Plight of "Abandoned Wives" in Tajikistan

While mass labour migration has provided a life-support system for much of Tajikistan, those families where the main breadwinner has stopped sending money home are among the poorest in the country. 

Civil society groups say more needs to be done to allow abandoned wives to get state help, find ways of earning an income on their own, and track down husbands who should be paying child support .

The problems facing such families came up a series of discussion events held in various parts of Tajikistan from November 25 to December 6. The debates, organised jointly by the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, the United Nations women’s agency UNIFEM, the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation–Tajikistan, and IWPR, are expected to generate recommendations on protecting the rights and interests of migrant families in Tajikistan.

Farzona Yusupova, 36, is fairly typical of the women left behind by husbands who go abroad. Although happily married with three children, the couple were so short of money that her husband had to find work in Russia.

“There was no news from him for about two years, but then I heard rumours that he’d got married in Russia,” Yusupova said. “After a while his relatives grew tired of keeping us and drove us out of the house. Who would take me in now with three children? I found a hostel to live in and got myself a job as a household servant so that we’d have something to live on.”

Having survived the experience, Yusupova’s main worry is that as a single parent she cannot give her children the attention they need now that they have reached adolescence.

Although economic crisis in Russia, by far the most popular destination, has reduced the demand for migrant labour, unofficial estimates put the current number of Tajikistan nationals working abroad at up to one million. That includes both those who have the right documents and permits and those who are working illegally.

Muzafar Zaripov, who runs the NGO Migration and Development and heads a resource centre that helps migrants, calculates that 930,000 people went to Russia in 2009. The IOM’s current estimate is slightly lower at 800,000.

According to the IOM about 95 per cent of the migrants are men, and nearly 80 per cent of that number are married.

The money they send home has cushioned large numbers of households against destitution over many years in which the Tajik economy has performed poorly. According to World Bank data presented last year, remittances account for nearly 60 per cent of gross domestic product.

Studies show that most migrants do send money back, although this may not be much as they have to pay their own living and other costs first. A study which the IOM published in April 2009 said the average amount of money sent home by a labour migrant was 400 dollars in the course of a year.

In a later report, from August last year, an IOM researcher calculated that some 37 per cent of households where the main breadwinner was abroad were living “in poverty or extreme poverty” because they were receiving under 500 US dollars a year, and in some cases nothing at all. “The 25 per cent that receive more than 500 dollars but less than 1,000 dollars annually may also be at risk,” the report added.

For a minority of families, emigration becomes a permanent state and sooner or later the money stops coming. The IOM report estimated that about one-third of husbands working abroad would settle down in the host country, leaving their wives back in Tajikistan.

These “abandoned wives”, the report said, together with those receiving little or nothing from husbands they are in contact with, constitute a risk group. “These women live in extreme poverty; they lack assistance from the government, international organisations and the local community; and their physical and mental health is vulnerable as they are defenceless against famine, crime and abuse,” it said.

Oinihol Bobonazarova, head of the Perspektiva Plus NGO, described some of the issues facing abandoned families.

“We’ve done a lot of work on suicide, where women set fire to themselves. Some of them did so because their husbands had gone away, remarried or failed to send back money,” she said. “Secondly, children are left without care, as the mother has to go out to earn a crust and spends day after day sitting [trading] at the market.”

Alla Kuvvatova, who heads the NGO Association for Gender Equality and Preventing Violence against Women, said people could seek government assistance in such cases.

“There is social support; the state can help if there’s no breadwinner in a family for an extended period. They can come say, “He’s gone and he isn’t [financially] helping me’,” she explained.

Kuvvatova said lack of education was a basic problem for vulnerable women. “They need to be taught how to earn money. They need the simplest skills,” she said.

Husbands are legally bound to provide for any children, including after a divorce, but this becomes especially difficult to enforce when they are far off in another country. Often, they do not divorce their wife in Tajikistan, making it hard for her to pursue alimony through legal mechanisms. Other wives may have married only according to the Muslim rite without registering with the state authorities, so the onus is on them to prove paternity.

In any case, such women, who typically live in rural areas and may not be able to travel to a large town, are as a rule unfamiliar with how to take their case to a government agency or go to a specialist NGO for advice.

Neli Safarova, coordinator of a project on access to justice and legal reform which the League of Women Lawyers is running, said women could get various kinds of help from her group.

“We advise them, and if they need legal aid we will write their statements for court proceedings,” she said. “A husband can be declared missing…or dead.”

In cases where only a religious wedding had taken place and the woman was therefore not married in the eyes of the law, Safarova said her organisation would seek a court order for a blood test to establish paternity.

She said lawyers would also help women secure a court order for alimony and then try to track the delinquent husband down through reciprocal legal arrangements concluded by the Commonwealth of Independent States, of which Russia and Tajikistan are both members.

Safarova said legislative changes were needed in several areas – to tighten up on alimony payment, to ensure that all marriages were properly registered, and to make sure that every worker who left the country did so as a legal emigrant.

At the moment, it is easy for migrant workers to conceal the fact that they are married and evade paying child support and alimony once they have stopped sending regular remittances.

Firuz Saidov, an expert with the Centre for Strategic Studies in Dushanbe, would like to see a revival of the Soviet-era practice of recording marital status and children in people’s passports.

At the moment, it is possible for a man with family in Tajikistan national to marry a Russian woman by buying a forged certificate stating that he is single.

Saidov would like to see a formal agreement between Russia and Tajikistan requiring registration of marriage in one state to be notified to the authorities in the other as a matter of course.

When a Tajik migrant settles down and marries a Russian, that is often the point at which he will stop sending money back home.

Bobonazarova said that in some cases Tajiks concluded such marriages to get accommodation, to ease the route to Russian citizenship, or just as a way of deterring local police from harassing them. She cited estimates that 12,000 Tajik men get married in Russia every year.

That is still a tiny proportion of the men who work in other countries, three-quarters of whom will remain there for under a year and continue to support their families as best they can.

As Saidov pointed out, 70 per cent of Tajik labour migrants travel abroad in spring and come back when the cold sets in. “They’re seasonal; they go off and then come back to their wives again,” he said.

With no end to labour migration in sight, though, the real hardships facing those households that are abandoned by their breadwinners look set to continue.

Mehrangez Tursunzade is an IWPR-trained journalist in Tajikistan.

This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.

The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.