WELCOME TO IWPR'S REPORTING CENTRAL ASIA, No. 668, February 8, 2012 HOMOPHOBIA ENDEMIC IN TAJIKISTAN, KYRGYZSTAN Prejudice, abuse and fear of attacks keeps LGBT community in shadows. By Yevgenia Kim, Yekaterina Shoshina, Dina Tokbaeva, Umed Olimov, Olimbek Olimov, Mehrangez Tursunzoda
INTERVIEW REPAIRING BROKEN TAJIK-UZBEK RELATIONSHIP Narrow vision of nation-state encourages alienation, obstructs solutions to common problems. By Shahodat Saibnazarova **** NEW ************************************************************************************ KYRGYZSTAN ELECTION UPDATES 2011: http://iwpr.net/focus/kyrgyz-election-2011 LATEST PROJECT REVIEWS: http://iwpr.net/make-an-impact/project-reviews VACANCIES: http://iwpr.net/what-we-do/vacancies **** IWPR RESOURCES ****************************************************************** CENTRAL ASIA PROGRAMME HOME: http://www.iwpr.net/programme/central-asia CENTRAL ASIA RADIO: http://iwpr.net/programme/central-asia/central-asia-radio NEWS BRIEFING CENTRAL ASIA: http://iwpr.net/programme/news-briefing-central-asia CENTRAL ASIA HUMAN RIGHTS: http://iwpr.net/programme/central-asia-human-rights-reporting-project BECOME A FAN OF IWPR ON FACEBOOK http://facebook.com/InstituteforWarandPeaceReporting https://www.facebook.com/iwprkazakhstan https://www.facebook.com/iwprkg FOLLOW US ON TWITTER http://twitter.com/iwpr http://twitter.com/IWPR_Kazakhstan http://twitter.com/iwprkg **** http://iwpr.net/ ********************************************************** DONATE TO IWPR: http://iwpr.net/donate **** http://iwpr.net/ ********************************************************** HOMOPHOBIA ENDEMIC IN TAJIKISTAN, KYRGYZSTAN Prejudice, abuse and fear of attacks keeps LGBT community in shadows. By Yevgenia Kim, Yekaterina Shoshina, Dina Tokbaeva, Umed Olimov, Olimbek Olimov, Mehrangez Tursunzoda When Alisher’s father discovered his son was gay, he beat him with an army belt, kept him at home for a month, then sent him from Tajikistan to a religious college in Iran to “knock the nonsense out of him”. It did not end there. While in Iran, Alisher learned that his father had hired men to beat up his boyfriend, so he fled the college for Russia, where he now works on a market stall. “My family doesn’t know my whereabouts, but after everything that’s happened to me, I don’t want to go back,” the 23-year-old told IWPR. “I know that my parents and the rest of the family won’t understand me. If I were to return, I would only face hatred and revulsion.” Alisher’s story may seem extreme, but the homophobic attitudes he faced are not unusual in the Central Asian state of Tajikistan and, to a lesser extent, neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. Gay rights groups and individuals have told IWPR that police harassment and the threat of public beatings in Tajikistan – and rejection and the fear of being fired in Kyrgyzstan – force many gays to remain in the closet or leave their families and migrate to more tolerant countries,. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there have been some improvements to gay rights in both countries. Homosexuality, which could lead to several years in prison during the Soviet era, has been decriminalised. And in Kyrgyzstan, which is generally more liberal, there are fewer cases of public intimidation and abuse than a decade ago, according to Maxim Bratukhin, head of local gay NGO Pathfinder. In the capital Bishkek and elsewhere there are about a dozen gay rights organisations, as well as cafes and nightclubs where members of he lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, LBGT, communities can gather. But gay activists say advances have been too slow, particularly in neighbouring Tajikistan, where homophobia is more deeply entrenched. Kiromidin Gulov runs one of Tajikistan’s only gay rights groups, Equal Opportunities, and said people sometimes attack gays, while even NGOs concerned with human rights show little interest in the issues they face. His organisation recently held a public event to which it invited a host of NGOs and rights groups, but only two people turned up. The problem, Tajik activists say, is that the public do not equate gay rights with human rights. Without wider support from NGOs, the media and government, they believe gay rights campaigns are unlikely to work. Homophobia tends to be more prevalent in the poorer and more conservative south of Kyrgyzstan, though only a tiny fraction of people nationwide live openly gay lives. There are between 18,000 and 36,000 actively gay Kyrgyzstan nationals, according to a 2011 report on HIV by local NGOs and international organisations, but of that number, only 20 in Bishkek and five elsewhere had told their families and colleagues. One 34-year-old lesbian from Talas, a town in northern Kyrgyzstan, told IWPR that she planned to emigrate this spring due to the prevailing prejudices. The widowed mother of two has been planning to move since 2006, when she attended an LGBT parade in Prague and realised how liberated other countries could be. “I felt free amongst others who were like me. No one was pointing the finger at me. There [homosexuality] is normal,” she recalled of the Czech event. “[In Kyrgyzstan] you live in constant fear – it’s a very unpleasant situation.... I don’t want to live the rest of my life like that.” At 18, she was a victim of “bride kidnapping” – abducted and pressured into marriage. “I’d always known I was lesbian, but I