The Women’s Bar Association of Azerbaijan: A Success Story
June 2010 by Barbara Standal
The Women’s Bar Association of Azerbaijan (WBA) was born in 2006 in Baku, a dynamic city of two million people on the Caspian Sea. In May 2008, when I arrived in Azerbaijan as a legal-education and rule-of-law specialist for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, the WBA had 250 members. They held high hopes, but little experience in running an organization. I gladly accepted the role of adviser. When I asked during an early training session what they hoped to achieve in five years, one Azerbaijani woman lawyer shouted, “The Nobel Peace Prize!” The group clapped and cheered.
I have advised, coached, trained, and applauded these savvy and ambitious Azerbaijani lawyers for the past year and a half. As a former board member of both Washington Women Lawyers and Northwest Women Lawyers, I was eager to help create a women’s bar association that would meet international standards. Perhaps nothing illustrates more poignantly the need for the WBA than what I experienced less than a year ago — the story of “Aida.”
In late June, a young girl was found wandering the streets of Baku asking strangers for shelter. A sympathetic woman who had heard about the WBA brought her to our office for help. Aida, a shy 16-year-old, was dressed like any Western teenager in a dress hugging her lean body, her thick dark hair coiled in a braid down her back. She arrived with her good Samaritan and had a cellphone clutched in her hand. Aida had come to Baku the day before from Goychay, an agricultural region in central Azerbaijan, 300 miles from Baku. Aida told us her family was forcing her to marry a local man. She did not want to be married but instead wanted to finish school, attend university, and become a doctor. She had run away from home. Saida, the woman who had taken Aida off the street the day before, told us Aida was welcome to live with her and her family. She said Aida could finish school in Baku and then attend the university. It sounded like the answer to this young girl’s dream, and mine.
But even as we listened to Aida’s story, her mother and uncle were rushing to Baku to take her back to Goychay. (Aida’s father was away working in Russia — a typical rural situation in the former Soviet Republics.) Aida’s mother and uncle were met by a half-dozen WBA members sympathetic to Aida’s plight. One experienced lawyer informed the mother and uncle that in Azerbaijan the legal age for marriage is 17 and therefore an arranged marriage of a 16-year-old was illegal. We threatened to notify the authorities. A recent study showed that in both the south and the north of Azerbaijan, 3,000 out of 5,000 marriages were illegal, primarily because the women were underage. After the WBA lawyers explained the law and potential penalties, Aida’s mother promised she would not force her daughter into the marriage and said she would allow Aida to finish school. But she insisted on taking her daughter back to their village. Aida’s running away had caused the family great shame and loss of status in the community. With no legal way to prevent them from taking Aida back, I watched helplessly as she left that afternoon, still clutching her cellphone, looking back at us forlornly.
Three months later, we visited Aida in her village and learned that her family had taken her directly back to her village, confiscated her cellphone, and put her in a psychiatric clinic. When we next saw Aida, she was married and pregnant. Recently, she gave birth to a son and now lives with her husband and tyrannical mother-in-law. Later, we learned that one of the reasons Aida had fled to Baku was to escape her future mother-in-law. Aida represents thousands of similarly powerless girls throughout rural Azerbaijan.
I have heard variations on Aida’s story repeated over and over in the past nine months. As part of an American foundation grant, last fall a dozen WBA members traveled into four remote villages on 12 separate occasions to bring rural women together to discuss domestic violence, human trafficking, gender inequality, and early marriages. In the sessions with the lawyers, rural women who didn’t want to speak openly were encouraged to write anonymously about their personal experiences. A few of those stories follow.
One woman in a village near the Iranian border wrote: “When I was a teenager, I witnessed how a young wife was repeatedly and brutally beaten by her husband. Once, he beat his wife so badly he broke her hands. She escaped and ran through the village seeking help. But nobody tried to rescue her. She only heard: ‘You are a young wife, and you have to go through it and endure.’”
Another story underscores the poverty and its impact on rural women. “There was a young girl whose mother sold her to a wealthy man from Iran. [She] was taken to Iran and forced into prostitution. However . . . she eventually found a way to escape and return to Lankaran. Here she faced the community’s reproach and was denied any rescue or medical care. . . . She appealed to people, saying that it was not her choice. But no one listened to her or helped her.”
