Voices Falling Silent

Whether struggling to find educational materials for children or teaching adults how to read, the Lezgi of Azerbaijan are trying to keep their identity alive. [Also in Russian.] by Leyla Amirova 24 August 2006 BAKU, Azerbaijan | A month before the first bell rings, 13-year-old Sabina Qajibutayeva is already preparing for the school year. She's looking forward to her classes, but one thing bothers her. “I’ll have to share my schoolmates' textbooks again,” she says, sighing deeply.

Sabina lives in the village of Unuq in Azerbaijan's Gusar region along the mountainous frontier with Russia. She and most other residents of Gusar are Lezgi. In Azerbaijan, a country of 30 recognized nationalities and ethnic groups, the Lezgi, or Lezgins, make up the second largest community after the majority Azeris, numbering 178,000 people according to the 1999 census. A slightly larger Lezgi community lives on the other side of the Samur river, on the territory of Russian Dagestan. There, Lezgi – a Caucasian language with about 450,000 native speakers in all – ranks as a state language along with Russian and others spoken in the republic. Lezgi can use their language in schools and institutions of higher education, hear it spoken on television and radio, and read books and magazines printed in their mother tongue.

NOT ENOUGH TO GO AROUND

Things are very different in Azerbaijan. Many Azeri Lezgi say the situation is harder on this side of the border, that they face a struggle to learn in their native language and preserve the Lezgi heritage. In the schools of the Gusar region, where Azerbaijan's Lezgi are concentrated, Lezgi is taught as a foreign language like English and Russian. Pupils study from books published in Russia, books that are not adapted to the local context, community leaders say. The textbooks “are far from reflecting the heritage of Azerbaijan’s Lezgi,” says Lezgi newspaper publisher and poet Sadaqat Karimova.

In all, some 125 schools in the Gusar, Quba, Ismayilli, Gabala, and Oguz regions are hampered by a lack of textbooks for 25,000 Lezgi-speaking pupils. Most schools have only two or three textbooks for each class. The books are imported from Dagestan.

“Last year, the whole class of 20 pupils got only one textbook. In elementary school, I remember times when we used to have Lezgi newspapers for reading instead of textbooks,” Sabina says.

Just two textbooks of the Lezgi language – an alphabet book for first-graders and a basic language primer for second-graders – were published in Azerbaijan in the past last 40 years. “They suffer from poor material presentation and numerous misprints. In 2005 a private author prepared a textbook for the third grade, but it also had drawbacks and specialists reacted negatively to it," Karimova says.

This year, a new textbook will be made available for second-grade pupils, according to the head of the Education Ministry's textbooks and publication department, Najaf Najafov.

Landscape in the Gusar region. Source: www.kycar.com

UNREALISTIC HOPES?

Early in the morning every school day, Akif Amirov travels from Gusar to the mountain settlement of Urva to his job as a teacher.

"The time available to teach Lezgi language and literature is restricted to two hours a week. This is not enough," the 26-year-old teacher says. In neighboring Dagestan, he says, Lezgi pupils receive five hours of weekly instruction in their mother tongue. Amirov trained to be a physics teacher but is obliged to teach language as well, owing to a shortage of qualified language teachers.

Lack of trained Lezgi language teachers is yet another challenge for the community, especially in the last two years when two institutions that trained Lezgi teachers have closed. The Lezgi department at the Gusar teacher-training college shut down in 2005, and this year, the Baku branch of Dagestan State University was forced to close entirely because Azeri authorities did not renew its accreditation.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, in the view of some. "Getting a university education in the Lezgi language is unrealistic," says a member of parliament, Rabiyyat Aslanova. "Someone who graduates from a university where the language is that used by only a minority in society is unlikely to find a job anywhere. This is the reality and we have to deal with it.”

Amirov doesn’t agree. “There are departments of Japanese, Chinese, Bulgarian, Polish, and Greek language and literature at Baku Slavic University and Baku State University. And this year an Urdu department opened. Are there really more Greeks than Lezgi in our country?" he asks. "Meanwhile, the country desperately needs Lezgi language teachers just as it needs teachers of Talysh, Avar and other minority languages.”

At present Lezgi speakers who wish to study at university in their native tongue must go to Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. There are sometimes problems, though, getting Russian degrees recognized by Azeri authorities.

