Residents of Tashkent drafted in to harvest cotton.

	The ‘white gold’ of Uzbekistan; photo: webpark.ru

For the first time since Uzbekistan gained its independence, public and private organisations and companies in the capital, Tashkent, received notification ‘from above’ on 22 September that they were to send personnel out into the fields to harvest cotton.

“My wife workers as a nanny in a nursery, and last week the manager told her she had to go and harvest cotton, but I wouldn’t let her. I’d rather she resigned,” said Erkin, who lives in Tashkent. He is worried about his wife’s health, he says, and wonders why she should be sent out, without knowing where, leaving their two young children confused as to why their mother is not at home.

Workers at one Tashkent machinery plant told Uznews.net that they heard last Thursday that they would be sent to harvest cotton. “Our director told us the district authority had issued the demand and then a list went up with 50 names on it of people to be sent out on the Sunday.

Responsibility for calling up labour from different organisations is the responsibility of the various ministries whose remit they fall into.

“On Friday, 30 people went, and another 20 were due to go into the fields on Monday, says Nargis, a doctor at the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She has heard that the ministry of public health decreed that each district had to send out 1,000 people for a period of 10 days, and thinks that the ministry has “finally lost all sense of reality.” “Who is going to attend births if we’re not here?” she asks.

Niyaz-aka, the president of one Tashkent self-government committee, said “Our local committee got the order to send people out to harvest cotton – I have never heard such nonsense in all my 70 years,” he says. The committee only has two members of staff itself, Niyaz-aka says, and if he told local people to go out to pick cotton he knows what they’d do to him.

“On Sunday the secretary of Chilanzar district accident repair service called me and told me that I was definitely being sent to the cotton fields,” says Ravshan, the leader of an association of private landlords in Chilanzar. He categorically refused, because his association serves the residents of two blocks of flats and exists for those residents alone – they have no interest in sending people out to pick cotton.

Higher education students in the capital, who in Soviet times would certainly have been drafted in to make up any shortfall in the agricultural workforce, have curiously been exempted from this latest call for cotton labourers.

“They sent a group of the administrative staff and teachers out to the fields, so now it’s older people who have to hold down a job together with this extra work,” said one teacher from the University of Economics. He assumes the reason that students aren’t affected is that the majority of them are now studying on a contractual basis – the parents of these students would be more likely to protest if they found out that their children were being sent out to damage their health in the cotton plantations.

“I don’t give the college a huge sum of money ever year so that, instead of studying, my son can be forced into an unhealthy cotton field, says Nodira Muminova, the mother of a student at Technical University.

Wealthier residents of Tashkent who find themselves on ‘the list’ of labourers at least have the opportunity of using the cotton harvest to take an additional holiday.

“I don’t want to harvest cotton and I’ll pay whomever I have to and go on holiday for a month,” says Shukhrat, a worker at a private company in Chilanzar whose company received an order from the local administration committee to send people out for cotton.

The only thing Shukhrat is concerned about is that the managers of his firm will decide to nominate the cotton labourers directly and he will have to give up his dream of a holiday.

For Tashkent residents, who have almost never been forced to go and harvest cotton since Uzbekistan has been independent, having to toil in such a way is a new development, but in the more rural regions of Uzbekistan this practice is entirely normal.

“At the beginning of September it was suggested that I might want to pay 300,000 sums instead of going out to harvest cotton, but I didn’t have the money,” says 53-year-old Dilfuza, a tacher in Narbek village outside Tasheknt.

Dilfuza says that working conditions are diabolical when she was sent to pick cotton near the town of Akkurgan in Urtachirchick district of Tashkent region. She lasted one week before going home to borrow 300,000 sums from her neighbours who had been spared from the cotton harvest.

The money raised by forcing people to buy their way out of this compulsory labour is not used to bribe officials but to pay unemployment benefits. According to Dilfuza there are hundreds of unemployed people now labouring in the cotton fields around Akkurgan.

In the village of Dustabad in Urtachirchick district, there is no work, and people exist on occasional work and are prepared to pick cotton to earn a living.

On the plantations where we harvest cotton, the pay isn’t bad in comparison with other farms. If there are lots of volunteers, then you get 150 sums per kilogram, but if there aren’t many volunteers you get 200 sums, says 35-year-old Marina Dustabada. She says that in order to harvest 50 kilograms of cotton she has to get up at 6am and stay out until 7pm. Marina says that if someone from Tashkent gave her 300,000 sums then she would still go out and pick cotton every day.

For the vast majority of Tashkent residents sent out en masse by the authorities cotton harvest is a very unpleasant shock.

“I never thought that 20 years after Uzbekistan became a capitalist country, they would lead me out like a sheep to pick cotton, as if Soviet times had never ended,’ says 56-year-old Mumin-aka, an engineer from a company in Tashkent.

 

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