Tajik Unemployment Fuels Islamic Militancy

The army of young men hanging around looking for work in Tajikistan provides a fertile recruiting-ground for Islamic extremist groups, analysts in the Central Asian state say.

So far this year, 11 people have been convicted of involvement in outlawed Islamic groups. Three of them, from the Abdurahmon Jomi district, were found to have been part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical but unarmed group; while the other eight from Kabodien district were accused of joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a guerrilla force and Taleban ally operating mainly in Afghanistan.

Most of them were young and from rural areas where paid work is hardest to find.

“When young people can’t get work, of course they’re liable to get mixed up in extremist groups of various kinds,” local analyst Saidrahmon Nazriev told IWPR. “Look at how many young people have been convicted of membership of various criminal groups in recent years. That shows that when ideals go out the window, young folk are susceptible to other kinds of ideas, and they get exploited.”

According to Nazriev, local government is not doing nearly enough to create workplaces for the younger generation.

IWPR interviewed Khurshid Haqnazarov, a 28-year-old unemployed man from the Bokhtar district in southern Tajikistan, who described the difficulty of scraping a living for people like him.

“I’m always hunting for work. We sit down at the end of the bazaar, at what they call the Mardikor [day-labourers] Market. You can get a bit of work there,” he said. “I might make ten somoni [two US dollars] in a day, I might make nothing. We sit there from morning onwards and we’re ready to do any kind of job. I don’t have a passport and without that, they won’t give me work pulling a handcart.”

Yasrib Karim is an IWPR radio contributor in Tajikistan.

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

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