Vanishing

Tajikistan’s government picks people up and they vanish. A journalist. An activist. Someone who posted something on Facebook that contradicted the official line. The police arrive, they’re gone, and then—nothing. Sometimes their families find out they’ve been tortured. Sometimes they just never hear from them again. Thousands have fled because staying is essentially asking to be made to disappear.

The international community makes the right noises—condemnations, calls for reform, threats of sanctions. Tajikistan ignores it. They keep hunting for the ones who got out, trying to drag them back. There’s no real pressure that works here. The government’s already decided the cost is worth it.

I think about what that feels like—to live in a place where your government is your enemy, where speaking is dangerous, where disappearing is what happens to people like you. Not hypothetically. Structurally. Regularly.

And I don’t know what changes that from here, honestly. The mechanisms that might work—sanctions, international pressure, whatever—they’re slow and probably useless. The people who could actually change things are the ones most at risk of disappearing.