Unmarried, divorced, or widowed women are often stigmatized or exploited. As an anonymous woman wrote: “I was married for eight years. After my husband passed away, his relatives treated me in a very bad way: humiliation, reproaches, insults. My father-in-law offered me to be his lover. In exchange, he promised better treatment and [a] future for me and my children. However, I refused his offers, took my children with me, and went back to my father’s house.”[1]
Many rural women who told their stories said that for the first time they had the chance to talk about these problems outside their families and no longer felt so alone. They discussed their experiences, including forced marriages of village girls, some as young as 12, and begged for more education on these social issues for themselves as well as their husbands, sons, and daughters. They also asked for shelters for domestic-violence victims and for community-leadership training.
Domestic violence in Azerbaijan is driven by both poverty and the culture. The violence is not solely man-to-woman. According to one recent study, 49 percent of Azerbaijani women believe some form of domestic violence is justified. Mothers-in-law are often the scourge of a young married woman’s life in Azerbaijan, although there are many notable exceptions. Traditionally, when a young woman marries, she is taken to live with her husband’s family for both cultural and economic reasons. In many cases, the young wife is treated like the family slave and beaten not only by her husband but also her mother-in-law.
Azerbaijanis have preserved their cultural roots, particularly in the regions outside Baku. Men are the sole authority in the family. One rural woman said, “If my husband says yogurt is black, yogurt is black.” Another wrote, “If he says die, you die. If he says live, you live.” Early marriages and domestic violence are major social problems in Azerbaijan. Corrupt officials offer no protection.
Azerbaijan is an oil-rich, Shiite Muslim country of eight million people. Historically, it has been heavily influenced by its powerful neighbors: Iran, Turkey, and Russia. Azerbaijan is a culturally diverse country with at least 53 distinct ethnic groups. The majority of Azerbaijanis, however, are Turkic people who share a language with their Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazak, Turkish, and Uigur cousins. Adding to its ethnic complexity is its history of domination by Persia, the Ottomans, and later the Soviet Union. In fact, 25 to 30 million Azerbaijanis live in Iran, three to four times as many as live in Azerbaijan. Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh, the unsuccessful Iranian presidential candidate in 2009, is Iranian Azerbaijani.
The WBA promises to be a powerful force for social and cultural change in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East. I have seen these strong, intelligent women use their skills and commitment for the greater purposes of the organization, their own professional development, and the rights of women and girls of Azerbaijan. In the past year, they have adopted bylaws, elected a board of directors, and developed committees to run the organization. They have written proposals for EU and U.S. grants that have won them over $350,000 to educate rural women on their legal rights and to monitor human trafficking.
The WBA is the only women’s bar association in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Its members are a credit to their country and to the investment of the United States Agency for International Development and the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative. I have no doubt they could one day be nominated for the Nobel Prize, as suggested by the attendee at that early training session. My work with these women and Narmin Kerimbekova, the ABA ROLI Azeribaijani staff attorney who provided me invaluable support, has enriched my life.
Ed. note: the author writes: I began my career as a clerk at the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division III. I was in private practice in Seattle for six years before becoming a supervisory trial attorney with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission until I retired in 2001. Failing miserably at retirement and feeding my addiction to travel, I worked in Kyrgyzstan from 2004 to 2006 for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) as a legal education specialist. In May 2008, I returned to ABA ROLI to work in Azerbaijan, where I will remain until September 2010. I confess a fascination with the former Soviet Republics, particularly the Muslim countries. I live in a small apartment in the center of Baku, a city in transition from the 19th to the 21st century. From my apartment windows I look across the street at the beautiful and historic Old City and the 16th-century walls lit spectacularly at night. The ABA office is also located in the center of Baku, and I walk to work just as I did from the Queen Anne neighborhood in Seattle. There are three Americans in our office, including me. Our staff of five Azerbaijani lawyers, four women and one man, with whom I work closely, all speak fluent English in addition to Azerbaijani, Russian, and, in the case of one or two, Turkish or French. I welcome any comments or questions and I can be reached atbjstandal@yahoo.com.
NOTE
1. These stories are included in the quarterly reports to the American One Woman Initiative Foundation that funded this Women’s Bar Association of Azerbaijan project. They were translated from Azerbaijani to English by a member of the Women’s Bar Association staff, Sayara Alieva.
