Russia's economic collapse is driving out some Central Asian immigrants, but the crisis is prompting reform in governments back home, Mark Godfreyreports from Tajikistan
THE CURRENT economic squeeze is doubly difficult for the former Soviet Union, still struggling with the economic trauma of being cut loose of Soviet subsidies with the collapse of the USSR.
Emigrants who lost their jobs in a collapse of Russia’s construction industry have been trickling home from Moscow and St Petersburg to the villages and towns of central Asia’s two poorest states, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
“It’s an unprecedented situation,” says Bermet Moldobaeva at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) office in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek.
Some emigrants, however, are staying put in Russia, illegally. Since there are no jobs and “absolutely no social welfare” back home, Zarrina, a Tajik translator who lost her job at a Moscow trading company, is working voluntarily for a Russian non-government organisation. She is hoping this will lead to a paying job soon. A family back home depends on the portion of her salary that she wires home monthly.
Going home is not an option: in her last job she made 12 times her school teacher mother’s $60 (€45.65) salary. Their cardiologist neighbour subsists on $65 a month.
Tajikistan relies on emigrant remittances for half its total GDP. A vicious civil war in the 1990s, corruption and rows with neighbours have bred poverty in Tajikistan, which recently got $120 million in prop-up money from the International Monetary Fund. Yet some see in the recent gloom the country’s best chance for reform.
Director of the local American Chamber of Commerce in Tajikistan, Temur Rakhimov, says government is cutting red tape for foreign investors and making it a lot easier for locals to set up private business. Government sees foreign investment as the only way to avert economic meltdown, says Temur. “There is no local capacity to create jobs.”
Long-serving president Emomali Rahmonov’s most radical reform is an announcement of a two-year moratorium on inspections of small and medium private businesses – hitherto routinely used by officials and police as excuses for bribe-seeking. These reforms are promising and even more vital, given that prices have collapsed for the country’s two main exports, cotton and aluminium. Farmers holding on to last year’s cotton harvest for a price rebound are defaulting on bank loans, explains Temur.
For Central Asia the cruellest by-product of the global recession is the trafficking trade. In a recession, cash-pressed construction firms in Russia and elsewhere “will seek cheaper labour, or slave labour”, explains Zlatko Zigic, co-ordinator for Central Asia at the IOM. The IOM has tried to stem the estimated 100,000 central Asians trafficked every year, the men mostly for labour in Russia, and women for sex work in Turkey and the Arab Gulf states.
Efforts to bring in bilateral agreements between governments to prevent trafficking are “going down the tubes” thanks to the global downturn, says Zigic. Impoverished locals, more desperate than ever for work, are easier prey for traffickers.
Corruption prevents prosecution in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, where border guards take bribes of $100 to allow trafficked workers through.
The IOM is urging Russia and Kazakhstan to take a long-term view – both need labour, particularly in agriculture – before enforcing labour quotas with poorer Central Asian states. The organisation’s Bermet Moldobaeva points to pockets in Russia, like the Volgograd region, where agricultural labourers are still needed.
The full effects of Russia’s economic meltdown will ultimately not be felt, however, as long as workers like Zarrina stay away.
“Some didn’t come back because they couldn’t afford the tickets, and some can’t go back because there are no jobs,” says Temur.
A return of migrants could create a social as well as an economic crisis, he says, pointing to worries about increasing crime and poverty.
Apocalyptic predictions of unemployment-induced social chaos in Central Asia are overstated, suggests Bess Brown, regional economic and environmental adviser at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Dushanbe. Emigrants will simply continue working in Russia, for ever lower wages. “Migrants in Russia will stay, for any job that pays something is better than coming home where there are no jobs.”
Brown thinks that Tajiks who came home for the traditional winter break will be going back, as usual, around this time – many to take poor-paying jobs in agriculture if there are no construction jobs.
Remittances won’t dry up completely: “They’ll send home what they can.”
Efforts to open alternative labour markets have faltered because, apart from Russia, the demand is for skilled labour. The Tajik government wants donors for help to resurrect the Soviet-era system of vocational schools to teach locals useful trades like metalworking. Getting teachers will be a problem though: most of them left for Russia during the Tajik civil war in the early 1990s.
Along with government reform there are other glimmers of hope. A Swedish NGO is helping farmers to install home vegetable canneries in Tajik farming villages, while the OSCE has $100,000 to spend on a network of small business resource centres.
But NGOs are limited in budget and “don’t have national reach”, says Brown.