Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

“Good news Pamiris,” writes [ru] Bektour Iskender, President of Kloop Media, a Kyrgyz news portal and blogging platform. “Wikipedia has provided permission to begin a version of the site in Shughni.” Shughni is one of the main languages spoken in Gorno Badakhshan province (GBAO), a remote, eastern part of Tajikistan dominated by the Pamir Mountains. Iskender helped local internet users file the request to create a Shughni section of Wikipedia following a new media training session in Khorog, the province's administrative capital, over two years ago. “Now begins the small matter of realizing [Wikipedia in Shughni]. But I can't help there, since I don't know a word of the language,” he says.

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It is a pity that instead of the ‘leninization’ of the monument space we now have its ‘somonization’. Every town erects a Somoni statue. How much more can we take? Why do we need so many identical monuments? Somoni might have been a heroic figure (which is impossible to ascertain now because the country’s history is excessively ideologized and politicized), but we should not turn him into a new Lenin, a ‘father’ or ‘grandfather’ of the nation.

Caravanistan presents a collection of images of the “awe-inspiriting fortresses” in the eastern Tajik region of Badakhshan (or GBAO). The ruins of these fortresses, some of which are still used by Tajik border guards, suggest that “life was once very different here”.

[D]o something useful. Stop sticking your breasts there where they may offend people. And don’t stand in the way of real feminists doing their noble job.

Emma Sabzalieva writes about the controversy surrounding a dress code introduced recently at a university in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. The dress code requires that female students wear high heeled shoes and single-block color clothes to classes. The blogger asks:

Could it really be that the rector believes that ordering such a dress code <…> will enhance female students’ learning experience? Will it make them smarter or better equipped to learn?

[I]n former Soviet Central Asia there is little debate that the root problem [of extremist beliefs] is “foreign ideas,” defined so broadly as to become a target of opportunity for both every political purpose and every local policeman or official’s ambition. Any sign of dissent from state policies or ideology <…> can be enough to bring the wrath of the state, sometimes with great violence.