Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 10 – When Central
Asians go to Russia to work as gastarbeiters, they all too often leave behind
their children frequently without adequate supervision. Some observers suggest
there may be hundreds of thousands of such “orphans” who constitute both an
enormous social problem and represent potential recruits for criminal and extremist
groups.
Tilav Rasul-zade, a journalist for
Fergana News, says that in that country alone there are uncounted numbers of
such children and few institutions which seek to address their needs. Their relatives, he says, “often cannot or do
not want to look after them” and they end up in the streets where they commit
crimes (fergananews.com/articles/9628).
“Many of these
children are sick,” adds one of the few officials in Tajikistan who works with
them. “Some need serious courses of treatment.” Their parents have effectively
abandoned them, and they are thus left on their own to beg, to violate the law
or to turn to extremist activities.
They are truly “orphans with living
parents” but without orphanages. Dilor Atabayeva, the head of the Consortium
Initiative in Dushanbe, says that these children feel less responsible for
their behavior and that leads them to get involved in illegal actions of all
kinds, including the most extreme and violent.
Tajikistan can’t get along without
migration. Some 700,000 to a million Tajiks go abroad for work each year, and
the transfer payments they send home now make up 35 percent of the country’s
GDP. But there are real victims of this
migration, and they are in the first instance the children left behind.
Under international pressure,
Dushanbe has been talking about adopting a law on migration that would deal
among other things with these children. But the discussion has dragged on for
more than five years, Rasul-zade says; and no one has even seen a draft version
of the measure.
Meanwhile, he says, “thousands of
Tajik children … risk remaining without parents and are living in the streets.”
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