Updated January 2008
Environment
The Republic of Tajikistan is a small landlocked republic in south-east Central Asia. The terrain is mountainous, with the northern part of the country (Khujand) cut off from the rest of the republic. Tajikistan borders Uzbekistan to the north and west, Kyrgyzstan to the north-east, the People’s Republic of China to the east and Afghanistan to the south. Its territory includes the autonomous region of Gorno-Badakhshan in the Pamiri Mountains. Partially because of its size and mountainous aspects of much of the country, it never received large numbers of Slavic settlers as other parts of Central Asia.
Peoples
Main languages: Tajik, Russian, Uzbek, Yagnobi, Pamiri languages
Main religions: Islam (Sunni, Ismai’li), Orthodox Christianity
Minority groups include Uzbeks 15.3%, Russians 1.1%, and Kyrgyz 1.1% (National Census, 2000).
The Tajiks are an Iranian people who speak a variety of Persian, an Indo-Aryan language. Most of them are Sunni Muslims and they make up about 80 percent of the population of Tajikistan according to an official 2000 census. The country is home to over eighty ethnic groups, most notably Uzbeks, Russians, Tatars, Kyrgyz and Ukrainians. Pamiri Tajiks arguably also constitute a minority group. A small minority in the southern province of Kurgan Tyube consider themselves Arab by descent, although they speak Tajik.
History
The land that is now Tajikistan has for more than 6,000 years been the site of human habitation. Its proximity to Iran has meant that for much of its more recent history it was within the sphere of the Persian empire. While Russia’s proximity has meant it has had contacts with this part of Asia for centuries, it was in the 19th century, between 1873 and 1876, that it conquered the khanates Khokand, Bukhara, and Khiva, and in so doing prepared the ground for the eventual creation of what is today Tajikistan. In 1895, the British and the Russians agreed to use the Amu Darya River as the border between the Russian and British Empires, and this became the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. In 1924, it became the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, a part of Uzbekistan. In 1929, it received the status of a constituent republic of the USSR as the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic.
Tajikistan declared independence in September 1991 and established a presidential republic. Rahmon Nabiyev, a former first secretary of the Tajikistan Communist Party, was elected president obtaining 57 per cent of the vote. His main rival, Davlat Khudonazarov, representing various democratic and Islamic parties, received 30 per cent. The important factor in Nabiyev’s victory was the backing by the Khujand northern clans and the Uzbek and Russian minorities, who feared that the country might be transformed into a Tajik ethnic and Muslim state.
Civil war
Aggravation of the economic situation and Nabiyev’s unwillingness to enter a meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the opposition, as well as the latter’s inability to accept defeat, led to political deadlock. Riots started in April–May 1992 and resulted in armed clashes in Dushanbe, the capital. The civil war, which erupted in summer and autumn 1992, claimed up to 100,000 dead and a million refugees. The civil war saw mobilization of supporters along regional, ethnic and clan lines in the struggle to resolve the ideological conflict between Islam and secularism and the political question of who would rule the country.
President Nabiyev was forced to resign on 7 September 1992, but this failed to stop the war in the south. In November 1992 the Tajikistan Parliament accepted Nabiyev’s resignation, abolished the presidency and elected Imomali Rahmonov as parliamentary chairman, the highest executive post. CIS peacekeeping forces for Tajikistan were created. In December the ‘opposition-led’ government fell, and Rahmonov took office. Uzbek and Russian military support ensured that the new government stayed in power. These developments finalized the first round of power redistribution in Tajikistan, when a Khujand–Kulob alliance was installed in power again, with Kulobis, from President Rahmonov’s region, on top. Ethnic and social fragmentation increased. The mandate of the CIS peacekeeping troops was extended into 1996. Following important military gains by the opposition, a UN-brokered peace agreement was signed by Tajik President Rakhmonov and Islamic opposition leader Sayed Abdullo Nouri in December 1996. As well as an end to fighting, the agreement called for a general amnesty, a prisoner exchange and the repatriation of refugees. The December agreement was designed to become the cornerstone for the creation of a national reconciliation commission in 1997.
