Azeri residents fight eviction by oil company

Spero News
July 25, 2006

Thousands of unregistered homes at risk as oil firm seeks to reclaim land.

By Idrak Abbasov

Late last month, desperate scenes were enacted in a small settlement
outside Baku. Two well-built young men pulled a sobbing, pregnant
woman and her two small children out of a one-bedroom house scheduled
for demolition.

The settlement of Upper Sulu-tep, near the village of Khodjasan, is
just 15 kilometres from the centre of the Azerbaijani capital Baku.
At the height of summer, it is an arid spot, with no grass growing
or trees visible.

But now there are four huge oil wells, each with a wide black,
treacly pit next to it. Everywhere, there is the stink of oil and gas.

For a month now, the Binagadi Oil company has been demolishing houses
here, sometimes with the help of the regional authorities and the
police. They are all on land on which Binagadi Oil is working, and
almost all the residential buildings here were built without the
required permits. The majority of the people who live nearby are
either from the poorest sections of society or refugees.

Almost a month has gone by since the demolition work started. More
than 200 homes have already been knocked down.

Local resident Adalat Seidov estimates that there are between ten
and fifteen thousand houses in the area inhabited by as many as
60,000 people, all of which could be potentially affected by the oil
company’s campaign.

Desperate residents say they have nowhere else to go.

"Where am I supposed to take my family? Whose door will I knock on?"
asked Nizami Bagirov, who comes from the Lerik district in southern
Azerbaijan on the border with Iran.

Bagirov says that he fought in the Nagorny Karabakh war and then used
to earn a small income doing hard physical work in a nearby stone
quarry. A few years ago, he decided to build a house for himself,
his wife and two small daughters.

"One of my colleagues lives in Sulu-tep," said Bagirov. "He suggested
I build a one-bedroom house there. We found an empty plot of land
and built a house for me."

However, he has now lost his home on the grounds that he had no formal
permission to build it.

Lawyer Fuad Agayev says Bagirov’s rights have been abused. "Regardless
of whether a house has been built illegally or not, to destroy it
you need a court order," he said, adding that the oil company had no
right to demolish houses themselves and the court should also provide
Bagirov and his family with temporary accommodation.

The authorities declined to give IWPR any precise information about
the demolitions.

Binagadi Oil, which owns the land, used to be part of the state
oil company SOCAR. Anar Gurbanov, a lawyer for the firm, said it is
drilling for oil on land in four fields, but three of them had been
taken over illegally. He said they were losing substantial sums as
a result.

Gurbanov admitted that authorisation from a court was necessary in
order to destroy buildings and insisted that the company sought such
orders for demolitions. However, he was unable to provide evidence
of any such paperwork, and some residents said they’d received
official notification to vacate their houses, not from a court but
the authorities and Binagadi Oil.

One resident fighting eviction is Khavyar Jafarova, a refugee from
Zangelan region, which is now under Armenian occupation. "They only
gave us a verbal warning, we haven’t seen any paper work. I have
lived here for twelve years – the authorities should give me back my
house in Zangelan. Even though I’m a woman, I fought for my country.
I will fight to the last here too," she said.

"I have lived here for seven years, and I have all the paperwork,"
objected Khumar Velieva, a refugee from Armenia. "I bought the land
from the municipality, and the construction was approved by the
regional authorities."

The head of administration of the village of Khojasan said the land
was only leased to Velieva for temporary use.

Unauthorised house building in the greater Baku area is a widespread
phenomenon, as the population of the largest city in the Caucasus
continues to grow.

According to a presidential decree, a census will be carried out in
Azerbaijan in 2009. An anonymous source in the cabinet of ministers
told IWPR that it will be conducted not according to place of
registration but to where people are actually living at the time.

The source adds that before the census takes place, the government
wants to solve the problem of residents living in homes built
illegally in Baku and surrounding areas. Many unauthorised houses
will be demolished and others will be legalised.

Idrak Abbasov is a journalist for Ayna newspaper in Baku.