Azerbaijani prostitutes, exploiting legislative loopholes and the naivety of their clients, are causing a headache for the Turkish authorities. Temel Mamedov, a police official from the eastern Turkish city of Trabzon, visited Baku specially last month to discuss the influx of Azerbaijani prostitutes to his region - and to investigate ways to stop the women travelling there in the first place.
Mamedov showed IWPR copies of petitions received from more than a dozen Azerbaijani women who had contacted Trazbon's marriage bureaux to request permission to marry Turkish men. These petitions had been handed over to the police after the newly married men had appealed for help.
In most cases, the Turkish man had come home following the wedding to find no sign of his new bride - only a flat emptied of its furniture, and all his money and valuables stolen. Even when the Azerbaijani "brides" are tracked down and deported, they often find their way back to Turkey - and pull the same scam on another unsuspecting Turkish man. Many of the victims were gullible men from mountain communities who travelled to the city to sell wool in the markets.
Having earned some money, they routinely seek casual sex in one of the city's hotels - usually with an Azerbaijani prostitute, who they then marry following a whirlwind courtship.
Mamedov explained that once a woman from a former Soviet republic marries a Turkish man, she becomes a citizen of Turkey and can no longer be deported. Local police can expose as many as 50 fake marriages a month involving Azerbaijani women - around a quarter of them in Trabzon. While there are no reliable figures for the numbers of Azerbaijani prostitutes working in Turkey, around 15 Azerbaijani women are deported every month.
