A case study of trafficking in the neighborhood of Kapan and Goris cities in the Syunik region of Armenia
Trafficking, or 21st-century-style suicide
By Vahagn Vardumyan
“Illegal trafficking and trade in human beings” – this phrase looks strange at first glance but is in fact just an attempt to pinpoint a phenomenon. Also known as ‘21st century slavery’, it became an issue worldwide only recently and has now reached Armenia. This study is about the Syunik region of Armenia. I started with the center of the region, Kapan city.
KAPAN
This small city in the south-east of Armenia, 350 km away from the capital Yerevan, near the border with former Azeri regions, Kapan used to have a population of 60,000 that dropped to 20,000 over the last decade. The city still has a face of its own. Locals have a very special attitude to life, no doubt affected by the huge beautiful mountains that surround the city. Many visitors have been impressed by the sincerity and hospitality of Kapan dwellers. Local shops open credits to customers. Locals can do hard work for years without getting so much as a cent. The city is struggling but doing its best to stop beggars appearing in the streets so as to keep the city’s head high… Huge holes in the walls of houses left from air raids and the carcass of a fallen helicopter in the long disused airport still remind of the Karabakh war. These are just details that make up the whole picture of life in post-Soviet post-war Kapan. Many things changed here with the fall of the Soviet rule. Free market relations reign everywhere, bribery practices spread beyond any control, local media are unanimously and conspicuously pro-government. None of this surprises the locals - not any more. Worst of all, they are getting used to this state of things and pay less and less attention to it.
A significant part of the population of Kapan city and neighboring villages are unaware of civil society standards, the basics of civil activity and the existence of civil society organizations. For this very reason, the local NGO sector is extremely passive; there are around 30 NGOs of which only 5 or 6 are more or less active at least six months a year. The links between communities and authorities are just as weak; authorities are scarcely aware of what goes on in the communities, and vice versa. Kapan residents have a bitter joke that whatever new law is passed in Armenia, it is first put into practice in Kapan. International organizations, whatever the project they try to implement in Kapan, have to deal with vague, imprecise figures and data. This complicates all external attempts to address local problems. Yet without external assistance, the solution of local problems is totally unthinkable because of the local authorities’ indifferent and casual attitude.
Of course, all this complicated the search for trafficking cases in Kapan and neighboring villages. At the employment agency in Kapan, in various bodies of the City Council and in the local hospital no one seemed to be able to name a single case when people were offered jobs abroad and then became trafficking victims. No one could remember something of this kind happening to a woman, man or child. I visited the five schools, two universities and ten NGOs of Kapan city, and did interviews in the streets with around one hundred persons aged 17 to 55. Only five of the 100 interviewees had heard the word ‘trafficking’, and of those only two could give an adequate definition. Six to eight per cent of interviewees knew about the Internet but only four per cent were aware of the dangers of internet-based trafficking. When asked what they would do if someone they have only met online offered them a job abroad, most young men and women in Kapan said: “I would try to find out if I can really trust this person.” However, when asked just how they were going to test the integrity and reliability of a job offer, and whether they were aware that a person’s passport is their property, the young people said “Well, I shall try to see if the person is deceiving me, then I shall see if their papers are genuine”. None of them could explain just how to tell between forged and authentic papers. What is most important, almost 100 per cent were deeply convinced that ‘Kapan is not the city from which someone would go to Dubai to do prostitution. This is highly improbable. Such people can easily do prostitution in Kapan, or else go to Russia, but why Dubai?”
My search for cases or victims of trafficking was provoked by reports of international organizations about the alarming spread of trafficking in Kapan and in the Syunik region in general. After more than two weeks of futile efforts, I was almost ready to give up. Everyone I talked to insisted this practice did not exist in Kapan. Of course, a few people said that they had heard about men who went to Russia as migrant workers and came back empty-handed, totally depressed and frustrated. It is an interesting fact that people were reluctant to mention those stories and refused to give names, saying that ‘perhaps the rumors aren’t true, why should we create problems for people’. I also noticed that people have not hope in that authorities will help them. Even when news comes from Russia about another unexplained murder, people simply accept the sad reality. Meanwhile, trafficking might be the motive behind those murders. There is data, though unverified, that every year an average three murders are committed that are related to the trafficking industry.
Yet the Head of the Employment Agency of Kapan city says that in his ten years of work he never ran upon a single case of trafficking from Kapan. He also said that most migrant workers from Kapan and neighboring villages are men and that men are less vulnerable to trafficking them women. He added that Syunik has the highest unemployment rates in Armenia and that this is a reason to expect labor migration to grow.
At the City Council they were not very enthusiastic about answering my questions. “This is not our responsibility; this is not our job to deal with the issue”.
A teacher at one of the local schools was very upset when she heard the word ‘trafficking’. She said that only recently she got a phone call from an American organization, offering to pay her several hundred dollars for finding 300 cases of trafficking in Kapan. In her opinion, this was an attempt to humiliate the dignity of the residents of Kapan. She said that she needed the money badly but could not accept an offer to disgrace the name of her home city.
