It’s rare the West has anything nice to say about the state of press freedom in Tajikistan. But this week, Dushanbe got some deserved praise.
On May 31, the lower house of parliament unanimously approved the president’s March proposal to remove libel and insult from the criminal code, and make them administrative offenses carrying fines but no jail time. The senate and the president must still approve the change.
“I welcome President Emomali Rakhmon’s initiative and the Parliament’s subsequent steps to decriminalize defamation. Once implemented, they will help safeguard freedom of expression and freedom of the media in Tajikistan,” said the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s representative on freedom of the media, Dunja Mijatović.
Tajik prosecutors regularly use libel charges to silence critical journalists, selectively interpreting legal provisions as necessary, says Freedom House. “Independent journalism has been marginalized” under Rakhmon, the watchdog wrote in its latest report on press freedom in Tajikistan. Moreover, “journalists who criticize authorities or expose government corruption continue to report threats and intimidation.” Last month, a television presenter in Dushanbe was attacked and hospitalized shortly after announcing a new project to report on cronyism and corruption.
Don’t laugh yet, but Tajiks are suddenly the envy of beer drinkers across the United Kingdom.
Tajikistan serves the cheapest lager anywhere, London’s Daily Mail has reported. In the northern town of Khujand, a pint costs a “mouthwatering” 29 pence (about $0.45). In the capital, Dushanbe, it’s only a few cents more. Beer lovers in Tajikistan pay even less than their counterparts in Burundi and North Korea, says the paper.
The data come from pintprice.com, a crowdsourcing project where users around the world share their local beer prices. The site describes its statistics as “an important economic indicator.”
EurasiaNet.org can confirm that half a liter (just a tad more than a pint) of Dushanbinskoye sourced directly from the Pivzavod (brewery) in the center of the capital does cost only $0.40 as reported. And if you’re reading this in Greenland (the most expensive place to have a pint at $11.50) or the UK ($4.54), cover those tearful eyes: One regular visitor to the Pivzavod has the nerve to complain that the price has doubled over the past two years. (Costlier imports are still cheaper than British brews, with a 50cl bottle of Russian beer at a Dushanbe café setting you back approximately $2.10 and at the fanciest joints about $3.75. Wholesale, at the train station, that bottle is about $1.)
A new report by the United Nations drug agency sheds light on the nuts and bolts of narcotics transit from Afghanistan through Central Asia, highlighting the former Soviet republics’ lackluster efforts at interdiction.
The 106-page report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), released this month, describes how smugglers traffic heroin and opium from Afghanistan, the world’s largest producer, to Russia, the world’s largest consumer. Ninety tons of highly pure heroin, roughly a quarter of the substance exiting Afghanistan, passes through Central Asia annually. Yet in 2010 authorities in the region seized less than 3 percent of it. And despite international efforts to help, that number keeps falling.
Central Asia’s entrenched corruption makes the region a perfect smuggling route, says the report. Senior officials are complicit in the trade, or at least take bribes to look the other way, especially in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. A lack of cooperation among neighbors also offers a boon to traffickers.
The stakes are huge.
“UNODC estimates that in 2010 drug traffickers in Central Asia made a net profit of $1.4 billion from heroin sales. Much of this profit was likely incurred by Tajik traffickers, given that Tajikistan is estimated to handle most of the flow,” said the report. They profit by marking up the heroin by as much as 600 percent once it gets to Russia. Between 70 and 75 percent of the drugs travel by road, leaving a trail of new addicts across Central Asia.
Perhaps this one was a little too close to home in Dushanbe.
Movie theaters in Tajikistan -- a country ranked “not free” by Freedom House, where men are forced to shave their beards and the government spends millions on vanity projects while half the population lives on less than $2 a day -- will not be showing Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest film, “The Dictator.”
The spoof -- which follows an eccentric and brutal Gaddafi-style autocrat, Admiral-General Omar Aladeen (played by Cohen), on his misadventure-filled visit to New York -- conflicts with the “mentality” of the people, a film distributor in Dushanbe told Kloop.kg.
According to the news site, the film was to premiere on May 17 in the rest of Central Asia, save for Turkmenistan – whose parody-worthy late dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenbashi), could have easily provided some inspiration for Cohen.
Daler Davlatov, a sales manager from the company Tantan, identified by Kloop as the sole distributor of new foreign films in Tajikistan, told the news site that Tajikistan shouldn’t be compared with “Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other countries […] because our mentality, as you know yourself, is different. That’s the only reason we didn’t include ‘The Dictator’ in the list of premieres.”
Other than Davlatov, movie industry insiders contacted by Kloop declined to comment on “The Dictator.”
Over the past year, human rights activists in Kyrgyzstan have directed increasing attention at bride kidnapping. Though illegal, and notoriously difficult to quantify, the practice is thought to be widespread, especially in rural areas.
