Protest in Iranian Bazaars

Here is the times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/world/middleeast/11iran.html?ref=world

The bazaaris are often depicted as being an urban group with economic weight that tends toward greater social conservatism and support of the Islamist laws.

The declining oil prices of the economic contraction are already making for interesting dynamics and already the bazaar offers a decent window on the changes.

Tour De Dordoi

Today Urusbek took me and a family staying at my host family’s guesthouse around the bazaar. Needless to say, being on a sort of guided tour made for more information that I could soak up, organize and coherently present. Regardless, here it goes.

The first two things I noticed while approaching the bazaar were the mosque and containers stacked two high. The mosque is located at a T-intersection where the main road from Bishkek goes past the bazaar and a spur into the bazaar meet. Imams sell religious texts, Islamic trinkets, and symbols of Islamic faith. Though the mosque is only about 3 years old they are already planning on adding another story as soon as next year.

Containers serve as retail and warehouse

The bazaar as a whole is changing, which is to say growing, quickly. Only 5 years ago Dordoi bazaar had almost nothing in the way of permanent structures. Tents were set up each morning and taken down each night to shelter the merchants and customers. Today, the recently standardized international cargo containers comprise the skeletal structure of the bazaar. They are arranged into rows with plenty of walking room in the middle.

Dordoi bazaar is divided into six sections – each owned by a different business man. “They are all very very rich men,” reported Urusbek. Each of these sections tends to specialize in a certain kind of good or source country, for example, there is a Chinese section and a European section. The China section sells cheaply made but extremely affordable goods. The European section sells mostly upper end clothing. We didn’t get into the other sections, but I am sure that it will be cleared up pretty quickly when get back to the bazaar in November.

One area was called Mir Zapat, meaning world of shoes or shoe world. And so it was. Shoe World stretched on and on five or six rows of cargo containers, each row at least 100 meters long. There were shoes from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, Indonesia. None of that is surprising anymore in the globalized economy. But consider that Kyrgyzstan lies more than a thousand miles from the nearest deep sea port, and the presence of such a boutique of footwear is impressive.

As we walked around the bazaar, we spotted a number of militsianeri, police officers. Unprompted, Urusbek complained that he despises the militsia. “They are not good guys. All they do is try and intimidate you for money. And they leave all the thieves alone, because they take money from them.” The militsia are hired by the bazaar owners.

After about two minutes Urusbek told us to be really careful because someone who he knew to be a pickpocket was following us – and had been for about the last 10 minutes. After I turned to look at him, he disappeared into a crowd.

The thieves are mostly pickpockets. The ones that Urusbek knows about are all between the ages of 11 and 20. They are experts of their trade. Due to the accumulating complaints of customers about pickpockets, for the last couple year the militsia have rounded up all of pickpockets and detained them for a little while. Urusbek views this action as a half-hearted attempt to intimidate the youngsters. After all, it happens once or twice or year all in one day – they manage this feat because the officers already know who to detain and where to find them. One distinction that I do not completely understand is between the militsia, who Urusbek derides, and the private security company guards that supervise a particular entryway or building and patrol the bazaar at night. These guys Urusbek viewed as honest, “All they do is guard.”

One area that has changed since I last was in Kyrgyzstan is that child labor has been prohibited (and the prohibition quite stringently enforced) at Dordoi bazaar. Last time I was Kyrgyzstan, many teenagers worked as porters moving goods from storage to retailers and transferring purchases form one merchant to another or in the warehouses loading and unloading trucks. The work was hard and the pay, considering the difficulty of the work, was meager. Details on the work and the pay are in the Asambek entry.

The porters haul very heavy loads around the bazaar and are paid based on the difficulty of the load and the distance traveled. If they get to the bazaar before dawn and work until the end of the day (about 10 hours later on average) they might be lucky enough/have worked hard enough to bring in as much as 1,000 som (around $US 30). Most days, however, the take is somewhere between 300 and 500 som ($US 10-15).

Porters haul goods from a storage area to the retail area. Its gets interesting when they meet the crowds.

We arrived at the bazaar late in the day, so by the time we left things were slowing down. Closing time does not occur in a single moment, rather the further removed shops tend to close first. And as a few storefronts close for the day, customers are less likely to visit that area. As crowds diminish, more store owners in that stretch of bazaar are enticed to close for the day. The process rolls from the margins to the center. At moments the sporadic nature of the rolling-close is odd. A main corridor will still be totally packed with customers and almost every shop still open while slightly less central passageways which intersect the main corridor will be totally empty.

As the corridors empty, a great deal of discarded plastic and cardboard is left behind. At this point, one of the few instances of non-glass recycling I have witnessed in Kyrgyzstan occurs. Old ladies and young kids collect plastic bags and cups as well as cardboard and sell it to processors. A kilo of plastic pays 1.5 som (that’s about $US .05/lb), cardboard is worth double. The cardboard is also harder to package and carry to the recycling center. Many of the women also are hired by the bazaar to clean the bazaar before opening the next morning. Whatever doesn’t get harvested for reprocessing is swept up and thrown away.

This shot shows a storage street marginal to the shopping center. Its a big place.

More photos are here.
They are all captioned, which make the gallery more informative than this post.