Village "Lost" Between Tajik and Uzbek Lands

Residents of a village on Tajikistan’s northern border with Uzbekistan feel they have been cast adrift by their government.

The village of Platina, with around 1,600 residents, lies in the Spitamen district of Tajikistan.

Tajiks and Uzbeks live happily side by side, but both face the same difficulties – lack of medical facilities in the area and a shortage of work.

Tajik families, however, face an additional difficulty as there is no local school, so their children have to attend an Uzbek school six kilometres away. As well as having to travel a long way to school, they are studying the curriculum and history of Uzbekistan, and using Uzbek instead of their native Tajik as the learning medium. Apart from the linguistic differences, they have to learn Latin script for Uzbek instead of the Cyrillic used for Tajik.

The audio programme, in Russian and Tajik, went out on national radio stations in Tajikistan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.