When the State Comes for the Kids with Opinions

Something I keep returning to, in between everything else: Tajikistan. Specifically what Tajikistan has been doing to its young people for years, with almost no one paying attention.

The pattern, documented in detail by Human Rights Watch, is this: activists get picked up. Journalists, lawyers, people who posted the wrong thing on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. They disappear for a while. Some come back in pieces. Some don’t come back at all. The government labels them terrorists and then spends considerable energy chasing down the ones who managed to flee to neighboring countries—not to prosecute them in any legal sense, but to drag them home and punish them for having had an opinion.

HRW and Norwegian officials have been calling this what it is: one of the worst sustained human rights crises in the region. They’re demanding that the US and the EU impose coordinated sanctions, make the cost of this behavior legible to the people running the country. Whether that actually happens is its own slow, ugly political question with a depressingly predictable answer.

What gets to me is the profile of the people being targeted. Not dissidents in the classic Cold War sense—not underground organizers with networks behind them. Mostly young people with phones and opinions, doing what millions of people do every day in countries where that’s allowed. Posting. Commenting. Disagreeing in public. The state finds this intolerable enough to kill over.

I’ve been writing on the internet since before most of these platforms existed, and I’ve never once had to calculate whether a post might get me hurt. That’s a privilege so foundational I mostly forget it’s there. Reading about what’s happening in Tajikistan is a reminder that the ability to say a thing publicly without fear isn’t a default state—it’s a condition that has to be maintained, often by people who don’t survive the effort.