couldn’t do anything about it as I lived in a small village where everyone knows everyone else,” she said. Once married, she said, “It was very difficult; I was merely existing.” Although she does not believe people would attack her if her orientation became known, she says, “I still don’t feel secure and I have to ensure no one finds out – not friends, not relatives, not acquaintances.” She predict, “I don’t think our society will develop an understanding of [homosexuality] any time soon. Maybe in 20 or 30 years.” The desire to emigrate is widespread. A report jointly produced by Equal Opportunities and the Kyrgyzstan-based LGBT group Labrys found that many want to leave for Russia or Kazakstan, where no visa is required and the language is not a problem. Failing that, people in Kyrgyzstan head for the capital Bishkek, where Bratukhin says “the atmosphere is more liberal”. Homophobia is common in the workplace, and one woman from Bishkek said her boss sacked her after her homosexuality became public knowledge. “My female colleagues shunned me. I was simply fired and not given any explanation,” she said. Homophobia can also be take more subtle forms. Another Bishkek resident who tried to keep his homosexuality secret was surprised when his boss approached him on his leaving day for a quiet word. “Even though you’re gay, you were very good at your job,” the manager confided. Tajikistan, the poorest former Soviet state, is more conservative in outlook, and gays face more serious hostility, so that many live like members of a clandestine political movement. Activists say gays live in fear of violence and abuse at the hands of the police, while the public ridicules them. As a result, many want to leave for Russia or Kazakstan, according to a joint October report by Equal Opportunities and the Kyrgyzstan-based gay group Labrys. Like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan’s population is predominantly Muslim, and Gulov said a small minority of religious extremists would support severe punishment for homosexuality like stoning to death. A bigger problem, though, is abuse from the police and general public. “Sexual and physical violence against gay and bisexual men perpetrated by the police... is very common,” the Equal Opportunities/Labrys report said. Some police still treat homosexuality as if it were still a crime, arresting “suspects” and detaining them for days, activists say, and horror stories circulate. When one 28-year-old gay woman reported that her ex-husband had raped her in December 2010, a police officer advised her to remain silent “and be grateful that her former husband did not kill her”, the report said. One gay man told IWPR that when he reported a robbery to the police, the officer insulted and intimidated him, and detained him at the police station for the day. Activists also claim that some policemen use websites to contact gay men anonymously, before blackmailing or harassing them. One Dushanbe resident in his early forties told IWPR that cash-strapped policemen have blackmailed many people he knows. “There are some people who contact you, gain your trust and then become threatening,” said the man, though he added that life for gay people in Tajikistan was not impossible. One former Tajik police office said gays were unwelcome. “Gay men are not accepted here,” he said. “Maybe people do say unpleasant things to them, but the police force isn’t a finishing school. It’s a tough job.” Allegations of police abuse fit into a wider pattern of homophobia, and openly hostile attitudes are common. Furqat Anvarov, 19, recalled with approval a recent attack on a gay man near the Philharmonic concert hall in the Tajik capital Dushanbe. “I think those guys did the right thing,” Anvarov said of the attackers. “If I’d been there, I would have joined in the beating, so that they’d learn.” A 42-year-old woman in Dushanbe also said she disliked gays, adding that a man’s proper role was to establish a family and raise children. Tajikistan is short of men due to deaths in the 1992-97 civil war and the subsequent mass labour migration to Russia, and the interviewee said any remaining bachelors should get married. “If my child turned out like that, I would reject him,” she added. Gulov cited cases where gay Tajik nationals were subjected to forced “cures”. “One young man was tied to a radiator and left in the cold with no food for a weekend. Prayers were chanted to expel the ‘evil spirits’,” he said. Another man’s homosexuality became a local scandal, with neighbours quizzing his relatives and people taunting him in the street. Eventually, it became too much to bear. “The young man couldn’t take it any longer and hanged himself,” Gulov said. (Some names of interviewees have been changed to protect their identities.) Umed Olimov, Olimbek Olimov, Mehrangez Tursunzade are IWPR contributors in Tajikistan. Yekaterina Shoshina is a student at the Bishkek-based American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Yevgenia Kim is a journalist in Bishkek and Dina Tokbaeva is IWPR regional editor. INTERVIEW REPAIRING BROKEN TAJIK-UZBEK RELATIONSHIP Narrow vision of nation-state encourages alienation, obstructs solutions to common problems. By Shahodat Saibnazarova Of the five Central Asian states, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are arguable the most entwined with one another, culturally and economically. Yet despite – or perhaps because of – their