Tajikistan unfortunately has all of the pre-conditions that make trafficking in persons there a perfect opportunity for the growing trade of human commodities. The state has poor governance, is rife with corruption, unemployment is high, and a large portion of the population is uneducated.
This combination of variables makes ‘acquiring’ human commodities very easy for the traffickers. The fact that the Caspian region, a major conduit and facilitator of such underworld activities, sits right on Tajikistan’s doorstep gives traffickers an easy route out of Central Asia and on to more lucrative and manipulative markets.
Madina, like thousands of other Tajik women who have been trafficked, had fallen on hard times. She was a single mother working in her local market and barely scraping by. Madina was enticed into the lurid world of the sex trade when a stranger approached her and promised that he would take her abroad and she would be able to earn large sums of money in just a few months and return home to her children. Of course, this was a lie. The man, who was a trafficker, took Madina to Turkey (through the Caspian region first, as most trafficked victims from Central Asia are) where he enslaved her at a brothel for over a year. Women, however, usually do not stay in their original destination country. Madina saw people transported on to Russia and Kazakhstan while others went to the Middle East, Iran, and even China.
Economic changes account for sexual exploitation as the number one trafficking concern in Tajikistan. The financial crisis of 2008 played an extraordinarily large role in the rise of trafficking along with the lack of border controls and complicity of the local governmental agents. As Louise Shelley states, “one-third of Tajik households now have a family member working outside of their country, most often in [the Caspian littoral states of] Russia or Kazakhstan.” (Shelley 2010) They are living in harsh conditions with many people housed in a single room. The conditions are filthy, exposing workers to dangerous jobs with little protection from the heat or cold, and employers that show little to no regard for the workers’ safety.
An often unseen aspect to Caspian trafficking is how it leaves the families left back in Tajikistan vulnerable to internal trafficking. These children left behind in Tajikistan, now devoid of their matriarchal authority figure, are often forced to work in the cotton fields within Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Even though officially adopted legislation is in place that prohibits the use of child and forced labor, especially in rural areas, many of the schools remain closed during picking season and the children are forced to work. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) remains the top agency in Tajikistan to monitor and fight the practice of trafficking in persons. For the years of 2010 and 2011, the IOM produced lengthy reports explaining their findings on the cotton harvests. Working together with local government and law enforcement, the IOM was able to determine that while there was a drop in the number of students participating in the harvest, trafficking in child labor was still high.
There is a pernicious secondary trafficking market through the Caspian region that is also under-researched: children are not only vulnerable to the pressures of forced labor within Tajikistan once an adult figure is stolen away. They themselves are sometimes then consequently trafficked out-of-country as domestic servants. Many of the children will end up in places where children are used in the sex trade as well. Russia and Iran are some of the strongest ‘middle organizers’ of this secondary market, acting as conduits through the Caspian and onward to, for example, the Arab Gulf States. Also, because of the massive numbers of adults that are migrant workers, many children find themselves taken by parents to places like Russia and then actually abandoned when their parents find they can no longer support them. Uneducated children who know little to no Russian at all and have no papers to identify who they are or find their parents often end up extremely vulnerable. The transient homes throughout Russia that are set up as temporary places of safety more often serve as de facto recruiting grounds for organized crime groups that utilize trafficking as a major cash resource. These children become the victims of sexual exploitation, forced labor, forced begging, and even conscripted as child soldiers to conflicts all around the globe. Some children end up in places as far away as Latin America. And all of them, almost without exception, start that horrible journey by transiting through the Caspian.
The ties that human traffickers have to organized crime offer them ways to forge documents and utilize illicit trade routes. It should be no surprise that the prosperous natural resource routes of the Caspian often double as illicit trade routes for ‘Dark Net’ activities. Advertising of ‘human inventory’ is now cheap, secret, and easily accessible because of modern technology. Consumers of trafficked persons are able to shop for their perfect victims with just the click of a button on their computer, tablet, or cell phone. Traffickers can use cell phones to make and take bids on their human commodities, while buyers are able to make their purchase – documentation and travel included no less – to anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, the decreased costs of transportation in the Caspian, as it has become more and more integrated into the global economy, have also made it easier to export these unfortunate souls.
Many countries, including Tajikistan, rely solely on the human-trafficking protocols set forth by the United Nations. Cooperation across many United Nations groups, academia, and private institutions are coming together to bring recognition to the problem of human-trafficking. The list of organizations that are participating in the initiatives include the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN-GIFT), the UNODC, the International Labor Organization (ILO), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). After rescuing victims of trafficking from their lives of servitude, the most difficult part is to reintegrate them back into their home societies. In Tajikistan, women who have been trafficked across the Caspian face a strong stigma related to the sexual activities they may have been involved in while being trafficked. This makes the reintegration process difficult because the community shuns the women, leaving strong feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and shame. The IOM has played the largest role in aiding victims of trafficking (VoTs) to reintegrate back into society. Unfortunately, these efforts are small in comparison to the estimated numbers of people that are actually trafficked. The complexity of retrieving victims from across international borders makes rescue near impossible in most cases. Traffickers have become experts at hiding and manipulating the victims into obedient compliance.
The governments of the Caspian littoral states still do not take the issue of trafficking seriously enough in my opinion. Until these governments take a serious stance against corruption and place a higher value on fundamental human rights and basic standards of decency, trafficking will continue to be a problem for years to come. The lives of these invisible citizens will be lost in a world of darkness. It is not just a problem for the Caspian. It is a problem for all of the countries adjacent to the Caspian Five as well. Until progress is made the Caspian region will not just be a 21st century channel for a new Silk Road into Central Asia. It will quite literally for some be a conduit to Hell.
