Central Asian children pick cotton (International Labor Organization (ILO), ILO-IPEC PROACT-CAR project)
While some children toil out of necessity for their families, in some countries the use of child labor is a state policy.
Children, some of them as young as 7 years old, can be found working at virtually every bazaar in Central Asia. They sell anything from food to clothing and cosmetics, and preteen boys often push carts in outdoor markets while young girls from the countryside offer to work as housekeepers.
The money they earn is often a lifeline for their families. Poverty is the main reason these kids leave school and work.
"I am proud that I work and get paid; I distribute bread," says 13-year-old Safar from the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, adding, "I wish I could go to school together with my classmates, but life is hard and I have to work."
Officials in Central Asia have long denied that children are forced to work. Many contend that the kids are helping their parents after school and that it is rural residents themselves who send their children into the fields to earn much-needed cash.
Firuz Saidov, an expert on child labor at the Center for Strategic Studies under Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, admits that there is no way to stop child labor because many Tajiks live in poverty and children are crucial for families to have enough money to survive.
"Children work mostly in trade, agriculture, and in the street -- they wash cars. It's hard to stop this in Tajikistan," Saidov says. "Their rights are violated both by employers and police."
But in many rural areas, particularly in places like Uzbekistan, it is the government that forces children to pick cotton. The practice has existed since the Soviet era and continued when the Central Asian countries gained independence in 1991 -- even after they joined international agreements banning child labor.
Not An Official Priority
Human rights activists say that cotton brings cash to the state coffers as well as to the pockets of the ruling elite in some countries.
Jovid Juraev, of the international organization Save the Children in Dushanbe, is critical of the Tajik authorities' stance on the use of child labor. He says there is no political will to end it despite official pronouncements to the contrary.
"The use of children in cotton picking has become a national catastrophe -- some 200,000 Tajik children are forced to do hard and harmful work [with the number increasing during the main harvest season]," Juraev says. "It amazes me that despite the decrees made by the president and the government, children are still subject to economic exploitation. And no one dares to fight it."
In neighboring Uzbekistan, the world's third-largest cotton exporter, the use of child labor in the cotton sector is a state policy.
As the cotton harvest begins in September, schools are shut down and thousands of children are bused to fields, sometimes with a police escort. They pick what is dubbed the "white gold" that brings around $1 billion in annual exports for Uzbekistan.
Uzbek authorities have been under fire from international human rights groups to stop using forced child labor in the cotton industry. A campaign launched in November brought some results, as major clothing chains including Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Gap, and H&M -- as well as textile producers in South Asia -- resolved to stop buying Uzbek cotton fiber.
The Long Haul
Nadezhda Atayeva, who heads the Paris-based Association on Human Rights in Central Asia, says that "noticeable progress" has been made in the campaign to boycott Uzbek cotton. She says the Uzbek authorities seem to have stopped denying the use of child labor and are willing to hold a dialogue with human rights groups and international organizations.
The Uzbek parliament adopted a law in January on "Guarantees of the Rights of the Child." It was followed by ratification of the International Labor Organization's (ILO) convention on the worst forms of child labor and minimum age.
In Kyrgyzstan, a girl collects tobacco leaves (ILO courtesy photo)
She also says the coming cotton harvest will be a litmus test for the Uzbek government.
"Despite those positive changes, it is important that international organizations have the possibility to monitor the situation in the autumn," Atayeva says. "Every interested party should be able to go to [Uzbek] cotton fields and check if there are children below the age of 15 working there and, if so, what their working conditions are."
History Of Ambivalence
In Turkmenistan as well, child labor is widely used during the cotton harvest, although the country is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It also passed laws in 2002 and 2005 prohibiting the employment of children under the age of 16 and regulating a child's right to protection from exploitation.
The late Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov frequently issued statements on the necessity of ending child labor, but the situation remained largely unchanged throughout his presidency.
The U.S. State Department estimated that more than 1 million children were part of the labor force in 2000. More recent statistics are hard to find.
Last year, Niyazov's successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, made a similar statement. But human rights activists say children are still widely used for labor in Turkmenistan.
In Kazakhstan, children work in cotton and tobacco fields and as unskilled laborers in urban areas. In recent years, children from neighboring Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have been working in Kazakhstan along with their parents.
Dana Zhandayeva, Kazakh project coordinator of ILO's child-labor project, tells RFE/RL that the situation with forced child labor has improved since the Kazakh government ratified two ILO conventions (one on a minimum employment age and the other on the worst forms of child exploitation) and asked for international organizations' assistance to stop the use of child labor.
