Refugees in Azerbaijan Defiant and Resilient

by Leanne A. Grossman
–USA–

The Sumgayit Refugee Camp was nothing like I expected. Rather than mud-colored tents blowing in the wind, I encountered two half-painted cement structures surrounding a grey dirt courtyard. While it seemed a world away from Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, we had left Baku only 30 minutes earlier. A woman wearing a cobalt blue outfit is bending over a bathtub that serves as her washtub minus the running water. Her family laundry will soon be added to the clotheslines that wave overhead. Time has called Sumgayit “the most polluted city in the world” due to oil and chemical industrial exploitation of the Caspian Sea basin.

I came to Sumgayit Refugee Camp as a representative of a global philanthropy organization and was joined by Azerbaijani colleagues who arranged our camp tour. My goal was to see firsthand the conditions in which refugees lived and to speak directly with camp residents about their lives.

Sumgayit serves as home to some 300 Azerbaijanis who, due to a ferocious but undeclared war in the early 1990s, fled the Nagorno-Karabagh region, technically located in southwestern Azerbaijan, but inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians. The territory, oddly configured by the Soviet government in the 1920s, has been fiercely disputed since the late 1980s. The conflict has killed 30,000 and uprooted one million. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre currently counts more than 586,000 IDPs (internally displaced persons) in Azerbaijan, a country of 8.8 million.

One camp resident, Raya, shows us through a dark corridor to a couple of rooms where families reside. With the help of a translator we chat with an elderly blind woman who sits on a slumping metal cot in an otherwise empty room covered in mismatched wallpaper. Raya lives on the equivalent of about seventy cents a day in one of the top oil-producing countries in the world. According to News.Az, Azerbaijan sold $17.9 billion worth of oil on the world market in 2009.

Another proud resident invites us to her immaculate living quarters. It is a relatively large room containing a dresser, a table, and two double beds. In the middle of the room stands a typical Russian wooden and glass hutch, a set of delicate porcelain teacups perched inside – a sad reminder of a happier life left behind and possibly a sign of hope that someday life will return to normal.

The more I spoke with the residents, the more I understood how invisible this community is to the government. It is not due to their silence. The women told us how they regularly traipse to government agencies, demanding attention to their problems, but are always ignored. One politician or another occasionally drops in near election time and promises to provide resources and rehabilitation to the camp. Yet clearly the officials feel no sense of accountability. One refugee explained that someone collects camp residents’ passports when it is time to vote and returns them later – obvious evidence of ballot-stuffing.

This is only one example of deep-seated corruption in Azerbaijan. We experienced it ourselves soon after we arrived at the Baku airport. As we headed into town, an electronic tollbooth sign said one price, but our colleagues were asked to pay four times that amount to the cashier. If they had not embellished the fee, they explained, we would have been stopped a quarter mile down the road by policemen with some false complaint about our vehicle along with a demand for an even higher tax.

Many nongovernmental organizations provide services and civic education to Azerbaijan’s vast refugee population. In December 2009, Women’s Association for Rational Development, led by Shahla Ismayilova, released the results of a survey of 90 Azerbaijani and international nonprofits and agencies working in this arena. It indicated that while improvements in living conditions have occurred in some communities, higher rates of unemployment and declining opportunity still plague refugees. Meanwhile, the international community has reduced its support in the wake of the worldwide economic crisis.

At Sumgayit able men find day labor. One woman describes her husband, a construction worker, as a victim of the “slave market.” The nearby chlorine factory, known to be unsafe, provides a few jobs. To subsidize meager incomes, men who work there bring home chlorine to sell to neighbors. Their wives may take it to Baku to sell in the streets. Chlorine can cause acute respiratory illness or burning of the skin. In general, no full-time or guaranteed work, let alone benefits, are available, a troubling situation in a country once known, albeit weakly, for full employment.

On our way to see the second building, we notice the outhouse, which is used by residents of both buildings. One resident takes us to her family dwelling – an eight-by-ten-foot room in which six people live with two beds and a jerry-rigged kitchen consisting of a small table, a hotplate, and some plastic bottles. Residents point disgustedly to the mold on the walls and hallway. Then they show us the basement where two faucets that cannot be turned off spit water endlessly, an absurd contrast to the first building, which had no inside water source whatsoever.

Hoping we had the power or influence to change her conditions, one nearly toothless woman complains to us of severe stomach pains. Then other women come forward and tell of painful fibroids and bloating. All of the twenty or so women we speak with have serious health problems. Not surprisingly, cancer rates in Sumgayit are 22 to 51 percent higher than the national average, according to Blacksmith Institute.

As residents described the outrageous ways they had been treated, I wondered who exactly was responsible. Where should they pin their complaints? On the anonymous officials of this stubborn state or perhaps on the chemical and oil magnates whose industries are the source of the polluted water and land?

As for a local clinic, none exists, and the hospital is quite costly, even though by law the health care of IDPs is free. One mother introduces us to her 10-year-old son who has been in the hospital several times with life-threatening heart trouble. He has just returned to the camp to take a shower, a sorry statement about conditions inside the hospital.

Leaving the camp in Sumgayit, I shudder to think about the refugees’ diagnoses, if they had decent health care. Ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, diseases of the stomach and esophagus – too late for prevention, but not necessarily too late for medical treatment.

Medical attention will not be forthcoming. In Azerbaijan, the government has a law ensuring that health care is free, but the law is not enforced and the infrastructure for good treatment does not exist. One thing is clear. While Azerbaijanis may lean on the support and services of the many nonprofit groups that contribute to their wellbeing, they must rely on their own resourcefulness, strength, and resilience for their very survival.

The author would like to thank Shahla Ismayilova and Rahile Mehtiyeva for organizing the refugee camp visit and many fascinating meetings with women’s rights activists. -Ed.

About the Author:
Leanne A. Grossman is a travel and non-fiction writer who has documented women’s concerns and perspectives in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. She is a founding trustee and advisor to Girl Child Network Worldwide, an innovative girls empowerment model initiated in Zimbabwe, which turns victims of sexual abuse into survivors and leaders. She lives in Oakland, California. Look for her upcoming website: portfolio-of-passions.com.