Romance or a business relationship?

When Zara and I approached her fellow prostitutes, she introduced me as a psychologist. One of the women had time to arrange to meet with me separately before she left with a client. We met the next day in a little known Yerevan café, to be out of sight. I told Mara (not her real name) that I was actually a journalist. She was not surprised, but refused to talk about her profession; instead she spoke about her biggest problem. Mara was worried about her complicated relationship with the man she loved. Thirty-seven year old Mara lives with a twenty-five year old man (a friend, as she put it). For the man, Mara's - his de facto wife's - occupation is no secret. But he had decided to leave Mara, get married and go to his native village to live with his parents. The woman asked for my advice as to whether to let the man go or to create obstacles.

Many prostitutes in Yerevan are in de facto marriages. Often the men accompany them to the streets and wait in a car at a distance, to protect them if necessary. The presence of a loved one makes the life of a prostitute easier. Mara knows that the man doesn't really love her, and is just living off the money she makes. She says that she stays in the relationship because she wants to be loved. The next time I saw her in the street, her eyes were sparkling. Her boyfriend had abandoned the idea of getting married and decided to stay in Yerevan.

Who pays, and who gets the money?

The main venues for implementing the sexual deals agreed upon in the streets are small hotels and saunas. In order to get the desired services in comfortable conditions, the client pays both the woman and the hotel or sauna owner. There is a verbal agreement between the sauna owners and the prostitutes - if a client doesn't pay afterwards, or tries to beat the woman up to get his money back, the employees of the establishment intervene. The sexual deals in the streets are arranged without middlemen. The prostitutes I met with told me that no one takes money from them. Yenok Shatvoryan, the chairman of the Hope and Help NGO, which has dealt with prostitutes for years, confirms these assertions: "They work individually. They are their own masters. I have the impression that street prostitution is not being regulated, managed, or looked after."

In 2003, the police filed nineteen criminal cases against pimps. Senior operative officer Tigran Petrosyan is pleased that there is no network of pimps exploiting street prostitutes in Armenia. "There are no organizers who gather the prostitutes and take a portion of the money they earn. There is no such thing in Armenia."

The Russian labor force in the Armenian market

In the fall of 2003, the sex market in nighttime Yerevan was reinforced with high quality workers. A group of Armenian pimps from Uzbekistan created a network of Russian girls, so-called elite prostitutes. The pimps were led by someone named Anush, aided by her younger brother and another woman. They brought eight Russian women to Yerevan. One of them, Oksana, told us that they would meet their prospective clients in restaurants and discotheques: "We met with men, but we didn't go with them right away. We gave them telephone numbers. They would call and Anush would find out who were they, and whether they had money, and only after that would we go." Oksana told us that she had three choices in Uzbekistan - to be out on the street, to engage in prostitution in Dubai, or to come to Armenia. She chose Yerevan.

The prostitutes stayed in an apartment on Pushkin Street. After seeing clients, they handed all the money over to Anush. The agreement was that Oksana would pay Anush $2,000 for the opportunity to work in Yerevan and $500 for her plane ticket. The subsequent profit was to be split fifty-fifty. But Oksana's debt grew from $2,500 to $7,800 in the end. The pimps forced the girls to buy expensive clothes, and their debt kept growing. Later on they found out that the clothes they had bought were available at every Yerevan bazaar. "According to Anush, my fur coat was silver fox, worth $3,000. But in fact it was worth $970; it was goat fur," Oksana recalls with a grin.

The Russian women serviced dozens of clients every day. These were no ordinary citizens. Each client paid between $50 and $200 a time. Oksana and her fellow victim, Nadia are convinced that their clients were high-level officials. Nadia said that after police uncovered the ring, their former clients had problems. The pimps had managed to operate the network for six months without any trouble. "We stayed in Yerevan for six months and visited clients every day, and we had no problem with the law enforcement agencies, but I don't know why. It was an organized group, and it was impossible not to notice it," Oksana says. The girls told me that Anush had bragged about her connections in Yerevan. She told them that she had no problem here and would destroy the prostitutes if they tried to secretly save up money and escape. However, last January the police arrested the pimps, and the group of Russian women was sent back to Uzbekistan.

To be continued

Gegham Vardanyan