A boy hauls potatoes in Amina, Kazakhstan (ILO courtesy photo)
There are bright spots. Zhandayeva says that in Kyrgyzstan, for instance, the government has been at the forefront of the fight against child slavery. She says the Kyrgyz government is the only one in Central Asia that not only cooperates with international organizations to fight child labor but also allocates funds to stop it.
RFE/RL Tajik Service correspondents Zarangez Navruzshoeva in Dushanbe and Mirzo Salimov in Prague contributed to this report
Young nationalists march in Moscow
Chingiz Aitmatov in January
Aitmatov with his daughter, Shirin, in 1975
Mutabar Tojiboeva
Tojiboeva was serving an eight-year sentence for criticizing officials for violently ending a protest in the southern town of Andijon in 2005.
"There is only one thing I can liken my life [in prison] to: Uzbekistan's prisons are like islands of torture," Tojiboeva told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service shortly after reuniting with her family. "They are isolated from society and from people." Tojiboeva, who is from Ferghana in the country's east, was arrested in October 2005 and sentenced to eight years in prison on more than a dozen charges, including slander and extortion.
Independent observers and human rights activists said the charges were fabricated and aimed at silencing Tojiboeva, a fierce critic of the Uzbek government.
Deteriorating Health
Tojiboeva, who is 46 years old, had sent letters from prison saying she was being ill-treated and tortured. She was temporarily held in a psychiatric detention center and forced to undergo medical treatment in 2006.
Domestic and international organizations had long urged the Uzbek authorities to release Tojiboeva, whose health was deteriorating.
Tojiboeva's release came as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher visited Tashkent for high-level meetings with Uzbek leaders. Boucher said on June 2 after meeting with President Islam Karimov that talks had focused on improving human rights and that some progress had been made.
The Uzbek government has a practice of freeing jailed human-rights defenders ahead of important meetings. Earlier this year, a number of opponents of the government were set free ahead of a key bilateral meeting between Uzbekistan and the European Union, which has suspended sanctions imposed against Uzbekistan following the Andijon violence. Independent observers and human rights organizations called the move by Tashkent mere window dressing on the country's poor human-rights practices.
Not Told Of Release
Tojiboeva says her release came as a surprise to her and her fellow inmates and that she was not told until the last minute.
"One of the inmates said, 'There will be visitors tomorrow and they want to hide you in another prison.' So I expected to be transferred to the Tashkent prison," she says. "The prison administration and representatives of the Interior Ministry were standing there, and I asked them where I was going. They didn't say anything."
Tojiboeva will remain on parole for the next three years.
"It means for the next three years they will watch every step I take," she says. "If I say anything unpleasant about those in power or for any other government officials, they will find a reason to put me behind bars again."
Despite that pressure, Tojiboeva says she will continue to fight for human rights and the freedom of those men and women living in the harsh Uzbek prison conditions. "You know, as I said, Uzbekistan's prisons are islands of torture. I cannot ignore the plight of imprisoned men and women caught on those islands," Tojiboeva says. "I believe I have to continue my activity now in order to end torture in Uzbek prisons and defend the rights of male and female inmates. This is my duty now."
Top Human Rights Award
Earlier this month, Tojiboeva won an international human rights prize -- the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders -- which is awarded jointly by the world's 10 leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Hans Thoolen, the chairman of the jury for the award, described Tojiboeva as "an exceptionally brave woman in a country where standing up for human rights is a dangerous activity, which can lead to imprisonment and death."
Tojiboeva's release might make it possible for her to receive the award in person in Geneva later this year.
RFE/RL Uzbek Service correspondent Shuhrat Babajanov contributed to this report
Once one of the most powerful men in Kazakhstan, Rakhat Aliev is now in exile
Alyaksandar Kazulin -- one political prisoner too many?
Religious literature is strictly banned in Uzbekistan
Zifa Sadriyeva says the jobs on offer are "humiliating"
Her husband, too, is disabled. Sadriyeva has a job -- she works from home, making cardboard folders for a local office-supplies company. But the work pays just 1,000 rubles ($40) a month, hardly enough to cover expenses for food and the medications she and her husband need.
All the same, it is a job, she says, something most disabled people in Russia do not have. By law, employment agencies in Russia are obliged to seek out work for disabled people. But the reality is very different, according to Sadriyeva.
"What they offer at the job centers for disabled people simply isn't suitable for us. They are all low-paid jobs," she says. "It is so humiliating. The idea of working cheers anyone up, especially disabled people like us. I know disabled people who were offered jobs like nursery-school teacher or boiler worker. Men are offered jobs as plumbers; but tell me, can a disabled person work as a plumber?"
In Tatarstan, as in the rest of Russia, companies are legally obliged to employ a certain percentage of people with disabilities. But Dania Galiullina, a spokeswoman for Tatarstan's Labor and Employment Ministry, says most companies simply ignore the law.
