A Travel Log from Tajikistan

TheTyee.ca 

February 25, 2005Re:  These are the Stans I know…

Greetings from a dodgy Tajik dial-up.

The Stans so far have been completely different than I imagined them to be.  Almaty, Kazakhstan was far more modern/high-tech than I was expecting - but this isn't that surprising, I suppose, considering that Kazakhstan is full of expats, foreign money, and oil, oil, oil. I sat on the Amsterdam-Almaty flight with an American oil rig engineer - Charlie from Mississippi - who gave me a crash course in the subtle geopolitical ballet of oil drilling in Central Asia.  ("Y'all go in there, right? And y'all drill a big f*&ing hole. You with me? Good. So y'all drill a hole and you pump the sh*t out of it. Ya bribe some dudes, you send it straight out to the Caspian, ya bribe some other dudes, you throw it on a tanker, and then y'all find another hole...") and so on and so on.

Almaty was a quick stopover in a very nice hotel, and we were back at the airport the next day for the charter flight to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. This flight was the part that I have been dreading the most about this trip-the small rustbucket that would take us over the mountains into the sometimes open, but often-not Tajikistan airport. There were 30 or so of us that met at the Almaty airport, and my jittery small talk with the other observers was doing nothing to calm my fears.

The tipsy Finn who informed me that Tajik Air is where "old Aeroflot planes go to die" didn't do much to quell my fears. When we boarded the plane there was nervous laughter all around-it had a cracked windshield, a funky smell, was freezing cold inside, and had all the charm (but little of the comfort) of a greyhound bus.  On terra firma at Dushanbe airport, we were greeted with the sight of a crashed plane, rusting away at the side of the runway.

Things could be worse

Tajikistan. I'm still in the capital, Dushanbe, and leave tomorrow morning for my posting in the bustling metropolis of Qurghonteppa, in the south of the country. A quick perusal of the map showed our team that its just a stone's throw from Mazar-i-Sharif. Not surprisingly, the local economy is based on the heroin trade-over 50 per cent of the world's heroin supply moves through this little valley. Our team leader told us point blank to expect very primitive conditions-the town hasn't seen electricity for the last six days. According to the crack political analysis of our team leader, cutting off the electricity is some kind of sophisticated political ploy being used by the governing party to get votes. There are 10 of us going, then we break into pairs and work in really small villages on election day.

The team leader has apparently set us up in a private house that has a wood stove and has rustled up a generator for us - but the generator will be kept in one room only - the "warm room with light" so its going to be a cozy few days. We were told that the security situation in Bokhtar is calm at the moment, but our biggest concerns should be roaming packs of vicious stray dogs after dark, and, uh, a typhoid outbreak. Things could be worse-my new Canadian pal has been posted in the middle of the mountains and leaves at dawn on a Russian chopper.

My partner will be a retired Finnish navy colonel with about 17 elections under his belt and a fondness for the local sauce. His humour is downright bizarreo, and he's of a completely different generation (old-ish, chauvenistic and seems to dislike Russians with a passion - claims he can "smell them from a hundred miles away") but I'm kind of grateful to be doing this with him anyway. Something about a burly, red-nosed, tattooed, rough and tumble, cold-war-era military-brush-cut type that makes me feel more secure, somehow.

Despite the rugged conditions ahead, I'm not sorry to be leaving Dushanbe. Its a very, very run-down, post-Soviet shell of a place-crumbling concrete buildings, potholes, dirt sidewalks, open manhole covers, and two days of incessant snow and rain haven't exactly showcased the city for us.

Tajik people are beautiful - my unscientific eye would call them a mix of Afghani, Slavic and Asian - a stunning combo. But the current women's fashion seems to consist of painting on one continuous eyebrow with eyeliner pencil combined with gold-capped teeth. Slightly disconcerting. But beautiful nonetheless.

Like most experiences, what has made this so much fun so far (yes, despite the grim descriptions above, I'm having a great time) is the people. You really have to have a warped sense of humour to enjoy this type of thing - and the group is so interesting. 63 people from all over the world - including a small Afghani delegation - one of the first ever - and a tiny group of Japanese - all of whom have really interesting stories. There's nothing like being cooped up in a dodgy Tajik hotel to make you bond with people. And, like everything else, the experiences and the conditions here are all relative - there's a guy here who has just come back from Darfur, and is enjoying the "mod cons" of Dushanbe - another American guy who works in Turkmenistan (not unlike North Korea for isolation) and is acting like he's just come to Mardi Gras.  The bottom line is that at the end of the day, we all get to leave this place so we can afford to have fun with the whole experience.

March 1, 2005Re:  Election Day or "The Amazing Race"?

Overall, this experience was an enormous privilege. Joyous, frustrating, mind-boggling, at times, hilarious, exhausting, but mostly just so much fun.

I left off right before we set off for our respective observation areas. With eight other keyed-up observers, we were shunted by minivan to the south of the country, to a town called Qurghonteppe. Now, if we had passed right through Qurghonteppe in the van and kept on going, I likely would have dismissed it as an inconsequential outpost of donkeys, dust, army vehicles, oppressively loud Pakistani pop music, decaying concrete blocks, and, of course, no electricity. But the van stopped, and we all got off, and were forced to fully engage in the civic life of the place for three days. Ergo, my opinion is maybe a bit more nuanced. Yes, all of the above is true, but there were so many small and fascinating things about this place.

