'No one thought to sound the alarm': Azerbaijan shocked the suicide of a 14-year-old girl hounded at school - ForumDaily
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'No one thought to sound the alarm': Azerbaijan shocked by the suicide of a 14-year-old girl hounded at school

In April, Azerbaijan was shocked by the suicide of 14-year-old Elina Hajiyeva, who became a victim of school bullying - the student jumped out of the window of a school building. The girl’s death outraged society also because the school authorities interrogated Elina, who was still alive, an ambulance was called only two hours later, and the parents were not allowed to see their daughter in the hospital for more than a day.

A small memorial in memory of Elina at the school fence. Photo: video frame YouTube / Aleksandr Records

Her story drew attention to problems that were not customary to talk about in Azerbaijan. By coincidence, all the events related to the suicide of the girl, were on video, instantly spread in social networks, writes Air force.

Videcam. School corridor

4 April, around 9 in the morning, change. On the corridor along the windows slowly passes a girl. She stops and looks outside. No one pays attention to her. A junior high school student will notice her too late, and in a few minutes she, barely alive, will be found on the playground in front of the school.

Elina jumped out of the 3 window of the school building floor.

Gadzhiyeva was new; according to the stories of a classmate, no one was friends with her. Her only friend from a parallel class, Nargiz (the name has been changed), says that Elina was often beaten by other students, including those from the senior classes.

“When she cried in the toilet, the other girls laughed at her,” recalls Nargiz. “I saw how an eleventh-grader beat her, I saw how she was humiliated and pushed. For example, when she was walking down the corridor, ten people could come up and spit or take away her glasses.”

Elina's mother, Sevil Huseynova, said that she had complained about baiting her daughter to the director, but she did not take any measures, claiming that there were cameras in the school and everything was under control.

“When I [after Elina’s death] asked to see the previous videos, I was told that they had been erased,” says Seville.

Nargiz says she also went to the director, trying to protect Elina. After that, her mother called the class teacher.

“She said: “Let your daughter not walk around, don’t protect. Otherwise she will have the same problems with students as Elina,” recalls Nargiz. The class teacher was suspended from work after Elina's suicide. A man answered her phone and said that she was not giving interviews.

On the subject: 'We lost too many': why school survivors commit suicide

The death of Elina Hajiyeva shook Azerbaijan. Under the hashtags #ElinaÜçünSusma (“Don’t be silent for Elina’s sake”) and #‎BullinqəSon (“End bullying”) you can find many posts in support of the girl and personal stories about school bullying. People write about how they themselves were bullied, how their children were bullied - for being “new”, “fat”, “kind”. One of the mothers recalls that when asked why her daughter was being bullied, the school told her that her daughter was “quiet and cultured.”

Politicians and public figures of Azerbaijan, as well as show business stars, stood up for the victims of bullying. Eurovision winner Nigar Jamal called on the president to “severely punish those responsible.”

“Save our children,” she says in the appeal.

Elina Gadzhieva. Photo: video frame YouTube / Aleksandr Records

There are no statistics on teenage suicides in Azerbaijan - neither the State Statistics Committee, nor the State Committee for the Protection of Family, Women and Children, nor the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor's Office, nor public organizations have it. Moreover, it is impossible to estimate how many children suffer from bullying at school.

The former director of several schools and the author of educational projects, Rufat Aliyev, says that he encountered bullying as a student, as a teacher and as a director. According to him, it is customary to ignore these problems, and when it is no longer possible to ignore them, employees do not know what to do.

“The teacher is not interested in teaching the child, otherwise he will remain hungry, since he relies on tutoring, especially since he does not care about the emotional state of the child,” says Aliev.

The class teacher, he said, usually knows about the persecution.

“In this case, the teacher often behaves unprofessionally: he either scolds or punishes,” says Aliyev. “You need to be able to hear, see, be able to present other models of behavior, and this needs to be taught separately to directors and teachers.”

The system of school psychologists does not work either: as psychologist Azad Isazade says, there are only one or two specialists for 300-400 children. In such cases, they must work together with teachers and parents, but this does not happen.

“They have to work as a team, and now everyone is trying to shift responsibility to the other,” says Isazadeh.

His words are confirmed by the former school psychologist Elmira, who chose not to give her real name.

“There was no trust - parents don’t trust the school, the school doesn’t trust the parents, they see each other, if not as potential enemies, then as a danger. They behave like representatives of warring armies, and the child ends up in a situation of mutual deception and hypocrisy.”

On the subject: In Indiana, a teenager died after a popular on social networks Challenge

After the suicide of Elina, the media began to write about other cases of child abuse in school. According to community activist Gulnara Mehdiyeva, the death of the girl made the society finally talk about harassment.

“Before Elina’s case, this had never been a hot topic, no one thought to sound the alarm and it was not directly linked to the school,” she says.

The story of Leila Ujal, who briefly worked as a chemistry teacher at a suburban boarding school, went viral on social networks. According to her, in just two weeks of working there, she saw how school employees beat and humiliated children, fed them poorly and neglected basic hygiene. She wrote about this back in 2017, but now her new post on Facebook has received 2,2 thousand shares, and the local press has paid attention to her. Two years ago, Ujjal wrote a complaint to the Ministry of Education; The department told the BBC that her appeal was still being considered.

Video from a mobile phone. Director's office

Elina is lying on the sofa, slightly covered with a multi-colored blanket. A female voice-over asks: “You studied at school 162. What was the situation like there, like the director, like the class?”

“The director didn’t do anything bad to me, but there are children there...” Elina answers with great difficulty. The video only lasts a few seconds.