FEW TAKERS FOR WELL-PAID JOBS

Another problem is that educated Lezgi are often reluctant to live in isolated villages, which makes it even harder to find qualified teachers. Recently the government adopted a number of measures designed to attract teachers to schools located far from regional centers.

Higher wages is one attraction. "This coming academic year village teachers will receive 200 manats a month [around $230], as well as subsidies for utility bills and even a plot of land where they can build a house,” says the deputy governor of the Gusar region, Elman Mustafayev.

This is an excellent wage – teachers in Baku typically earn 60 manats per month – but high salaries may not be enough. On a Saturday in early August, employers and job-seekers came to a job fair in Gusar where more than 150 vacant teaching positions were advertised, according to the deputy director of the region's employment office, Matlab Salahov.

“Schools are empty and we need teachers of the Lezgi language, math, physics, and other subjects. The results of the fair were disappointing in terms of attracting teachers to mountainous regions without electricity and gas,” Salahov said.

While Lezgi have some opportunity to learn their native language in rural areas, it is a different matter in Baku. Fewer and fewer young Lezgi are picking up their native language. Fatima Khanbutayeva studies at the University of Foreign Languages in the capital. She has a good command of English and French, but she doesn’t know Lezgi. “I grew up in Baku. My parents always speak Russian with me, and there was nobody to teach me Lezgi. There were no courses or textbooks I could use to study the language on my own," she says.

Knowing that young people are essential to keeping an ethnic identity vibrant in a cosmopolitan setting, last year, some of Fatima's contemporaries – graduates of the Lezgi department at the now-closed Dagestan State University in Baku – began offering language classes to members of the community, who gather on Sundays to learn the language of their parents. Others, elderly people who never learned to read their mother tongue, are starting by learning the alphabet. Unlike the Azeri language, which switched from Cyrillic to Latin characters in the early 1990s, the literary form of Lezgi uses Cyrillic. Because there are no textbooks available, the lessons are taught based on special programs prepared by a young language scholar, Gulbaz Aslankhanova.

The lack of language-teaching materials makes it harder for Lezgi to communicate in their mother tongue and contributes to the weakening of Lezgi identity. The available scholarship on Lezgi history and literature is insufficient, and the community has few resources to support new research.

And it's not just schoolbooks and scholarly studies that are in short supply.

“Newspapers are not available in the mountain settlements and there is nobody to deliver them. Access to information is often blocked and the population is not aware of what is going on in the country," Sadaqat Karimova says. A well-known poet, she is also the editor in chief of Samur, a monthly newspaper published in Baku.

"The day after the paper is printed my husband and I drive to remote settlements and distribute it,” she says. The four-page Lezgi-Azeri-Russian paper has a print run of 2,000 copies.

Samur's readers are offered articles about history and works by Lezgi writers and poets, and this boosts their self-awareness as Lezgi, Karimova believes. Another of her recent projects is a brightly illustrated children's book in Lezgi.

“Unfortunately, our children have no opportunity to read in their native language. I guess schoolchildren can use this book as extracurricular reading material,” she says.

SEEDS OF CHANGE

The recent passivity of Azerbaijan's Lezgi has political roots as well, going back to the emergence in the early 1990s of Sadval (Unity), a group that called for Lezgi on both sides of the border between Russia and newly independent Azerbaijan to be united in a new Russian republic. The Azeri authorities banned Sadval after accusing group members of carrying out a bomb attack on the Baku metro in 1994. Sadval remained active in Dagestan, but Azeri Lezgi grew leery of public activism and even public celebrations of their culture.

The Lezgi breathed a sigh of relief when Azerbaijan joined the Council of Europe in 2001 and ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, which offers its citizens recourse to the legally enforceable rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, and the Framework Convention on National Minorities, which gives member states guidelines on policy toward long-established ethnic groups.

In the past two years, the more relaxed attitude on the part of the authorities toward the country's largest minority, and vice versa, became visible as Lezgi groups organized several well-attended festivals. Commenting on a recent performance of the famous lezginka dance, Karimova says, “Our dance is known all over the world. Our nation has a rich culture, but we still can’t bring it to the whole world. The financial opportunities don't yet exist.”