Sinning but surviving: Uzbek girls driven by poverty to sex trade

TASHKENT, Aug 20 (AFP) - Zulola, a country girl, tells her parents that she's working in a cafe, but she earns her living turning tricks. "I know it's a sin, but it's the only way I can survive."

For Zulola, the mother of two small children, the irony is dark and bitter: she has been forced into prostitution by the arrest of her husband, accused by Uzbekistan's autocratic regime of belonging to a banned radical Islamic group.

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"There are 10 mouths to feed in our family. I visit them twice a month, bringing them money and presents. In the autumn, my elder child starts school and will need a satchel, books and paper..."

Desperate times call for desperate measures. But to tell her parents the true nature of her work, in this traditional society deeply attached to Islamic standards of modesty, would be too shaming.

Zulola and her husband come from Namangan in the Ferghana valley, a stronghold of Islamic sensibility and a recruiting ground for the outlawed fundamentalist group Hizbi Tahrir (party of liberation).

Thousands of young people like Zulola have been driven by the grinding poverty of their rural homes to seek work in the cities.

The population of the Uzbek capital Tashkent is officially estimated at around two million souls, but is unofficially believed to be at least twice that number because of the rural exodus.

For young women, despite the sense of shame and humiliation that it involves, a city job has increasingly come to mean the sex trade.

Prostitution existed during Soviet times but was marginal and discreet. It is now out in the open, much to the displeasure of local residents.

Umed, who lives on Kator Tol, a residential side-street in the southeast of the city that has become the centre of the red light district, is planning to move house to spare his daughter exposure to this "dangerous example."

"There's not one of our daughters now who doesn't know what these girls are up to in their fancy dresses and make-up, standing around in Kator Tol as soon as it gets dark. And the problems is getting worse by the week," another resident said.

The girls stand by the poplar trees on Kator Tol, eyeing the drivers of passing cars who in turn peer through their windscreens, eyeing the girls.

"There's no problem getting sex in Tashkent," a taxi driver said. "You just need to know how to ask and have enough sums (the local currency)."

A trick here costs a handful of dollars (euros), though the price rises steeply in the luxury hotels in the city centre where tourists figure among the punters.

"There are families for whom the only money they make is what their daughter brings home," a local journalist said.

Young Russians as well as Uzbeks turn to prostitution to earn a living, he noted.

"But generally, if an Uzbek girl becomes a prostitute, she makes sure her family doesn't find out. The Uzbek prostitutes come mainly from conservative, agricultural backgrounds. They say they've got a job in Tashkent and the parents, even if they suspect that something is wrong, say nothing. After all, they have to eat."

It is a further irony for Uzbekistan's Muslims that it was during the Soviet era, with its official atheism, that local girls were best protected from the temptations of joining the sex industry.

There were prostitutes as in any poor country, "but not a whole army of them as there is now," the journalist said.

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