"Companies that refuse to employ disabled people have to pay fines," Galiullina says, "but the amount of the fine is so low, most companies prefer to accept that they are breaking the law and just pay the fine."
Out Of Sight
According to the United Nations, 14 million Russians are disabled. But it's rare that you will see a wheelchair user, a person with Down's syndrome, or a blind person on the streets.
Denise Roza, director of Perspektiva, an NGO that champions the rights of people with disabilities in Russia, says that during the Soviet period, people with disabilities were almost never seen.
"Most disabled people were invisible. They had no rights, there was no legislation. It was as if they weren't there -- I mean they weren't out in the community," Roza says. "If you ask disabled people who lived through the Soviet era, they'll tell you that, that 'We were invisible.'"
Two prominent Soviet societies that began operating in the 1920s did much to help certain areas of the disabled community: the blind and the deaf. But children with developmental disabilities, including Down's syndrome and cerebral palsy, were mostly taken away from their families and put into institutions, Roza says, where they received little, if any, education.
Social-system reforms drew Moscow's community of disabled people out for a rare public protest in mid-2004 (epa)
Today, Roza says, the emphasis for disabled children is to include them in ordinary schools, rather than sending them to specialist institutions, where they are cut off from the rest of society.
"Children need to be with their families, they need to be near their homes. And they need to have a community. But that argument unfortunately doesn't always work, because we have special educators [in Russia] -- they call themselves 'defektologists,' a term that we dislike -- who tell us that children are better off in this other setting," Roza says. "All you have to do is look around you to see that you don't see people with disabilities, because they've been isolated in special institutions. We meet a lot of these people when they're 18, 19, 20, and it's very hard to find them jobs, because they're not ready to go off to work, because they don't have social skills; they don't have a network."
Societal Friction
This different approach causes some friction between the more traditionalist groups of people with disabilities in Russia and groups that take their leads from Western organizations.
"On the whole, we support integration, because the main aim of our society is to integrate the deaf person into society, into ordinary society," says Aleksandr Ivanov, the head of the Rehabilitation Department at the Russian Society for the Deaf, which has 200,000 members across the country. "The trouble is that this is very individual -- one deaf child might be able to study at an ordinary school using special equipment, but there are other children who, for various reasons, find it very difficult to learn, and so of course it's better for them to go to specialist schools."
Natalia Prisetskaya has been in a wheelchair since a spinal injury left her paralyzed in the lower half of her body at the age of 15. Not only did she lose many of her teenage years, her confinement to a wheelchair meant her studies were cut short, for the simple reason that she wasn't physically able to get to her lectures.
"After my accident, I went to university to study," Prisetskaya says. "But it was very difficult because there were so many stairs, and because of that I gave up my studies."
Only now, at 34, has she completed a degree in economics, half a lifetime after she began.
Nevertheless, more traditional schools are starting to accept children with disabilities. In Moscow alone, 10 schools now take children with developmental disabilities, blind and deaf children, and children in wheelchairs -- and more are expected to welcome these children in the near future.
Citizens In Peril
For Pavel Opiyev, who has been blind since birth, integrating into society was less difficult than for his peers. His was a rare case: his mother taught at the local school, so unlike most blind children he was able to study at a mainstream school for a few years before he was sent for more specialized education. His main complaint about Russia is how difficult it is, as a disabled person, to get around.
"Taking into account that in Moscow nothing at all is very accessible, then, yes, [it's very difficult]," Opiyev says. "In Russia there aren't that many disabled people who can find the strength to move around on their own. And you can understand why: Our public transport system isn't just inaccessible, it's downright dangerous. You take your life in your hands. On the metros and on buses, nothing is provided for disabled passengers. And on the streets, perhaps only one in 10 traffic lights" emits a coded audible signal for blind pedestrians.
In the last few years, Opiyev, who is 28, has twice been knocked down by a car, and has nearly fallen beneath an underground train on several occasions.
At Perspektiva, Roza's top priority today is to persuade the government to adopt the new UN convention on disabled rights. She is positive about the future, particularly after a recent speech given by the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, in which he promised to take greater steps to help the country's disabled population.
"This was an issue we did not talk about at all for a long time," Medvedev said. "But the situation is changing now, and the state has made this issue one of its priorities."
In Prisetskaya's estimation, life is starting to improve, albeit slowly, for Russians with disabilities.
"I think we have more opportunities than before because society is starting to change, rather a lot, and it seems to me that these days it's difficult to force someone to stay at home," Prisetskaya says. "Also, you see more and more disabled people on television, on the streets. You see more and more how people who are disabled are leading ordinary lives."
RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service contributed to this report