July 24, 2000

Hope Erodes for Azerbaijan's Sea of Refugees

By DOUGLAS FRANTZ

AGHJABEDI, Azerbaijan, July 21 -- For the last eight years, through relentless seasons, Ali Orudjev and his family have lived in a hole in the ground. He and his wife, Samsiya, have watched helplessly as two of their infants died because they could not afford medicine. And they fear desperately for their surviving children, a tiny 5-year-old girl and a year-old boy who rarely smiles.

"I feel ashamed because I can do nothing for my family and make no money," said Mr. Orudjev, a trained veterinarian who was among hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who fled the fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Azerbaijan's mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1992. "I'm afraid for the future of my kids. I don't want them to grow up in a dugout."

Several hundred refugees live here on treeless, desolate land in south-central Azerbaijan. Their homes are, essentially, graves for the living: pits carved by hand from the parched earth, 15 feet or so wide, 20 feet long, 5 or 6 feet deep, covered with mud-caked thatch and outfitted with a solitary wood platform for sleeping and small windows for ventilation. They are neither cool in summer nor warm in winter. Meant to be temporary, the holes have become permanent.

The Orudjevs are among the poorest of the poor, banished to the bottom of a population of one million refugees scattered throughout 40 or more camps in this former Soviet republic where promised oil riches have yet to materialize and per capita income is less than $2,000 a year.

Long after the fighting stopped, the refugees remain victims of a little-noticed war, insufficiently cared for by their government and on the verge of abandonment by international aid organizations. They live without running water, electricity or medical care in railroad cars, tents, temporary prefabricated houses and holes in the ground, surviving on a few dollars a month, on handouts and heartache.

Sipping strong tea at a roadside cafe after touring refugee camps, Gesche Karrenbrock, an official from the Geneva headquarters of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, explained with professional detachment that the situation in Azerbaijan is complicated by several factors.

People's lives have been disrupted for so long that many have lost the power to help themselves, she said. Job training for young people has provided a glimmer of hope, so the United Nations and other aid groups are shifting emphasis from food and shelter to programs that encourage self-sufficiency. One result, Ms. Karrenbrock said, is that the meager food for refugees will be cut.

"There will always be people left over after our efforts," she said. "Here, 200,000 may be beyond our reach."

Her agency's budget for the country is being reduced from $12 million last year to $4.7 million. Many private organizations have also cut back or pulled out after eight years of little progress.

The Azerbaijani government, which has reached a cease-fire with the Armenian forces but no peace agreement that would allow at least some refugees to return home, has not taken up the slack. Some Western diplomats and humanitarian workers said the camps are political pawns in the government's effort to negotiate the return of the 20 percent of the country now occupied by ethnic Armenians. They also said some aid is siphoned off through corruption. But even the best-intentioned government would find an enormous burden when one of every eight of its citizens lives in refugee camps -- among the highest ratios anywhere in the world.

Although the government raised financial assistance to the refugees to about $5 a month each from $1.50, even the president, Heydar Aliyev, acknowledged that their plight remains abysmal. "It is a horrible thing that hurts my heart," Mr. Aliyev said in an interview.

The people were displaced in 1992 and '93 when the war that had erupted in 1988 between Azerbaijanis and Armenians over Nagorno-Karabakh -- a predominantly Armenian-populated enclave in Azerbaijan -- turned decisively in the Armenians' favor. After four years of indecisive conflict and violence that drove ethnic Armenians from Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, ethnic Armenian troops swept into the mountainous, 1,700-square-mile region, emptying villages and collective farms and driving out Azerbaijanis.

A shaky cease-fire was established in 1994, but sporadic negotiations have failed to end one of the most intractable conflicts that emerged as communism, which had squelched ethnic and religious differences across the Soviet empire, simply collapsed.

These refugees insist -- as do refugees almost everywhere -- that they will never abandon hope of returning home. But, as so often happens, a bleak permanence has settled over their blighted lives.

On the far edge of the camp near Aghjabedi, the first people were buried in 1994, after residents accepted that they would be living and dying in holes in the ground far longer than they once imagined.

Agil Dunemaliyev, 13, was silent as he gently lifted the latch on the wire gate. Some of the 250 graves within were marked by impressive headstones, etched with the faces of the dead and purchased at mind-boggling sacrifice by grieving families. Others bore only a small brick of mud and straw, and one mounded grave was covered by a hand-made carpet, its nomadic design faded by time and sun. Somewhere here were the graves of Ali and Samsiya Orudjev's infants, Elvin and Tabriz.