Firstly, it was a really important town during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The KGB built a compound there and hired half the town to work as agents. The Tajiks speak the same language as Afghanis, so Qurghonteppa was Russia's best bet to get behind enemy lines. There are still plenty of Russian military there - a big base still exists and the Russians are still guarding the Afghan border as a favour to the Tajiks. Apparently they are phasing this out and won't stay for much longer - much to the detriment of Qurghonteppa's economy. Anyway, Russki soldiers everywhere, not to mention blinis, borscht, and export-quality vodka.

Election day itself had an Amazing Race scavenger-hunt like quality to it. Up at the crack of dawn, no map, an incoherent list in a language we didn't understand, a first aid kit, an ancient mobile phone that had yet to work, a trunk full of food and bottled water, and a very tight schedule. We met our driver and translator at five a.m., scarfed down some meat-on-a-stick, and set off on our 22-hour adventure.

During the good old Soviet days, "Election Day" was synonymous with "Having a Party." I suppose that with one party, one candidate, and a day off work, it was a great reason for whole villages to throw a bit of a knees-up. I have to say that this tradition is alive and well in rural Tajikistan. Many villages we went to were in party-mode - complete with the ubiquitous adolescent-kid-on-a-Casio-keyboard-with-microphone-combo, picnic tables covered in food, the local election commission whiffing of vodka, and giant photos of the ever-present president looking on.

A wallflower in a male-dominated society

The Finn and I got along like a house on fire. Frankly, I was surprised. Your partner is so important:  you spend almost every waking hour for three days together, talking, interviewing officials, making quick judgment calls in often stressful situations, eating together, sharing a bathroom, and waking each other up at 4 a.m. to start the day. The most difficult part of these partnerships can be coming to consensus about what you have seen - we all bring a lot of cultural baggage to this process. But to grossly over-generalize, Finns and Canadians seem to see things remarkably alike. Although I cant say I agreed with many of his anti-Russian, and often very un-P.C. statements ("Even if you fry him in a pan with butter….He is still a Russian!"). The Finn was one quality dude.

It was great to be on a team with an older man - because it became apparent pretty quickly that this is one seriously male-dominated society. The region that we were in is over 90 per cent Muslim - and very, very traditional. On day one, our translator very sheepishly informed me that it "is not advisable" for me to offer a handshake to a man - but rather, that I should put my right hand over my heart and look down when I met one. In a job that requires three whole days of face-to-face contact with men, this was a bit of a challenge - but the Finn handled it beautifully. He did the hand-shaking ("Salaam Aleikum!") the talking, the arguing, some lecturing, and generally threw his formidable Nordic military weight around the polling stations, while I stood in the corner and did the writing and a lot of watching. Shelving my liberal values for a few days wasn't so bad - being an invisible female in the corner of the room had its advantages.

We ended the day at the People's Glorious Agronomy Institute Number 45 - where we sat for three hours by the light of the Finn's army flashlight, my LED bike light, and a few candles, and observed the strangest display of vote-counting that I have ever seen. The local policeman, imam, and about 20 other unidentified men peered in the whole time through the grubby windows of the unheated school - probably the most interesting entertainment to hit this village in a long time - while the harried election officials tallied the results on an abacus. Yes, an abacus. When the count was finished, the officials informed us that they had no way of getting to the local polling headquarters - and proceeded out on foot, at 1 a.m., with plastic bags full of ballots, for 5 kilometres. As observers, it would have been illegal for us to give them a ride - and there was no room, anyway - which meant we crawled along behind them in our Lada on farm roads - for five kilometres - a surreal experience indeed.

At 3 a.m., the Finn and I were jaggy, light-headed, sleep-deprived and irritable as hell. We were still working, still watching the headquarters' questionable processes, shaking our heads in confusion and frustration. Without a manifesto on central Asian geopolitics, we weren't alone in our long day and questionable results.

Failed Elections

The bottom line, which was announced today at a press conference, is that the elections failed to meet international standards on many, many levels. As amusing as it was to see some cheeky ballot box stuffing, many backwards processes, so many cases of "family voting" (men voting for their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters) that we lost count, abacuses and creative math, there was nothing funny about seeing people who were obviously nervous, coerced, and afraid to tell the truth about what was going on. Tajikistan is still recovering from the social, cultural and economic vacuum of leaving the Soviet Union, not to mention the five-year civil war that saw 100,000 people killed.

With a landmine problem, an isolated location, some dysfunctional neighbours and very few natural resources, this country has a long way to go. But in spite of this, I would still say that there was a sense of hope and optimism about the future amongst almost everyone we met.

Even Dushanbe, where I am right now, looks different now - I suppose when you get deeper into a culture you are far less likely to make snap judgments (as I did previously) about a place. It's really quite unique, quirky and lovely here in its own way - if it didn't take 15 hours of traveling and the world's scariest airplane ride, I might consider coming back. In fact, I really hope I can some day.

Jennifer Brown monitored several elections while living and working in the Balkans.  This past Christmas, Brown was in the Ukraine monitoring the elections.  Brown was recently in Tajikistan as a voluntary international election monitor with the Canadian government.  She lives in Vancouver.