Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan is experiencing a strange new disintegration of its own. Angela Robson reports.
Rose remembers the message texted from her husband in Russia as if it happened yesterday. ‘Talaq [divorce], talaq, talaq,’ she says bitterly. ‘That was it. My life was over.’
It sounds dramatic, but for Rose – a rural Tajik woman with five children – the divorce was a humiliating and shocking blow that she has yet to come to terms with. ‘No visit, no phone call, no letter. Nothing,’ she says. ‘Just a text.’
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