Later it turns out that the chairman of the regional commission for work with minors, Khalida Bayramova, interrogated and filmed the girl. In response to a request from the independent portal MeydanTV, she said that she arrived at school at 11 am - an hour after the director called her, and two after what happened to Elina. According to Bayramova, it was she who called the ambulance after seeing the wounded girl and learning that this had not been done yet. The official claims that she filmed the video to ensure “maximum transparency of what was happening.” The BBC was unable to contact Khalida Bayramova.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Aleksandr Records

On April 8, the Ministry of Education removed from work the school director Sevinj Abbasova, her deputy and the school psychologist. A week later, the court placed Abbasov under house arrest; she was charged under the articles on leaving in danger and negligence that led to death.

“If this happens to a child at school and you first of all call not an ambulance, but a person who can protect you, this is thick skin,” says former director Rufat Aliyev. “The executive branch (administration - BBC) will be called to protect the director, and in order to protect the child, an ambulance and parents will be called.”

In his opinion, the reason for this “thick skin” is that principals often perceive the school as their own “fortress,” and this is a systemic problem. School resources in Azerbaijan, Aliyev believes, are aimed at showing the child that school is a foreign territory with its own rules.

“This is a distorted perception of who the school, the principal and the teacher should serve, and they should serve the child.”

Video broadcast on Facebook. Hospital

“There is nothing in the device, it just works that way! You see, there are no medicines there!” the father screams and cries near Elina’s body in the hospital. Morning of April 6. The girl’s body is connected to a life support system, the parents are looking for a doctor to remove the devices from the dead child and tell him how their daughter died. But the doctor doesn't come.

The event is streamed on Facebook by blogger and activist Gulten Ramazanova, the entire video lasts more than an hour. Gulten walks with Elina's mother on the floors, trying to find out which of them was the girl's attending physician. In the recording, the two doctors can be heard calling each other's names.

Gulten is the administrator of the Facebook group Life Line, which raises money for medical care for low-income people. She arrived at the hospital when she was told that the girl who tried to commit suicide was in critical condition. There she met with her parents and, noticing strange things - the doors of the intensive care unit open, as if in an ordinary ward, the doctors' evasive and contradictory words, she began to film what was happening.

Elina's parents saw her daughter for the first time after a suicide attempt was already dead. According to mother Sevil Huseynova, she was not allowed to visit the girl for two days, claiming that she was all right. On the morning of April 6, she received a call from the hospital and was told that Elina was in serious condition. Arriving there, her parents and Gulten discovered that she had been dead for several hours.

“I didn’t believe that all this was happening. Even when I saw her dead, I thought, what if she’s alive, what if she’s still in a coma,” says Seville.

On the subject: More than half of teens in the US are being bullied on the Internet

“When I arrived, she already smelled like a corpse,” the activist recalls. “It turns out that she died a long time ago, but a machine was connected to her, and next to her lay a syringe with drugs that had not yet been injected.”

One woman whose baby was in the same hospital told the BBC she saw "nurses moving the dead baby from ward to ward."

The press service of the Ministry of Health declined to comment on what happened in the hospital, citing the fact that the investigation is ongoing. It is still unknown whether the doctors are involved in the case; the BBC prosecutor's office was unable to provide this information.

Photo: video frame YouTube / Aleksandr Records

Video from a mobile phone. The outside

A young man wearing glasses, wearing a knitted hat with a pink pompon and a backpack behind her back is gesticulating violently to call a teenage girl, then grab her hand.

“Shameless, traitor, shame on you,” he says. “Apologize to my candidate, Mehriban Aliyeva.”

The girl is crying and demands that he remove his hand. A policeman passes by calmly. As a result, an elderly passer-by stands up for the girl.

The video is shot by 14-year-old Syanai Yagmur. Four days earlier, on April 13, she was one of dozens of young people who came to lay flowers at the gates of the school where Elina studied. Then the teenagers were met by police and people in plain clothes and ordered to disperse. According to one of the protesters, the police were trying to find out “who is your leader here.”

The girl's mother, Zumrud, believes that the man intimidated her daughter because of her participation in this action. Why the man demanded an apology specifically to the vice president, the wife of President Ilham Aliyev, remains unclear.

Later, the person who insulted Xianai was recognized as Tural Garayev, an activist who had previously come to other public events. So, on March 8, he attended a rally against domestic violence, where he also demanded an apology to the president’s wife and called the demonstrators traitors. After the Xianai incident, he was arrested and sentenced to 15 days in prison for hooliganism.

A few hours before his arrest, Garayev recorded a video in which he stated that the opposition, “enemies of the state and their media” were waging a smear campaign against him. According to him, he did not use violence against the girl, but only “demonstrated that these people do not actually demand justice for Elina, but, hiding behind her name, are waging a campaign against the people and the state.”

According to human rights activist Rasul Jafarov, such cases show that the authorities fear any kind of solidarity of citizens, their common position on various problems.

“Such events are not prohibited either here or anywhere else in the world - you don’t ask the executive authority for permission to go and lay flowers at the school,” the human rights activist notes, “And practice shows that people can still gather and raise issues.”

Activists like Garayev—many independent journalists and observers—call them provocateurs—a dangerous trend, Jafarov believes. His video message indicates that he acted voluntarily, and not on “orders from above.”

“This rhetoric has been carried out by pro-government media for years. We heard from officials that there are invisible forces trying to destabilize the country,” says the human rights activist. “The arguments voiced by Tural show that people believe this official rhetoric.”

***

There are still flowers on the white stone fence of the three-story school where Elina studied, a month after her death. Together with a security guard, a young man in a suit with a badge that says “Student Friend” comes up to me and says that this is a new project of the Ministry of Education to ensure the safety of teachers and students. When asked to talk to teachers, both refuse.

“I know that this is an important topic, but I can’t let you in without permission,” says the “Student Friend” and, shrugging his shoulders, closes the door behind him.

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