In recent weeks, mass arrests of Dushanbe workers and students have been reported in various Russian regions: checks and searches for no apparent reason and also numerous acts of violence. The Tajiks accuse: they press to push the most staunch ally of Central Asia to participate more on the Ukrainian front.
Dushanbe () – In recent weeks there have been many cases of “Tajik hunting” in various regions of Russia, from the westernmost to the Asian, with mass arrests of immigrants – workers or not -, controls and searches without reason apparent, and also numerous acts of violence. The Russian authorities have not explained the reasons for this harassment against people used to going to Russia to study or to do the most humble jobs.
Some official bodies in Tajikistan, starting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have approached their Russian counterparts to ask them to investigate these cases, but the situation does not seem to change much. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Tajik citizens travel to Russia to earn money to support their families, due to the lack of jobs and decent wages in their country.
The Ozody website has tried to better understand the situation and interviewed several Tajiks involved in these dramatic circumstances. Mekhriniso Suleymanova’s daughter, for example, is studying in Russia and has seen several of her Tajik friends and fellow students beaten by the police. She herself has suffered harassment and attacks on several occasions because she belongs to a family of immigrant workers from Central Asia, towards whom there is, in her opinion, a “strong racial prejudice”. Her mother called her when she saw the videos about the violence, and she was locked up studying at home. Mekhriniso says that she can understand “the situation of so many parents who have made great efforts for their children to study in Russia.”
In the Khabarovsk region in the Far East, the Omon broke into the youth hostel without warning last week and attacked 100 Tajik students with batons, bladed and chemical weapons. As one of them, who asked to remain anonymous, recounted, “at seven in the morning they knocked on the door very loudly, yelling for documents and using very vulgar epithets; then they lined us up in the corridor without ceasing to insult us with irreproducible expressions. Anyone who tried to object was savagely beaten and we did not understand at all the reason for such violence; some even received electric shocks.”
Many similar arrests and pressures took place in Saint Petersburg, in Kotelniki in the Moscow province and in various districts of the capital. Many Tajik youths and adults were fined and later released, but several dozen were charged with totally baseless criminal charges. In social networks there are hundreds of reactions to these events, with different assessments, but in general they agree that in this way Russia is trying to put pressure on Tajikistan, the most loyal country in Central Asia, to counteract the centrifugal forces of all the others. . Some think that the growing instability in Russia, due to the war in Ukraine, is pushing Moscow to increasingly involve “Asian subjects” in war operations.
Tajik expert Abdumalik Kodirov believes that the persecution of his compatriots in Russia is the result of a feeling of despair, which is increasingly gripping Russia, cut off from all by the war in Ukraine. “Russian authorities need people to put to death without heaping more blame: so far they have used soldiers from the Federation’s Asian and Caucasian regions, and convicts, but now they need more cannon fodder,” he says. Some even hypothesize that there are secret agreements in this regard between the leaders of Moscow and Dushanbe.
London-based Tajik analyst Alisher Ilkhomov lists three factors linked to these disturbing circumstances: “the meeting of Central Asian leaders in China, which left Russia isolated, the Afghanistan problem, particularly close to the Tajiks, and the war in Ukraine, where Tajikistan forbids its citizens to participate, while Russia would like to recruit thousands of them.”
It is not the first time that Russia has put pressure on Tajikistan trying to force it to play a role in favor of Moscow, but the particular violence and brazenness of the persecutions in recent days has caused consternation and fear, and reveals a state of mass hysteria in Russia that is exceeding all limits.
Photo: Flickr/International Labor Organization
