Pointing to the leaden waters of the river, Manzura Borbieva recalls the horror of seeing her 21-year-old colleague commit suicide with her baby.
“That’s where she jumped in,” she said.
Borbieva, a pot washer at the bazaar in the provincial town of Vahdat in ex-Soviet Tajikistan, saw trader Maftnuna Rakhmonova plunge into the swollen river with her three-month-old son.
Photo: AFP
In the Central Asian country where a region-wide economic crisis has exacerbated grinding poverty and social tensions, some women are choosing a terrible way out.
“We told her to at least spare the child, but she would not listen,” recalled Borbieva, who scrapes by on less than US$100 per month as a sweets seller in the town around 20km from the capital Dushanbe. “She told us, crying: ‘Whatever my destiny is, that will be the destiny of my child.’”
Rakhmonova committed suicide in April along with her son, whose body was never found. Her death is one of at least four such recent suicides that have shocked the conservative mainly Muslim country.
Up to half of working-age men in the impoverished republic head to Russia to find work, often in construction. But such jobs are increasingly scarce due to the recession in Russia and families are struggling without the men’s contributions.
Rakhmonova’s family attributes her suicide and infanticide to regular domestic violence and abuse at the hands of her in-laws, but Borbieva says such tragedies are also rooted in the economic situation.
“Our men cannot find work to feed their large families. Quarrels start inside the home,” Borbieva said as traders from the bazaar where Rakhmonova works gathered to listen.
“This is what drives people to do such things,” Borbieva added. “This is our Tajikistan.”
VIOLENCE RISING
The landlocked country has been clobbered by the wider economic crisis sweeping through the Central Asian region closely linked to Moscow.
The national currency has fallen 40 percent against the dollar since January 2014 and the government has sought help from international financial institutions to keep its battered banking system afloat.
According to the World Bank, it is the world’s most remittance dependent country, but these cash transfers — mostly from Russia — fell by around two thirds last year.
“If before our social problems were connected with men going abroad and spending long periods without their families, now the issue is that they are sitting at home without income,” said Alla Kuvatova, a gender expert and director of the Dushanbe-based non-governmental organization, Women with Higher Education.
“Violence against women is rising. The level of aggression and cruelty in society as a whole is growing,” Kuvatova said. There were 325 registered suicides and attempted suicides among women last year, a spokesman for the state prosecutor told AFP by telephone.
The spokesman could not provide data for previous years. Many such suicides go unregistered because of the stigma surrounding them.
‘BAD FAMILY’
Experts like Kuvatova say that a tendency for early marriages and large families places a heavy burden on young women, who often suffer from excessive demands of in-laws.
Last summer, a provincial court found two young women guilty of conspiring to murder their common mother-in-law and burn her remains.
Maftnuna Rakhmonova’s grandmother Harimbibi Rakhmonova, 59, who raised her and saw her married to a man from a neighboring village, said that her in-laws were abusive.
“They were a bad family. They beat her almost every day,” she said. “She could not breastfeed her baby but they refused to buy him formula milk,” she said.
“We gave them a good dowry — gold jewellery — but they sold it so [her husband] and his brother could buy plane tickets to work in Russia,” she added bitterly.
She wants Maftnuna’s widower, who was in Tajikistan when she died, to stand trial for inciting her to suicide but fears he has bribed prosecutors to drop the case. Local media has spotlighted women’s suicides and infanticides in recent months.
Last October, Parvina Abdulloeva, a 33-year-old from the central Yavan region was jailed for 18 years after she drowned her three children in a Dushanbe canal but failed to kill herself.
Then in February, 25-year-old Zukhuro Makhmurodova threw herself and her four children off a bridge in the town of Nurek, 70km southeast of Dushanbe.
All of the women came from provincial areas which tend to be poorer and more conservative than Dushanbe with its grand architectural projects championed by autocratic president Emomali Rakhmon.
At the bazaar in Vahdat, a trader who knew Maftnuna praised her as a “modest” and “respectful” woman who “never went around with guys.”
But her grandmother says she feels the community judges her behind her back and views her granddaughter’s death as part of a taboo trend sweeping the country.
“What can I tell them?” she asks, her voice shaking with emotion. “She was such a good girl -- so beautiful -- and she never had an argument with anyone before that family. “Look how they treated a girl like that.”
Last week Elbridge Colby, US President Donald Trump’s nominee for under secretary of defense for policy, a key advisory position, said in his Senate confirmation hearing that Taiwan defense spending should be 10 percent of GDP “at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense.” He added: “So we need to properly incentivize them.” Much commentary focused on the 10 percent figure, and rightly so. Colby is not wrong in one respect — Taiwan does need to spend more. But the steady escalation in the proportion of GDP from 3 percent to 5 percent to 10 percent that advocates
A series of dramatic news items dropped last month that shed light on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attitudes towards three candidates for last year’s presidential election: Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Terry Gou (郭台銘), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It also revealed deep blue support for Ko and Gou from inside the KMT, how they interacted with the CCP and alleged election interference involving NT$100 million (US$3.05 million) or more raised by the
While riding a scooter along the northeast coast in Yilan County a few years ago, I was alarmed to see a building in the distance that appeared to have fallen over, as if toppled by an earthquake. As I got closer, I realized this was intentional. The architects had made this building appear to be jutting out of the Earth, much like a mountain that was forced upward by tectonic activity. This was the Lanyang Museum (蘭陽博物館), which tells the story of Yilan, both its natural environment and cultural heritage. The museum is worth a visit, if only just to get a
More than 100,000 people were killed in a single night 80 years ago yesterday in the US firebombing of Tokyo, the Japanese capital. The attack, made with conventional bombs, destroyed downtown Tokyo and filled the streets with heaps of charred bodies. The damage was comparable to the atomic bombings a few months later in August 1945, but unlike those attacks, the Japanese government has not provided aid to victims and the events of that day have largely been ignored or forgotten. Elderly survivors are making a last-ditch effort to tell their stories and push for financial assistance and recognition. Some are speaking
RSS