Ukraine War Day #781: Tajik Shame – Part IV

Dear Readers:

Today continuing (and concluding) this rather long but interesting piece, wherein Russian reporter Grigory Kubatian seeks out the backstory of the four main Crocus terrorists. The guys who (allegedly) did the actual shooting (and stabbing). Hopefully, in the process, we have learned something about the small nation of Tajikistan and its fascinating people.

We left off with a rather horrific story about an ordinary Tajik man (presumably not affiliated with the terrorists, although he knew the barber, Faizov when they were both guest workers in Ivanovo, Russia) who had been beaten up rather badly by a gang of thugs. This happened in Russia on the very night of the terrorist attack, although he says it happened to him before the terrorist act, so was also, presumably, not related to that. He didn’t say if the thugs were ethnic Russians or fellow Tajiks. The thugs broke his jaw and left him in a dumpster. This reminds us that violence is a constant component of the lives of guest workers. As in any country, rootless men living in cramped ethnic ghettos without their wives, often create the substratum for a criminal milieu. Also the potential to be recruited by bad actors and various international evil-doers. Well, this is something that the police have to deal with.

Dalerjon Mirzoev: Apparently beat himself up while in police custody.

And speaking of wives, one does also read in the Russian press, they are trying to crack down on “fictitious marriages” between ethnic Russian women and Central Asian guest workers. The point being, of course, to obtain a Russian visa or passport. This is a tough one though, because sometimes it hard to tell what is a fictitious marriage and what is true love. Again, that is for the migration services to figure out.

The Wrong Dalerjon

But returning to Kubatian: His next task is to find the home of the terrorist Dalerjon Mirzoev, who also lives in Rudaki. Initially, in the first few hours after the terrorist attack, the police had Mirzoev pegged as the leader of the band of four. He had the repulsive task of running around looking for wounded people in the concert hall, those who had somehow survived the shooting, and then finishing them off with his knife.

Unfortunately for Kubatian, there are a lot of Dalerjons in this town, and most of them are completely innocent. And also startled to have someone knocking at their door asking them about the attack. Finally he learns the address of the correct Dalerjon, it’s a little hamlet (“kishlak”) called Galakhona.

Kubatian: My taxi driver Hamid, as we roll through several kishlaks, is not your usual conversationalist. If I had met him in Russia, I would have pegged him as a regular viewer of internet channels run by the Ukrainian security services, his head filled with the most outlandish conspiracy theories. “How could it be them!?” he exclaims. “Look for yourself. The sneakers they are wearing [in videos of the attack]. Men wearing matching blue tee-shirts and jeans shouting Shut the doors! Haven’t you seen that? O, Allah! There is no justice in this world!”

The actual facts are too stark, and the Tajiks find it hard to accept them.

Four Skinny Guys

We enter the village of Galakhona. And we soon find the house we are looking for. This is the home of Dalerjon Mirzoev’s parents. His father is not at home. He is a “tangem” driver, that’s a tiny Chinese microbus which follows a set route. Dalerjon himself also used to have a job driving one.

Dalerjon’s mother opens the door. Her name is Gulrakat Kurbanovna Mirzoeva. She is literally trembling from grief, emitting sigh after sigh. But she agrees to speak with me, although she doesn’t know any Russian. We use taxi driver Hamid to translate for us.

Dalerjon’s two younger brothers are right here, in the courtyard of the house. Dalerjon also had an older brother named Ravshatjon. Who left the country to fight for ISIL in Syria, and that’s where he perished. The mother won’t say a word about him. But about Dalerjon she says: “He has a weak character. I would even call him a coward. But he was good around the house. He was afraid of blood. He never served in the army.”

Dalerjon’s mom, Gulrakat Mirzoeva

“Is he religious?” I ask.

She waves her hand dismissively. “What are you talking about? He never even said his prayers. He might say his prayers one day out of ten.”

Gulrakat has already been hauled into the Prosecutor’s office for questioning, where she told them exactly the same thing. [yalensis: Hmm… Color me suspicious though. This powerful-looking woman raised at least 2 jihadi sons, one of them already a martyr.]