Ombudsman Tursunbek Akun, who says legislators are little interested in the issue, announced today that up to 8,000 Kyrgyz girls are kidnapped and forced into marriage annually.
Few statistics on bride kidnapping are available, and it’s unclear how Akun did his research, but one study last year found that 45 percent of women married in the eastern town of Karakol in 2010 and 2011 had been non-consensually kidnapped.
As Azita Ranjbar reported last week, many of the girls are pressured into marriage and have little recourse to justice.
Although bride kidnapping is illegal under Article 155 of Kyrgyzstan’s Criminal Code, prosecutions are almost unheard of. The state can intervene only if a complaint is filed directly by the victim. But, in many bride-kidnapping cases, the woman is isolated within the home of the abductor, and must overcome daunting obstacles to contact her relatives or the police. Even if her family is aware that she has been kidnapped, they are usually powerless to press charges against the abductor on behalf of the woman. In conservative villages, opposing a bride kidnapping can also bring the family shame.
Moreover, many victims have few legal rights because local religious leaders, rather than the state, certify their marriage ceremonies. Without a government-issued marriage certificate, the courts can do little to protect a woman and her children should she try to leave her husband.
A demonstrator hoists a banner with images of Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the late Turkish communist leader Hikmet Kıvılcımlı to mark May 1, International Workers' Day.
Tens of thousands of people, including communists, Kemalists and members of labor unions, thronged central Istanbul's Taksim Square to celebrate the national holiday.
Istanbul's annual May Day rallies have been peaceful in recent years, though many in the crowd today remembered clashes 35 years ago that left at least 34 dead.
David Trilling is EurasiaNet's Central Asia editor.
Vegetarians in Central Asia must often explain to well-meaning restaurant staff that chicken and lamb (even when it’s ground) are meat. The idea that someone would purposely choose to avoid eating meat can be perplexing in a region where lamb, beef and sometimes horse are considered the heart of any good meal. Vegetarians have been known to swoon with joy over a plate of fried eggs at a truck stop -- after politely pushing aside the greasy hot dogs, of course.
Vegans? Stay at home.
In this desolate landscape, impoverished Tajikistan offers some traditional peasant fare that gives solace to Central Asia’s meat-avoiders, and anyone else looking for an alternative to shashlik.
Not just any eatery will do. In Dushanbe, seek out a café called Hojiyon – “pilgrims” in Tajik – in the city’s 112th “micro-district,” a Soviet-built suburb of faded, five-story cement blocks surrounded by kitchen gardens and rusting playgrounds.
Hojiyon’s specialties are kurtob and shakarob -- similar dishes, both eaten from shared wooden bowls, usually by hand. Kurtob is a jumble of flaky bread called fatir, fresh tomato and onion, oil (your choice of flax seed or vegetable) and kefir, a mildly fermented milk drink. A bit lighter and less soupy is the shakarob – fatir, tomatoes, onion and yoghurt, without the oil. Add salt and slices of hot, green pepper to taste. The result brings to mind a Central Asian take on Tuscan panzanella, a mushy salad of day-old ciabatta, tomatoes, onions and vinaigrette whose name comes from the word for “little swamp.”
Interethnic tensions between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan have slipped out of the headlines, but analysts say the threat of renewed violence is still a real concern. And if there’s one Kyrgyz politician who loves to stoke the tensions, it’s Jyldyz Joldosheva, a parliamentary deputy from the ultranationalist Ata-Jurt party.
Since the June 2010 ethnic violence, when approximately 450 people died, Joldosheva has regularly traded on anti-Uzbek sentiment. She has often claimed to have proof that members of the Uzbek “diaspora” are plotting against their hosts, the Kyrgyz. Her language relegates Uzbeks to outsider status, although they have lived in the area that is now southern Kyrgyzstan for hundreds of years.
Now she’s getting her supporters riled up with the newsflash that Uzbek high school students are taking their state exams in their native language. This displeases people, AKIpress cited Joldosheva as saying on April 18. She’s demanding an explanation from Education Minister Kanat Sadykov, while other deputies, perhaps bowing to the xenophobic climate, are falling in line behind her. One warns that his constituents are rallying at parliament’s gates, demanding the exams be stopped. The Education Ministry says the tests have been carried out in Kyrgyz, Russian and Uzbek since 2001; of approximately 40,000 students who took the exam last year, about 1,000 took it in Uzbek.
Joldosheva’s rhetoric is divisive in and of itself, but in a post-conflict situation it could be explosive.
A poet and scholar before he was a diplomat, Tehran’s long-serving ambassador to Dushanbe, Ali Asghar Sheardoost, is known about town for his devotion to Iranian and Tajik cultural and linguistic ties. But he also serves as an emissary to one of Iran’s few friends.
