CIVIL SOCIETY
Daniel Sershen
10/15/07
Yangi Makhalla, a dusty, low-slung neighborhood on the edge of the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh, has a bad reputation. Most nonresidents are reluctant to set foot inside the settlement, home to most of Kyrgyzstan’s population of Lyuli, an outcast Central Asian minority group.
Instead, the average city-dweller meets Lyuli in a different context: begging, telling fortunes, or gathering metal, plastic and other salvageable objects. In a region where many are poor and disregarded, Lyuli are the extreme the most marginalized of the marginal.
Nina Kadryan, a non-Lyuli outreach worker with a local health services group, said her peers were shocked to hear that she visits the area regularly. "They sometimes ask me, ’Aren’t you scared to go down every last alley with them?’ But I do it every day," Kadryan said.
The view from within Yangi Makhalla is quite different. It is the outside world that threatens, turning the mud-brick walls of the neighborhood into both refuge and prison. "Most people don’t leave the neighborhood," said Abdurashid Urinov, chair of the residents’ association. He described a self-perpetuating cycle of mistrust between Lyuli and outsiders, deepened by a lack of documents and education. "The majority of them don’t know their rights," he said.
Scholars link Lyuli to the Roma of Eastern Europe often known as Gypsies tracing both groups back to a common origin on the Indian subcontinent. Some community leaders on both sides consider the two groups to be distinct, however, pointing to differences in language and religion. Most Lyuli are Muslims, whereas the majority of European Roma are Christians.
Seeking to settle the previously itinerant Lyuli, the Soviets created Yangi Makhalla which means "new neighborhood" in Uzbek after World War II. The group ran its own kolkhoz, or collective farm, and lived a tolerable if largely segregated life, according to Urinov. The Soviet collapse in 1991 brought an end to the collective farm; its land was broken up and distributed, many say unfairly. Meanwhile, according to Arsen Ambaryan, director of a local human rights group, the Kyrgyz government’s policy hardened into one of neglect. "Here there’s not a direct conflict between state and community. The authorities say, ’You don’t bother us and we won’t bother you.’ It’s a situation of not war, not peace," he said.
Starting in 2004, Ambaryan’s group, Our Law, conducted a year-long survey of living conditions for Lyuli in the Osh region. He estimated the Lyuli population in southern Kyrgyzstan at 3,500, with unemployment approaching 90 percent. Some Lyuli survive by farming their remaining parcels of land, or working as hired day laborers in the fields. Many have had to resort to begging or scavenging.
But despite all that Yangi Makhalla lacks water, money, medical care, education in the Lyuli language a less apparent shortage is more critical. Many residents have no identifying documents, leaving them without access to key government services. Despite being settled in Yangi Makhalla, many Lyuli fell through the cracks in the Soviet bureaucracy and did not register for passports. Those who did receive Soviet-era identification often cannot afford the cost of converting to new, Kyrgyz documents.
"I need to change my passport, but I have no money," said Israel Rzayev, an unemployed man who supports his family by farming a communal plot.
In a corrupt region where the police can stop passersby on any pretext, Urinov said, venturing far from home without a passport amounted to an invitation to extortion. A detained Lyuli, he said, "might be right, but he’s already in the wrong, because he has no documents." Finding employment without papers is also difficult, Urinov added.
The wife of the local mullah agreed. "If someone goes to work in the bazaar and the police come and ask for documents, he will pay a big fine," she said.
Birth certificates are arguably even more important, since they offer newborns access to government benefits, and, eventually, passports of their own. But the cost of maternity hospitals leads many Lyuli to give birth at home, meaning their children are often not registered.
In its survey of approximately 400 families, Ambaryan’s group found that 45 percent of the community’s children did not receive government support because they lacked proof of birth. "This is already the third generation without documents," he said.
Rzayev and other Lyuli parents outlined a vicious cycle in which the lack of documents precluded the possibility of obtaining employment or state benefits, which in turn denied their children any opportunity to improve their lives. "Snow is coming soon but we don’t have anything [warm] to put on the kids’ feet," Rzayev said, adding that this meant his children would probably not go to school in the winter.
As part of its study, Our Law supported a legal challenge by a family of five that was completely without documents, eventually winning a judgment that the Kyrgyz authorities should issue the plaintiffs identification. Ambaryan hoped the case would serve as a precedent. In the meantime, Kadryan said Kyrgyzstan’s Lyuli community would continue to eke out a life on the margins. "People don’t live here they just survive," she said. "And people survive however they can."
Editors Note: Daniel Sershen is a freelance journalist based in Bishkek.
