It took the seven Uzbek men four days to arrive in Moscow by train from Tashkent. It took the police just minutes to demand their passports and money.
The group of exhausted men, wearing overalls and greasy T-shirts, stood in panic, while police, tapping their weapons, shouted at them. Finally after ten minutes of interrogation, the men reluctantly handed them 200 rubles and practically ran out of the station in fear.
A compatriot, who sweeps the cobblestone floors at Kazansky station, shrugged at the incident. “It happens all the time,” said the man who only identified himself as Zafar.
“The police will stop you, ask for your papers. If you don’t have them, they’ll ask you for 200 rubles. If you do, they’ll still demand 200 rubles”.
An estimated 10 million migrants come each year from Central Asia and other areas of the former Soviet Union, recruited to do jobs most Russian citizens are unwilling to do. They are often hired to sweep floors, work in local markets and construction sites.
They are lured by money, which they say is often four to five times what they can earn back home. Among them is Dilshyod, 23, a Tajik migrant who doesn’t feel comfortable releasing his name, moved to Russia three years ago.
The tall, frail-looking man moved to Russia three years ago and now works in the wasteland of Chelobityevo, about 20 kilometers outside of Moscow. There, he calls home a ragged shack improvised from particleboard and scraps of sheet metal. Dilshyod sleeps on the roof of the hut with three other people, in constant fear that police will find his home, and arrest him.
It has happened to him before. This year alone, authorities destroyed about 20 homes in Chelobityevo, where more than 300 migrants from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan lived. They defended their actions, claiming that the migrants were in Russia illegally, according to the Municipal Department of Internal Affairs of the Moscow oblast region.
“Look, there’s no life here, but we’ve made something out of it,” he says. “Every night, the police come and harass us, demanding money. Even if we have the right paper work, they still ask us for 200 rubles. It’s no life”.
Many migrant rights activists believe the Russian authorities are doing very little to help the migrants.
“They give up everything, everything to come to Russia, but what does this country do to help them?” says Bakhrom Khamroyev, an ethnic Uzbek who works for Memorial, a local human rights center in Moscow. “They end up in modern-day ghettos, where they become isolated and cannot integrate”.
Although the shabby village, which is now surrounded by barbed wire, is quietly coming back to life as migrants slowly build new homes. Migrants say they are still scared. At night, Dilshyod and his friend, Ali, also a migrant from Tajikistan, fear leaving the perimeter. They say if police catch them roaming around, they will be arrested. RIA Novosti
