Tajikistan’s integration into Dubai’s economy began with the first official visit of President Rahmon to the United Arab Emirates in December 1995. Since that time, the Tajikistan-Dubai business relationship has developed, and now covers different forms of state and non-state collaborations in the fields of trading, technology, investment, and tourism. A striking interrelationship between tourism and trade existed from the very beginning. Although economic avenues into the Gulf were initiated first by the government and economic elites, the Tajikistan-Dubai business relationship is to a large extent sustained, developed, and expanded by traders as well as small and middle-scale entrepreneurs and middlemen, whose business relations, cooperation, and activities can be situated in the grey zone between formality and informality (see also Fehlings in Chapter Seven).
In the early 1990s, Tajikistan’s then political elite discovered Dubai as an exclusive tourist destination and simultaneously established a cargo business trading luxury cars. Later, small-scale traders and entrepreneurs discovered Dubai’s and Abu Dhabi’s markets for their businesses. They began to import luxury clothing, home decorations, fashionable fabrics and clothing, and mobile phones to Tajikistan. Such consumer goods became especially desirable because they were branded as dubaiskiy; i.e., made in or imported from Dubai and thus considered high-quality and prestigious lifestyle products. Others, like Firuz and his friend Rustam, started to import second-hand cars from the United Arab Emirates to Tajikistan. Increasing trade with Dubai goods also fuelled the travel aspirations of Tajikistan’s upper and middle-class and, thus, caused tourist companies to expand their travel destinations into the Gulf region. In the early 2000s, Tajikistan’s tourism sector experienced a Dubai boom, and many Tajikistani tourist companies started to maintain collaborations with Dubai-based Iranian tourist agencies. This trend accelerated when flydubai opened up a flight route to Tajikistan and enabled middle-class business travel, tourist trips and labour migrants’ mobility at affordable prices. Furthermore, in the last decade, Dubai’s famous city skyline has become a priority location for music video shoots among famous Tajik pop artists. These artists created links
between Tajikistan’s pop music industry and Dubai’s spectacular image of post-Western modernity (Kathiravelu 2016), thereby contributing to the involvement of Tajikistan’s Muslims into a growing global Islamic consumerism and simultaneously feeding the lifestyle aspirations of the new urban middle class (Pink 2009).
Dubai’s appealing radiance as the city of possibility is further enhanced by Tajikistan’s overall economic instability, the dominance of regimes of corruption, nepotism and arbitrariness, and the dearth of professional opportunities for well-educated and economically aspiring entrepreneurs. The specific combination of globally mediated economic opportunities in the Gulf and the political and economic constraints at home encouraged many Tajiks to establish or get involved in translocal businesses in the United Arab Emirates. Among them were well-educated young men such as the two middlemen Rustam and Dilshod who will be introduced later, and who left the country due to the lack of enticing employment opportunities. In the Arab Emirates, they were able to capitalize on their Russian, Persian, Arab, and English language skills, university degrees, travel experiences, and aura of urban sophistication and began successful economic careers as middlemen.
In the last five years, many entrepreneurs suffering from adverse conditions in the non-state economy have been attracted to Dubai’s business-friendly environment. To run a successful business in Tajikistan, entrepreneurs must have informal ‘access’ (kanal), or
‘connections’ (svyazi, aloqa) to government officials. In recent years, these costly connections and the corruption linked to them, together with the overall economic crisis in the country, have caused difficulties for entrepreneurs struggling to cover their business expenses. In addition, the decline of migrants’ remittances due to the financial crisis in Russia3 critically affected Tajikistan’s economy. As a consequence, the government increased taxes and thus jeopardized small- and middle-scale entrepreneurial and business enterprises (Mullodjanov 2016). The informal economy is additionally hampered by constant surveillance practices through local authorities and elite groups who seek to monopolize the trading and bazaar business. Fires in the central bazaars of both Dushanbe and Kulob destroyed many vendors’ property.
3 The country depends heavily on remittance from migrants in Russia, which provides an equivalent of half of the country’s GDP (Malyuchenko 2015).
These vendors were mainly uninsured, making them ineligible for compensation for their lost property.4 It is important to note that the insurance system in Tajikistan is neither well-developed nor trusted.
Many of the affected traders used bank loans to reopen their business.
Banks in Tajikistan offer loans at extremely high interest rates5 and overburden borrowers with a lot of confusing bureaucratic paperwork.
Eventually, many vendors transferred their business to the United Arab Emirates in order to pursue their economic interests without the pressure to get involved in corruption, the need to pay bribes, or the high risk of being targeted by the government’s arbitrary surveillance and regulation regime in the informal economy.6
Furthermore, the integration of Tajiks into Dubai’s global trade and tourism business cannot be understood without considering the role of Russia and its changing migration policy, as well as the emergence of a new consumer-friendly and status-oriented urban middle class in Russia and the countries of Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan, that have been enjoying tourist trips to the Gulf since the early 2000s.
In recent decades, migration from Tajikistan has significantly increased due to the country’s uncertain socio-economic situation. Of the total amount of Tajik migrants, about 90% go to Russia, while the rest migrate to Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, South Korea and some overseas countries (ILO 2010). Due to Russia’s citizenship law, educated and highly qualified foreigners enjoy certain privileges, such as the right to acquire Russian citizenship after some years of work in Russia. Therefore, the emigration of Tajik intellectuals and entrepreneurs to Russia has significantly increased during the last ten years.7 However, due to growing Russian nationalism, many Tajiks, like other migrants from Central Asia and other foreigners, are increasingly facing racism in their everyday life in Russia (Habeck and Schröder
4 See http://news.tj/en/news/tajikistan/incidents/20120314/damage-caused-qurghon-tepppa-s-central-bazaar-fire-estimated-312000-somoni, http://www.rferl.org/a/
kulob-bazaar-fire-market-sahovat-shops/25465601.html
5 In 2016, the bank rate was 29% to 32% for Somoni, and 22% to 35% for USD. See http://fmfb.com.tj/ru/legal/loans/
6 See https://www.ukessays.com/essays/economics/barriers-to-entrepreneurship-development-in-tajikistan-economics-essay.php
7 For instance, Tajiks have been resettled in Russia’s Tambov Region within the Russian voluntary resettlement program — including twenty high-qualified medical doctors and their families (Pastrova 2014).
2016:10f, 12f).8 For example, many struggle with structural exploitation9 in the workplace (Ryazantsev 2016:5–6). Violent xenophobia in Russian society has diminished their overall wellbeing, and when the economic crisis hit Russia, many Tajiks left for the Emirates, while others were deported back to Tajikistan and later followed their more successful relatives to Dubai.
Although Dubai is for many Tajiks an alternative migration destination to escape the precarious working and living conditions in Russia, in the Gulf they nevertheless retain links to Russia’s socio-economic development, as well as to the shared Soviet past (see Philipp Schröder in Chapter Eight). On the one hand, they profit from the influx of Russian middle-class tourists to Dubai’s tourism sector. On the other hand, many Tajiks who maintain and cultivate close relations with the Tajik migrant diaspora in Russia are able to expand their Dubai-based businesses into markets in Russia and wider Eurasia.
Fig. 2.1 ‘Mexa, shuba!’: fur-coat shops for Russian tourists in Dubai Deira. Photo © Manja Stephan-Emmrich (2013), CC BY 4.0
8 See http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1304096,00.html
9 See for instance the widespread practice of non-payment of salaries or residency in poor living conditions (Olimova 2013, p. 72).