She says that Dalerjon did not have any close friends. He has 4 children, one boy and three girls. Thanks to this, he needed to work a lot of hours. Sometimes he worked as a taxi driver, he would drive to Dushanbe and back, earning roughly the equivalent of 1000-1500 rubles per day [yalensis: in American dollars, around $10 to $16.]

“That’s not a lot!” I exclaim.

“It was enough to live on,” Gulrakat demurs.

When they heard the news about the terrorist attack, Dalerjon’s wife suffered so much stress that, according to her mother-in-law, she practically twisted her own hands off. Just the day before [the attack] Dalerjon had called his mother from Novosibirsk [yalensis: I looked it up, it’s a 10-hour flight from Novosibirsk to Moscow!] where he was working as a taxi driver. He told her that his guest-worker registration expired on March 17, and that on the 25th he would return home. And then this happened.

Gulrakat also watches Ukrainian Telegram channels, and she believes in the same conspiracy theories as does Hamid. On the Ukrainian channels they blame Russia for everything and all but praise the terrorist killers. “The killers you see in the video are such sturdy, healthy fellows! But our guys are quite skinny,” she complains. Until the very last second she never lost hope that her son is actually innocent, that they caught the wrong guys.

Kubatian: Alas, this is a well known effect. A person carrying a weapon looks very dangerous when he is shooting at unarmed people. But then he becomes pitiful once he is captured and rendered harmless. I recall images of the detained prisoners. They didn’t look to be in the prime of health, but you couldn’t exactly call them skinny either.

The Poorest Home On The Block

A year ago Dalerjon Mirzoev left his parents’ home and went to live with his family in a separate house on a neighboring street. His younger brothers agree to show me that house.

If 32-year-old Dalerjon actually is a good man about the house [as his mother affirmed], then it doesn’t show on the external appearance of his home. It’s just a nondescript hut, more like a barn than a house. A wire fence covered with torn rags, twisted sticks instead of posts. This is the poorest hut (“khibara“) on the street. Dalerjon was catastrophically poor. And it appears that he was willing to do anything to improve his situation in life.

Dalerjon’s wretched home.

We return to Dushanbe. Taxi driver Hamid is still hopeful that Dalerjon is innocent. He shows me, on his phone, clips made by Ukrainian commentators, busy explaining how, once again, “the Russians shot themselves.” These types of clips are everywhere on Smartphones in Tajikistan. I patiently explain to Hamid, checking off on my fingers, exactly how and where these Ukrainian pundits are lying.

His face changes. “If what you are saying is true, then these terrorists need to be chopped up into pieces. Even if they are Tajiks!” he shouts.

I don’t approve of chopping people up, that goes without saying. But for these terrorist acts, the guilty will have to answer.

Epilogue

After I returned from Tajikistan, I spent a lot of time thinking: Why do so many people there not want to believe that their fellow citizens are guilty? Given that, generally speaking, they relate to Russia and to Russians very well, in a friendly manner. And the Tajiks do not consider themselves to be an aggressive people at all. This is why they are clutching at straws, tossed to them by the Ukrainian internet-channels. Which blame Russia always and for everything.

Although… Once you start digging a bit, then you find that these “good”, “home-keeping”, “jolly” fellow citizens, who suddenly out of the blue became terrorists, well it turns out that they had prior criminal convictions or some ties with extremists (either directly or via their brothers). And all were extremely in need of money. And it was for money, it seems, that they went off to kill.

But should one judge an entire people because of the crimes committed by these few?

After the Crocus terror act, we saw “hate posts” galore, with posters attempting to incite enmity between Russians and Tajiks. Or even against migrant workers in general. Those who inspired these attacks are rubbing their hands in glee. Ukraine’s Head of Disinformation swelled up with pride, like a toad, in his interview with the Times. [yalensis: Is he talking about Budanov? I’m not sure…] “Yes!” he boasted. “We are conducting an operation to sow ethnic discord in Russia. And after the terrorist act in Crocus, we doubled our efforts, because any kind of ethnic division in Russia, is useful for Ukraine.” And that is an exact quote.

And in Tajikistan the same thing is happening, a mirror image, in respect to ethnic Russians.

The last thing we should be doing is helping the Ukrainian secret services, along with the West, in performing their filthy, bloody work.

[THE END]