Railway Residents in Azerbaijan

People living in a poor neighbourhood of the Azerbaijani capital Baku face eviction as part of a government programme to clear housing situated dangerously close to railway lines.

The area, nicknamed “Shanghai” by the locals, consists of houses close to the track at Keshla, a major rail junction. Many were erected by people forced to flee their own homes during the Nagorny Karabakh conflict in the early 1990s, and were built without official planning permission.

Now the authorities want to remove them, along with similar houses in other parts of Azerbaijan, on the grounds that residents are not only at risk from rail traffic, but also disrupt trains by dumping rubbish on the track.

A special commission looking at illegally-built structures across Azerbaijan has found 5,000 buildings that breach safety regulation since 2010. Of those, 880 located beside railways – many of them in “Shanghai” – need to be demolished.

Railway workers complain that residents throw rubbish onto the line, causing near-misses including a case where a train carrying a load of fuel tankers would have crashed if it had not been for the driver’s swift reactions. A couple of years ago, a train came off the rails but miraculously did not hit any houses.

“Houses near railways cause a lot of trouble. They present a danger to these people’s lives, and to the functioning of the railway itself,” Nadir Azmammadov, spokesman for Azerbaijan’s rail company, said.

The regulations state that housing must be at least 52 metres away from railway lines, whereas in “Shanghai” the buildings often encroach right to the edge of the track.

“You can say that in this area, the residents have taken over land belonging to the railway,” Azmammadov said. “If there were an unforeseen incident like an accident or a fire, we wouldn’t be able to respond to it as it would be impossible to bring in the necessary equipment.”

Azmammadov said areas right next to railway lines were not a good place to live.

“These people should be keen to leave here themselves,” he said. “Trains come through carrying oil and dangerous chemicals. So houses in this location are in particular danger.”.

According to long-term resident Gulnara Aliyeva, there were just 300 houses in the area in Soviet times, but the numbers swelled rapidly over the last two decades as Karabakh refugees poured in, joined by people from other parts of Azerbaijan hoping to find work in the capital.

Lacking proper amenities, children in the “Shanghai” neighbourhood play volleyball on the railway tracks, skipping aside when they hear an oncoming locomotive sound its horn. Rail company warnings to their parents have had little effect.

Local residents have got used to living in an environment that looks alarming to an outsider.

“I’ve lived here 40 years and I’ve seen a lot of accidents,” Aliyeva said, adding that she had witnessed accidents where people lost their legs under trains.

“When a goods train passes by, my whole house shakes,” she said.

Aliyeva described how a neighbour tried extending her home to provide space for her recently married son. She added a balcony, but failed to calculate the distance properly, and a passing train knocked it off.

The eviction plan did not come as a surprise to Aliyeva, who said, “There have always been rumours that our houses would be demolished. At the end of the day, I wish they would either resettle us, or remove the railway. We wouldn’t mind moving to nice city flats.”

However, assisted resettlement is not going to be an option, as officials have made it clear that no compensation will be paid out for houses that were never legal in the first place.

“Everyone is blaming the people who built their houses along the railway line, rather than those who closed their eyes to this illegal construction work,” Yalchin Imanov, a lawyer who has acted in previous cases where homeowners faced demolition orders, said. “Everyone knows you can’t build a house in Baku without getting official permission.”

Majid Imanov lost the car he had bought in hope of earning money as a taxi driver when it was crushed by a passing train.

“I was hoping I would improve our difficult family circumstances, but it turned out to be the opposite,” he said. “There’s a big question-mark over how I’m to repay the outstanding debt of around 5,000 US dollars. The bank has already taken out a court case against me.”

One small consolation is that the bank cannot take possession of his house, since it does not technically belong to him, so his family will continue to have somewhere to live for the time being.

Diana Isayeva is a journalist for Novosti-Azerbaijan.