Tajikistan's Unrecorded Lives

Figures for Tajikistan’s population, currently reported to stand at 6.3 million, may well be wildly inaccurate since it has emerged that a quarter of children may not be officially registered.

Boys are more likely to be registered at birth than girls, but there is a general reluctance to register children immediately after they are born. Parents are deterred from informing the authorities by the cost of registration fees and by the high incidence of children born into underage or polygamous marriages.

Although children must be registered in order to go to school, many parents only do this at the last minute, when the child reaches the age of seven.

“Why do I have to hurry to the registry office when there is still time before school starts?” asked Mikhibulo, who has a three-year-old son. “I’ll get a birth certificate for my son [by the time he starts school], but these documents are not necessary for any other purpose.”

The situation first came to light on June 11, when judges presiding on a case in Kulyab in southern Tajikistan had to delay sentencing a woman for procurement because her eight-year-old son still did not have a birth certificate.

The boy, who was enrolled in school despite not having the correct documents, had a false surname because his mother did not want to name him after her womanising husband who had abandoned the family.

Nazokat Kasymova, the head of the registry office for the city of Kulyab and the surrounding area, which has a total population of 900,000, said the number of people registering their children there was even lower than the national average.

“Only 40 per cent of newborn children in the Kulyab group of districts are registered within their first year of life,” she said.

Kasymova said there had been a marked decline in the number of children being registered in the region. “In 1992, almost all the 3,300 children in this region were registered on time, but in 2004, only 800 were registered, despite the fact that the birth-rate has consistently remained at the same level, and sometimes even exceeds it.”

Although there is theoretically a fee for late registration, this is rarely levied because failure to register in the first place is often because parents have been unable to pay their duesto the state.

Jumakhon Alimi, head of the Parallax human rights centre, explained that parent are unwilling to register their child not so much because of the initial charge worth one US dollar, but because they will then have to pay a tax of five dollars a month for public services, a fee levied on every citizen from birth. If the children do not appear on the state’s files, the family escapes paying the per capita tax.

Unemployment is high in Tajikistan, especially in the south, so many people simply cannot afford to pay. According to official statistics, the average monthly wage in Kulyab is no more than 11 dollars.

“We are told that living standards are constantly improving, and all sorts of tables and statistics are produced. But the statistics are a big lie by the state,” Alimi said.

The disincentives to registering children are making the official statistics even more inaccurate.

It is not only births that don’t get registered in Tajikistan – the figures suggest that only half of all marriages are recorded.

Families suffering from poverty who want one less mouth to feed often give their daughters away in marriage from the age of 13, even though they cannot legally marry until they are 17. These underage marriages remain unrecorded, and the children born from them are also likely to be hidden from state records.

Polygamy, which is illegal but still commonly practiced in Tajikistan, creates similar problems, as second or third wives enjoy no legal status. Once again, their children will remain invisible, and husbands often do not want to give them their surname.

“Recently I sent my wife away and married again, for the third time,” said a 40-year-old man from Kulyab who did not want to be identified. “Why should I have to go to the registry office three times? Why should I deal with the red-tape of these documents, when at any official institution I can hand over a bribe of five or ten dollars which will solve all problems, and no one will ask me anything?”

Local customs dictate that the basis of marriage is the Muslim rite, rather than the secular registration procedure originally put in place by the Soviet authorities. Official documents are seen only as a necessary evil. Divorce is similarly recognised by custom and practice rather than official procedure.

Sometimes even deaths may not be registered for years. In 2004, a court case in Kulyab ended in the conviction of several social welfare officers who had been pocketing pensions due to war veterans who were long dead, but whose deaths had not been recorded.

At the parliamentary election held in Tajikistan on 27 February this year, some foreign observers identified cases of “dead souls”, where the votes of dead people not listed in official records were fraudulently cast at the polling booths.

Given that so many births, marriages and deaths are kept secret from the authorities in Tajikistan, it is uncertain exactly how many people there are in the country. An added problem for census-takers is that hundreds of thousands of men are away in Russia working on seasonal contracts, with some staying away for good.

As a local political analyst who wished to remain anonymous put it, “The results of the [last] census of January 2000 still remain a deep, dark mystery for the people.”

Turko Dikaev is an IWPR correspondent in Tajikistan