proximity, they have consistently had the worst of relationships. Recent expressions of this dismal relationship include trains containing vital supplies for Tajikistan held up inside Uzbekistan, and a rise in the price of the natural gas that Tashkent sells Dushanbe. The Tajiks are heavily reliant on their larger neighbour as most of their imports and exports have to transit through that country, and their economy runs on Uzbek fuel. From their perspective, Tashkent is using its position of advantage to bully them. For its part, the Uzbek government has accused its mountainous neighbour of failing to curb Islamic militants in the past. These days, the main frictions are around the ongoing work to complete the giant Roghun hydroelectric scheme. While the Tajiks say it is their right to relieve their chronic shortages of electricity, the Uzbeks say the dam will reduce water levels on the Amu Darya, a major arterial river in Central Asia, and starve them of irrigation for their agricultural sector. IWPR asked historian Kamol Abdullaev, who lectures at Ohio State University, to explore the history of the relationship, and look at ways of breaking out of the vicious circle. Kamol Abdullaev: Since I'm a historian, I will start by going back almost 100 years, to when the Tajiks and Uzbeks lived in the Kokand Khanate and the Bukharan Emirate, parts of which became the Turkestan Region [of Imperial Russia]. In other words, they never lived in nation states. Under Soviet rule, there was initially no demarcation of ethnicity. The Central Asian leadership of the time was largely bilingual and of dual ethnicity. Ethnic consciousness was effaced, and there wasn’t a fiercely expressed sense of nationalism. Effectively it was continuity from the previous state of affairs in Turkestan Region and the Bukharan Emirate. What we have inherited is the nation state as conceptualised later on in the Soviet period. It is an ethnic nationalism centred on statehood, the premise being that a particular ethnic group should reside within its own state, and that it owns everything located on that territory. Uzbeks were defined as a Turkic nation, and Tajiks assigned to the Iranian group. But this is really an artificial construct – the Uzbeks aren’t wholly Turkic, and the Tajiks are not wholly Iranian. We have more in common than sets us apart. But it’s often the case that people with a great deal in common home in on tiny points of difference. They ignore all the things that unite them, and dig away at anything that divides them. Nationhood/ethnicity and the structure of the nation state have become a battle-ground of interpretations. After the break-up of the USSR, the idea of looking for new ways forward emerged. Some kind of Tajik-Uzbek or Uzbek-Tajik association clearly exists – “Turk-o-Tojik” [Turkic and Tajik], the term that used to be used. It’s only natural that there’s both an attraction and a repulsion there, and that there are misunderstandings and conflicts. I think this will be the case for a very long time. IWPR: Such misunderstandings are hardly in the interests of peoples who are fundamentally so close to each other. By raising freight transit fees, Uzbekistan sends a message that it controls trade routes, switching off the gas underlines Tajikistan’s dependence on Uzbek resources, and there’s the categorical disagreement over Roghun. Abdullaev: I don’t want to delve into the ferocious debate on the Roghun power station or the transport problems here. These issues are hugely politicised, and need to be resolved by technocrats and specialists in calm environment. IWPR: How can the two countries seek common ground? Abdullaev: I believe we need to consider creating a federation between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, on the model of Russia and Belarus. Both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan would win as a result. In order to connect Tashkent with the Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan had to lay a new railway and other communications via Angren. Yet the most convenient way of getting there is still through Khujand and Kanibadam, in Tajikistan. We need to move towards a realisation that we cannot get by without one other, that border restrictions need to be eased, and that we should think about a federative state. We’re not talking about a loss of independence or sovereignty – each state will have its own laws and constitution . The issue of Samarkand and Bukhara remains important to both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. [These cities in Uzbekistan have significant Tajik-speaking populations, and are the subject of occasional territorial claims by nationalists in Tajikistan.] I believe the problem would be resolved by a federative state. The younger generation in Tajikistan has never visited Samarkand or Bukhara, just as there are Uzbeks who never go to Tajikistan. It’s entirely possible to resolve this. Samarkand and Bukhara aren’t the exclusive property of Uzbekistan or Tajikistan – they belong to the entire world, to the people of Central Asia. If Tajiks can travel there without having apply for a visa, it will cease to be an issue. We’re talking about a frozen conflict that could be reignited sooner or later. Hence, we need to promote integration. Let me say again that I’m not talking about a complete merger of the two states, but a gradual process of moving closer together. IWPR: There is a substantial