Death of Kalim: it is hard to be young, male, unemployed and a Zazakh in Tsengel village

New Internationalist, Nov, 1998 by Louisa Waugh

MY FRIEND AYUSH and I were wringing out our washing when we saw the procession snaking up the hill towards the ancient cemetery that stands above Tsengel village. Silent men and women picked their way through the intricate clay and wooden tombs until they came to a freshly dug grave.

`It's the funeral,' said Ayush calmly. `His father hasn't even arrived from Kazakhstan. But the Kazakhs always bury their dead the next day.' She bent her head and continued rinsing her sheets. I stared at the small crowd across the rocky hillside and thought again about the rage and despair that killed Kalim.

`I went to school with him,' she told me later that afternoon as we sat in her small wooden house drinking bowls of tea. `He really was one of the brightest in the whole year. Maybe that was his problem. There wasn't anything to occupy him here.' I nodded, drumming my fingers slowly on the table. `What happened after he left school - what did he do then?' Ayush shrugs. `He went to the old Kazakh capital, Alma Ata, to study. Lots of the Kazakhs do. He came back here to Tsengel, got married, I don't know. He didn't work.'

She lowered her voice, though there was no-one else in the room and it was her house. `That's when he started drinking and they began,' she gestured, `you know, fighting. His wife Kulgan left him once a couple of years ago, after the first child. But they got back together again and he promised to change.'

Ayush is Mongolian, but our small village and the surrounding mountains and deserts of Bayan-Olgii province are home to most of Mongolia's 90,000 Kazakhs. Traditionally nomads, they herded here in the far west of Mongolia before anyone thought of international borders, tending their camels, goats and sheep in these barren mountains, always living on the edge of Mongolian society. Many of them don't even speak Mangolian. They don't want to belong to Mongolia - the strength of their own identity leaves room for no other.

Many, but not all, Mongolians despise the Kazakhs and don't want to work or socialize with them. So most of the Mongolian Kazakhs have kept to these remote western mountains, as far from the capital Ulaanbaatar as possible. In the early 1990s, lured by the promise of a new, more prosperous life, thousands trekked back to Kazakhstan. But they didn't feel welcome back `home'. In Kazakhstan they were ironically identified as Mongolians and treated with subtle, unnerving contempt. Life was hard. So many returned to Mongolia and continued to play their beautiful, haunting music, and worship Allah in exile. Kalim was amongst them.

I'd only met him a few times. We'd been introduced when I'd just arrived in Tsengel village. Kulgan told me her husband was a driver. But Kalim wasn't working - because like most people here, he didn't have a car. Ayush and I saw him again a couple of weeks later. He was coming out of a narrow shop doorway as we were entering. He reeked of vodka and had a swollen black eye.

At the beginning of the summer he and Kulgan fought again bitterly, shouting through the night. Kalim was drinking heavily, cheap local vodka. He didn't stop when Kulgan left the house early that morning for her teaching job. He could have slept it off, nursed a hangover - they could have made it up once more. But Kalim took down a wire clothes line and hung himself from the wooden rafters of their house. Their neighbour was walking across the yard to the communal toilet when he heard Kalim choking to death. He was just too late.

Kalim's suicide disturbed me because I realized what a terrible place Tsengel could be. The men have hardly any work here; the small clinic and the school are mostly run by the women, who are also constantly busy raising their children, cooking and cleaning. The men spend their time hunting and then hanging round the village square, trading wool or skins. There's little else to do.

For Kalim, aged 27, bored, clever, drunk, without money, unable to work and unwelcome anywhere else, Tsengel was all he had - and it just wasn't enough.

Louisa Waugh is a freelance writer who lives and works in Mongolia.