Tajik Hostel Evictions Highlight Unclear Laws

Residents of a former worker’s hostel in the Tajik capital Dushanbe are continuing to protest against their eviction by private owners who acquired the building after the state company that ran it was denationalised.

The tenants may be fighting a losing battle as the owners believe their legal case is rock-solid.

The evictions underline the vulnerability of people with no real home to call their own in the capital. Around 27,000 live in 155 workers’ hostels across the city. These used to be attached to Soviet state enterprises for the use of their staff, but in the years following Tajik independence, new residents often moved in from the countryside, to escape poverty and the devastation caused by five years of civil war in the 1990s.

In the case of the hostel on Dushanbe’s Borbad street, many of the tenants say they have proof of their association with the state-owned firm prior to privatisation, which should give them continuing rights of residence.

After the Khonasoz construction company was privatised, the hostel was taken over by the state and then sold to a private owner in 2007.

A number of families were evicted in 2008 because of unpaid rent and utility bills. Isroil Dustov, a resident whose family was among this group, said they refused to pay to protest against a rent increase.

After lengthy legal wrangling with other tenants, the owners began a new round of evictions in April 2010. Residents interviewed by IWPR say a total of 350 people from 80 families have been left homeless.

The building itself is a four-storey block with 50 rooms. It is now squalid and run-down, with no front entrance doors. The windows are broken, and the dark corridors are dirty, with an overwhelming stench of urine.

Niso Kamolova and her five children were forced out at the beginning of April. She says she and other residents should not have been evicted as they had a right to live here.

“We’ve been living here for the last 20 or 25 years because we have residence rights here, we have authorisation to have accommodation here, and letters of employment,” she said, referring to documents confirming that residents were associated with the old construction firm.

Kamolova has moved in temporarily with a relative living at another hostel nearby. Conditions are cramped there, with three or four families to a room. But others are worse off, and have had to move into disused basements or the attics of other hostels.

IWPR spoke to Urunboy Bobosherov, a representative of the new owner, who said evictions began in April only after around 100 tenants ignored a request to move out to allow building refurbishments to go ahead.

“When the deadline arrived, they did not leave voluntarily and that was when bailiffs got involved and hired people to evict them,” Bobosherov said.

The owners plan to invest large sums of money to refurbish the building, after which rooms will be rented out again. However, higher rents are likely to leave the current and recently-evicted tenants out in the cold.

Nurmahmad Mirzoev, also representing the owner, said that in addition to refusing to move out, residents had built up arrears of rent and utility payments. He also accused them of allowing the hostel to become unhygienic, playing loud music and causing a disturbance at night.

“When we started to tell them this and demand some discipline, this so-called-war broke out,” Mirzoev said.

Residents have filed a lawsuit with a district court and written to the prosecutor’s office contesting their eviction and alleging that the hostel was privatised illegally.

One of the key questions is whether they can prove they originally had the right to live in the hostel.

Sergei Romanov, a lawyer with the Tajikistan Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, says that tenants need to be able to show they had worked for the Khonasoz firm for at least ten years, entitling them to hostel accommodation.

Bobosherov said he had a document from Khonasoz indicating that some of those now protesting against their eviction had never been employed by the now-liquidated enterprise.

Some legal experts argue that the hostel should not have been sold off as if it was no more than an economic asset of a privatised company.

Among them is Muhamadali Nurali, a lawyer acting for the tenants, who said, “Article 115 of the Housing Code states that privatisation of dormitories is prohibited.”

When Khonasoz was privatised, it was handed over to the government’s Agency for Construction and Architecture, which took the decision to sell it off. The sale itself was handled by another body, the State Committee for Investment and State Property Management.

A representative of the construction agency, Qurbon Teshaev, told IWPR that the staff involved in the sale had now left, and there was little his organisation could now do to help the tenants.

“The owner says the hostel is his property and he can do whatever he wants with it, whether he decides to evict them or not,” he said.

He added that the agency had received strict orders from its superiors in government not to allow a repeat of this dispute, and that “we are therefore ignoring all requests from businessmen to privatise dormitories and put them up for sale. This case has been a good lesson for us.”

In a letter to IWPR, the investment and state property committee said its conduct of the 2007 was above-board.

“There is a court ruling confirming that the privatisation process was legal and there were no irregularities in the course of it,” the letter said.

Bobosherov, too, insisted that the purchase of the building was entirely legal.

Abdurahmon Sharipov, a lawyer with the Dushanbe-based legal firm Kontrakt, said other legislation provides sitting tenants with the right to remain where they are, regardless of any change from public to private ownership.

“How was it possible to sell the hostel when there were people living there?” he asked. “Their constitutional right to housing is being violated in pursuit of personal interest.”

Romanov said a gap in current housing legislation had added to the legal uncertainty surrounding the hostel case, as “at the moment, there are no clear mechanisms and procedures for eviction from a residential property”.

Speaking for the owner, Bobosherov said lawyers representing the tenants were building their case on a flawed argument, in that laws governing purely residential property did not apply here.

The state property committee, however, takes the view that hostel residents do have continuing residence rights, “unless they are breaking rules and regulations or there is a court order for their eviction.”

More generally, Sharipov said, the legal dispute shows how vulnerable people are when they are caught up in the transition from the Soviet social safety-net to the market economy. Workers’ hostels are part of that old world so the legislation around them, in particular privatisation, needs to be reviewed. But the most important thing is to ensure that those caught in the middle do not suffer, he said.

Zarina Ergasheva is an IWPR-trained journalist in Tajikistan.

This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.

The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.