Tajik minority living in Uzbekistan, and many Uzbeks in Tajikistan. What about them? Abullaev: There are a lot of Tajiks living in Uzbekistan, and people from Samarkand and Bukhara were naturally drawn towards Tajikistan after independence. Many of them travelled to the country. Unfortunately, the civil war [in Tajikistan in 1992-97] altered that trend. The group we call the Tajik population in Uzbekistan is considering how it should identify itself. It’s a little unclear at the moment, but they are reluctant to identify themselves with the Tajiks, or with Tajikistan in particular, since that country is going through difficult times. But who knows? It might all change in future. IWPR: One often hears it said that the misunderstanding isn’t so much between the two countries as between their leaders, Uzbek president Islam Karimov and his Tajik counterpart Imomali Rahmon. Abdullaev: It isn’t about the individual personalities of the two presidents, it’s the fact that integration into a federal structure will entail the loss of certain powers, the loss of total authority over territory they consider their own. No president – and the Uzbek or Tajik leaders are no exceptions – is going to embrace changes that lead to a weakening of his authority. It’s important for them to control territory, resources and revenue. My personal impressions is that that presidents Karimov and Rahmon used to emphasise how close their two nations are. Uzbekistan always said it wouldn’t leave Tajikistan on its own. Uzbek leaders realised that Tajikistan had lost out from independence, as it lacks resources, most of its communications with the outside world depend on Uzbekistan, and it is unlikely to survive without Uzbekistan. Officials including President Karimov have articulated sober, reasonable arguments of this kind. So miracles may be possible. IWPR: Has some shift in ideology affected the Uzbek-Tajik relationship? Abdullaev: The ideology in both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan is exclusively ethnic; it is founded on ethnic nationalism. That doesn’t suit either Tajiks or Uzbeks because during the Soviet period we had dual identities, as Tajik or Uzbek but also as part of a greater whole, the Soviet people. The outside world views Central Asia as a single region – no one divides us into Tajiks or Uzbeks. The ideology disseminated at state level and by official media is one of national exclusivity, of the nation as sovereign and exclusive owner of its territory – Tajikistan for the Tajiks, Uzbekistan for the Uzbeks. It’s a narrow interpretation of ethnic nationalism. It can be called state-based nationalism as it is defined by geographical boundaries. I think we need to resist this trend, and the only way of doing that is to develop civil society via various initiatives. For instance, I would love to get together with my Uzbek colleagues, or invite them to visit, since I don’t get to see them now, unfortunately. I wrote my dissertation in Tashkent, the cultural capital of Central Asia since Soviet, even Tsarist times. I know colleagues in Tashkent who think along similar lines. Sadly, since visa requirements were introduced in 2001, I have not been to Tashkent. IWPR: How realistic are these ideas of commonality and rapprochement? Abdullaev: It can’t be just one more artificially created ethnic entity. It has to be about creating a civic identity. Tajiks and Uzbeks also marry Tatars, Russian, Koreans and others. We need to create a broader platform of civic values that encompasses all these people. At its heart will be the concept I called “Turk-o-Tojik”, the classic description of the Central Asian population. It includes a bilingualism that has now disappeared. Fewer and fewer people are speaking Uzbek in Tajikistan, and even if they know it, they won’t speak it. Similarly in Uzbekistan, I’ve often met colleagues there who acknowledge only later that they are ethnic Tajiks. Ethnic nationalism has its attractions, but those are now dimming. It never really inspired mass support, just as other past ideologies – pan-Turkism and pan-Iranianism – didn’t survive. We Tajiks get on very well with Iran and try to maintain good relations with it. But that doesn’t mean we want to find common cause with it. Uzbekistan, too, is a long way removed from ideas of pan-Turkism. I believe that the dalliance with ethnic nationalism and romantic “pan-” movements will gradually fade away, and that people will come to realise how important it is to establish solid, lasting, shared civic values. Shahodat Saibnazarova is IWPR radio editor in Tajikistan. **** http://iwpr.net/ ********************************************************** REPORTING CENTRAL ASIA provides the international community with a unique insiders' perspective on the region. Using our network of local journalists, the service publishes news and analysis from across Central Asia on a weekly basis. The service forms part of IWPR's Central Asia Project based in Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent and London, which supports media development and encourages better local and international understanding of the region. IWPR's Reporting Central Asia is supported by the UK Community Fund. The service is published online in English and Russian. The opinions expressed in Reporting Central Asia are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the publication or of IWPR. 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