Azerbaijan Under Pressure on Trafficking

Wednesday, 21 April, 2004

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Khadija Ismailova

Azerbaijan is about to adopt a new national programme to combat human trafficking in the next few days, as the scale of the problem is becoming ever more evident and is threatening to bring international sanctions against the country.

At the moment the Azerbaijani Penal Code does not have an article on the exploitation and sale of people and it is virtually impossible to punish those who traffic women and children.

Yet Azerbaijan is both the recipient and source of trafficked people. Two young girls from Kyrgyzstan, 16-year-old Asel and 14-year-old Maria, were saved from two months slavery thanks to the efforts of the Baku and Bishkek offices of the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, and Azerbaijan's Centre for Legal Help to Migrants, CLHM.

They were brought to Ganje in Azerbaijan in January this year by a woman known as Medina, who travelled to Kyrgyzstan, brought them back and forced them to work as prostitutes.

"We were told that we could earn a lot of money in Ganje," said the older sister. "We believed Medina and came with her to Azerbaijan. In Ganje we had three or four clients a day and were paid nothing."

The woman was paid 500 dollars for each girl she brought to Azerbaijan. However, Shahin Sadygov of the Ganje police told IWPR that she and her associates were not arrested because they had small children. Sadygov said that under current rules, they could be punished for various offences, including "keeping people in slavery" but it was not possible to bring them to justice for cross-border trafficking.

The case of the two Kyrgyz girls was one of 96 in Azerbaijan researched by CLHM, in a study carried out jointly with John Hopkins University in Washington DC and financed by the US State Department. Fifty-two of the trafficking victims they met were Azerbaijani citizens, the rest all came from other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Azerbaijan exports more trafficked women than it receives. Many of them are women who are conned by promises of work in employment agencies or by marriage agencies.

Alovsat Aliev, director of CLHM, said that the most frequent destination for the women, aged between 16 and 30, was the United Arab Emirates. Twenty-eight of the 96 women they interviewed were trafficked there and there may be more than 1,000 women from Azerbaijan living in slavery or enforced prostitution in the Emirates.

Nineteen of the interviewees - eight of them under 18 -were trafficked to Pakistan. They were forced to service three or four clients a day and earned 500-600 dollars, all of which went to their bosses. The clients did not use contraceptives and 11 of the 19 women came back pregnant to Azerbaijan. CLHM believes there may be more than 500 trafficked Azerbaijani women in that country.

Almost all the women the centre talked to said they had been treated brutally. Some said they had been forced to take drugs or threatened with weapons. They said their "bosses", all of whom were women, were known by their first names - Alia, Dilshad, Fatima, Regina, Farida. Each of them would take four or five women with them every time they left Azerbaijan.

"My visa had run out," said 22-year-old Narmina, one of those taken to Pakistan. "After I had worked for a while with a 'boss' called Regina, she abandoned me in a hotel without paying the bill, and went back to Baku to get a group of new girls. Then I rang a few of my 'normal clients' and told them about my problems. Within a few days I had collected enough money to travel, put my trust in the migration services and went back to Baku. I went to the police but they did not find Regina."

That Narmina went to the police was unusual, as officers frequently make no distinction between trafficking victims and prostitutes.

Part of the problem the two organisations encountered in researching the problem of trafficking was the negative public opinion towards its victims. In a study carried out by the Baku office of IOM last year, the majority of 120 media articles written about trafficking over a six-month period adopted a negative tone towards the victims.

This is a major reason why many trafficked women feel stigmatised and decide not to report what has happened to them to the police. They also say that they have no faith in obtaining justice.

Azerbaijan's deputy interior minister Oruj Zalov told IWPR that the new national anti-trafficking programme will mean that Azerbaijan adopts legislation in line with international conventions. But he refused to give more details of what this will involve, saying, "We will not reveal elements of the programme even after the president signs it. We don't want the traffickers to know what methods we are using to fight them."

Laura Hruby, political officer with the US Embassy in Baku, warned that Azerbaijan will be included this year in the US State Department's Trafficking in Persons Report as a country "having significant problems" with human trafficking. This could lead to sanctions against Azerbaijan if it does not act to combat the problem. Hruby said that the term "significant problems" applied to a country which had more than 100 cases of trafficking a year.

Robin Seaword, deputy head of the OSCE's Baku office, told IWPR, "We don't want sanctions to be imposed on Azerbaijan. Our desire is for the programme to be adopted very soon and to work properly."

Khadija Ismailova is the editor of Now newspaper in Baku.