The camp's romantic name, Lachin Winterland, belies the living conditions. For centuries the semi-nomadic cattle breeders who lived in a part of Nagorno-Karabakh near Lachin, 100 miles away, brought their herds here to graze in winter. When their villages were emptied by the war in 1992, some 20,000 people came here, where the land cannot support cattle or people year round.

Salatin Novruzova, who looks far older than her 39 years, boiled potatoes over a fire of dried cow manure outside the dugout where her family of seven lives. The heat in summer and the cold in winter, the snakes and lizards that crawl in, the mile walk for drinking water, the absence of irrigation water -- she described it all without emotion. Only when asked why the family stays did she raise her head from the pot.

"I pray to Allah to just lift us and move us back to the other place," she said. "People are staying because they can't move because they don't have money. The little we get must be spent for food. We have nowhere else to go."

Standing on the dirt steps leading down into his home, Mr. Orudjev told much the same story. Though he is trained as a veterinarian, there are no jobs for him in a country where university professors drive taxis and physicists work as waiters.

"We are healthy enough and we are strong enough to work, but there is no work," he said.

So he and his wife live with their remaining children in a place with dirt walls, a dirt floor and a dirt roof. They share the hole with their small flock of chickens. The latrine is 100 yards away, drinkable water at least half a mile distant.

To get the government-allotted food money each month, Mr. Orudjev walks two miles to a paved road and hails a taxi to take him into Aghjabedi, another five miles away. Sometimes the money is inexplicably unavailable, so he must sign a note promising to pay the taxi later. Even when he gets the money, he said, it is always less than the allotted 20,000 manat, about $5. "Local officials reach in," he said.

Some of his neighbors are more fortunate. The United Nations refugee agency, with $2.25 million from Eni, an Italian energy company, is building 400 limestone houses in three regions of Azerbaijan, including Aghjabedi. They are rare bright spots on a dark landscape.

No houses are being built at the three camps where about 3,000 people live in abandoned railroad cars, which are scorching hot in summer and freezing cold in winter.

At one of the rail camps, near the town of Saatli about two hours' drive from the capital, 100 rusting boxcars sit on two parallel rail sidings. For seven years, the cars have been home to 400 people from the farm village of Boyuk Marjanli near the occupied territory. It is the smallest of the train camps and it has no name, but the residents have fostered a semblance of community.

Old blankets strung between cars provide shade and a place to sit and chat. A few enterprising residents have planted vegetables in pots, but they are not thriving. About 40 men and women have been married here over the last eight years; twice as many have died.

One recent morning, the men huddled under shade trees a few hundred yards away, jobless and persistently idle. The women tended the children and many people still lay under cars, where they had slept to escape the heat.

One stone-faced old woman kneaded bread, oblivious to the swarm of flies around her. Another washed clothes in a blue plastic bucket. An elderly man hobbled off to fetch water from a communal spigot on the other side of the rail yard.

For children younger than 7, a boxcar is the only home they have known -- they attend school in four cars, play hide and seek beneath them, live within them. Inside, the cars are neat and clean, with sheets to partition the interiors and burlap bags suspended from the ceilings to hide the metal.

Nasiba Gakhramanova, 24, was married in the camp. She has had two babies in it and watched her husband leave when he was drafted into the army. Still, she wants nothing of permanence. What she savors are memories of Boyuk Marjanli. What she wants is to go home.

"It is the land, good fertile land, that we are missing," she said as her 14-month-old son played in a discarded tractor tire. "We can't plant anything here. There is no land here that is not hard and dry."

Some people, mostly single men, have left in search of work in Baku and other places. Everyone knows that their prospects are poor and that many are now living in squalid, abandoned buildings in the capital.

More importantly, explained a knot of women simultaneously, the ones who leave will lose out on that great day when the aging boxcars are hitched to a locomotive and trundled back to the green pastures of Boyuk Marjanli.

Even the few thousand people who have returned to villages overrun at the start of the fighting and retaken by Azerbaijani troops have found hope to be a scarce commodity. Homes, shops and factories were shattered by mortars and fire. The United Nations and other relief agencies are rebuilding houses, but progress is slow and spotty.

In one settlement a few miles from the buffer zone between Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh, a father pointed out live mortar rounds on land where children like to play. In the village of Akhmedalilar, a factory where 2,000 people once assembled heavy machinery is a skeleton of brick and steel.

"There is not enough for normal life," said Khanish Allahverdiyev, 76, vowing in the same breath never to leave again.