Exhibition highlights child labour

Campaigners against child labour in the country’s cotton sector opened a photo exhibition on Friday in the capital, Tashkent, in an attempt to highlight the practice. Uzbekistan is one of the five top cotton producers in the world, with thousands of children and students picking cotton in vast cotton fields during the harvest months of September to November. The photo exhibition "Cotton - White Gold of Uzbekistan", organised jointly by the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), a media NGO, and the Swiss embassy in Tashkent, is a rare attempt to draw attention to the use of hundreds of thousands of young people to bring in the nation's cotton. Critics of the practice say it impacts on the health and education of young people. On 8 October, Rustam Akhliddinov, the first deputy minister of public education, confirmed that 44,000 senior pupils and students had been mobilised to harvest the crop this year, but critics say the number does not include junior school children helping their parents. “Eighty percent of our schools are located in rural areas and children in these schools help their parents and farmers to harvest cotton - our national wealth. It is obvious that children help their parents to keep their livelihoods,” the deputy minister said at a press conference at the time. The photographs, by German, Thomas Grabka, depict the faces of children working on Uzbek cotton plantations. “To make my photos I didn’t look for working children, they were just everywhere in the cotton fields,” he told IRIN. “It was so sad for me to see them working, while their contemporaries in Germany spend their time in study and leisure,” he said. “We have been writing about it [child labour] endlessly,” Galima Bukharbaeva, head of IWPR office in Tashkent, told IRIN. “Now we came to the conclusion, maybe it is not enough to write about it, maybe it is time to show the public the reality which exists on cotton plantations and show under what conditions children work,” she said. Local rights activists used the exhibition launch to call on the international community to boycott Uzbek cotton. “They [local governors] use children as slaves. Furthermore, these children and their parents don’t get any benefit, although cotton is sold for hard currency,” Motabar Tajibaeva, a rights activist from the eastern Uzbek province of Fergana, present at the opening, told IRIN. “That’s why 18 NGOs in Uzbekistan are telling the international community to boycott - not to buy Uzbek produced cotton,” she added. The photographs will be displayed for two weeks. Organisers hope government officials, especially from the educational and agricultural ministries, will visit the exhibition. The exhibition will also give teachers and schoolchildren in Tashkent an idea of the conditions their contemporaries in rural areas are working under to gather the 'white gold'.