The headmaster of the school repeated what other people said to me earlier, adding that it would have made more sense to identify the potential causes of trafficking and to fight against them, because the progress of technology, such as the internet with its huge information resources, is prone with great dangers, and it is time to launch a nation-wide campaign to prevent trafficking. He feels that web-based communication poses risks to young people, especially girls, in cities like Kapan where most people are unaware of the risks and not prepared to face them.
I traveled to many villages around Kapan – Davidbek, Artsvanik, Chapni, Syunik, Gyodaklu, Khndrants, Kubatlu, Tatev. I got no information about trafficking cases but a good idea about the degree of awareness of the issue. I came to the conclusion that most people here have never heard about it. They only know that it is not always easy to find a job abroad, and that it often happens that people do not get the salary they were earlier promised. When asked what they would do if a total stranger offered them a job abroad, seven out of the fifty people that I interviewed in those villages said that they would accept the offer after checking its reliability. The rest said that however difficult life in their home village may be, they would never exchange it for a prospect of getting lost in a strange country. This idea was supported by most people. They said they would try to survive in Armenia especially if labor migration involves so much risk.
In my endless travels from office to office, from street to street, from school to school, from village to village, I finally met a taxi driver from Goris city who told me about several women who had gone to Dubai to do prostitution and already returned to Goris. He refused to give their names ‘so as not to accept too much responsibility’. The cabman said that there are prostitutes in Goris who have been visiting the UAE (Dubai) and Turkey regularly for a year. He told the story reluctantly and would not help me find those women. Other locals, upon hearing about the prostitutes, tried to avoid the topic and did not give any names or addresses. People were afraid.
From Goris I went back to Kapan, this time with the purpose of finding prostitutes and interviewing them. The problem was that this had to be done casually so they wouldn’t know I was interviewing them. The only way was to find agents who find clients for prostitutes. My first two attempts failed because, as I later learned from an unofficial source, the agent (I do not mention his name so as not to put him at risk) had recently been caught by police and was afraid to deal with strangers. Eventually I found a cabman who agreed to help me meet that agent. The third attempt also brought no results. The agent had his reasons to be very cautious. I had to look for another. Later another taxi driver told me about a group of girls who went to Dubai and just came back. One of them, he said, had been beaten their and came back without her passport. No one knew where she could be found. I asked him to arrange a meeting with one of those girls and said that I would pay for her services. The cabman got in touch with an agent. This time everything worked out very quickly and just an hour later a friend of the girl who had been beaten in Dubai was already waiting for me at a bus station. We went to my apartment to talk.
I had never found myself in such a strange situation before. I was forced to use this ‘service’ so as to interview the girl without raising any suspicions. We ‘talked’ for several hours. All this time I tried to impersonate a young man with a doubtful past and asked all sorts of questions. When I saw she was not reacting to my unusual behavior, I said that I was well connected and could help her find a better job so she could forget about her present situation. I said that I have had this idea for a long time and that I wanted to make a film in which prostitutes would take part, just of my own accord and without any wish to humiliate them. I said I would never disclose their identities against their wishes. The girl told me about herself and about her friend who had left without telling anyone where she was going. I do not mention the girls’ names or ages for obvious reasons. The girl said it would take a while before she could trust me, that she did not want to take part in films or things like that, that she was fed up with her ‘job’ and that if nothing else comes up, she might just as well commit suicide.
She also told me about drivers from Iran who are relatively ‘inoffensive’. She said she had never heard about any one of them hurting a girl. “It’s just that they are Turks, - she said. She believed that it was wrong for a Christian girl to sleep with Muslims, and was trying to justify the fact. She said that this was primarily the fault of the authorities who knew all those girls and ‘did not give a damn about them’. The girls had been deserted by their spouses, relatives, friends and enemies alike. They have to face the new world of slavery on their own, and if we want to help them, we should first try to understand what it is that makes them face uncertainty and take risks rather than sit and wait...
There are many crushed dreams in those girls’ lives. Most people speak ill of them, they are condemned and exiled from the society. This is why they often prefer to go back to be abused by criminals rather than stay in their ‘own home’ and endless suffer the censure of the community.
This article was written by journalist Vahagn Vardumyan in winter 2004, as a part of the research on trafficking in persons in Armenia. This research was organized by Caucasus Media Institute, US Embassy in Armenia, War, Peace and The News Media department of New York university, IOM and OSCE offices in Yerevan, in which groups of journalists and government officials took part. After the personal research that each of the journalists did in different regions of RA, they all wrote articles on this issue and published in Armenian mass media. The search for cases and facts of trafficking in Armenia is currently being continued by the mentioned group of journalists. There has also been created a website about trafficking in Armenia by the stuff of http://www.hetq.am, which is now available under http://www.antitrafficking.am address.
Source: http://www.gateway.am (Official translation)