitrag abgelegt unter: Faces of the East Russland