Post-conflict developments
While disarmament occurred in 1999 and parliamentary elections were held in 2000, some areas of the country remain under the control of former guerrillas despite President Rahkmonov largely consolidating power. There have been assassinations in recent years of a number of high-ranking officials, including a peace accords negotiator and a Minister of Culture. Overall, democratic institutions and the rule of law have not had been strengthened in the short period since peace has been achieved, and the rate of reconstruction very slow while people remain seriously impoverished.
Independent journalists and human rights activists have been harassed and worse, especially after 2005 as government officials appear to have reacted nervously to the 2005 revolution in Kyrgyzstan. Key media outlets have additionally in 2005 and 2006 been closed due to state persecution.
Parliamentary elections in 2005 were generally deemed not to have been free and fair and to meet international standards, though they appear to have been an improvement on the 2000 elections. The 2006 presidential election were also considered not to be fair, though it was peaceful.
Governance
Tajikistan’s recovery after almost a decade of civil war which destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and created severe humanitarian and refugee problems has been slow and painful. It is still not complete. While some stability has returned to the country in more recent years, Tajikistan remains an authoritarian state dominated by President Rahmonov and his entourage. There is a multiparty political system, but the development of the rule of law and democratic progress remains slow.
Despite the absence of comprehensive human rights legislation, the international treaties dealing with human rights ratified by Tajikistan can be applied directly by the country’s tribunals, but are seldom invoked partially because of the weakness and poor status of judicial institutions, as well as a low level of awareness of the availability of these rights. Freedom of expression is protected under the country’s legal system, but independent media and journalists while present in Tajikistan, are subjected to pressure and harassment, and may have problems with obtaining or keeping licences. Some journalists who offend authorities have disappeared, been beaten or arrested worse.
Non-governmental organisations – including those representing minorities – must be registered, and this process may take years, in particular in the case of international NGOs. Domestic NGOs are generally not interfered with, at least until 2005, leading to a dramatic increase in registered NGOs since 2000, especially when registration fees were later slashed.
Though the civil war has ended, tensions remain high in some parts of the country.
Current state of minorities and indigenous peoples
The situation in Tajikistan is similar in many respects to that of its neighbours. The titular ethnic group, while a majority, faces the legacy of the dominance of the Russian language in many aspects of political and economic life. Since independence, Tajiks have attempted to assert their dominance by linguistic and other preferences that tend to discriminate against and exclude minorities, often leading to resentment or even an exodus. While they were close to a quarter of the population at the time of independence, many Uzbeks fled during the period of the civil war. They remain the largest minority at over 15 percent of the population according to a 2000 census, and are concentrated in areas usually associated with opposition to the government. This has led to a general distrust of Uzbeks, and in turn discriminatory treatment towards them in many institutions of the state. Once again, oppressive measures have been presented as necessary in the name of the fight against ‘terror’ and ‘separatism’. The degree of under-representation of minorities in public life is startling: only two members of Parliament are Uzbeks, despite this minority’s very substantial numbers.
The civil war that broke out in the country after 1992 has meant a massive departure of some 400,000 Russians – and some Uzbeks – so that today the former constitute less than 3 per cent of the population. Russian is not an official language, but a language of ‘inter-ethnic communication’ under the Constitution. Despite constitutional provisions that initially appear to guarantee the use of minority languages, and despite the large percentage of minorities in the country, in particular Uzbeks, minorities are largely excluded from employment in public service. The limited use of the Uzbek language by state authorities in particular is probably discriminatory, although in the field of education the use of the Uzbek language is more prevalent, partially because of the Education Act which contains a provision which recognises a right to education in the language of national minorities. Where feasible There are however continued reports that state authorities ordering some Uzbek- and Turkmen-medium schools to teach in the Tajik language. An additional difficulty faced by the larger minorities is the requirement from 2000 that all minority schools follow the approved national curriculum and use educational materials. While previously these schools could use materials in their language from Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, etc., this option was officially removed while approved materials from central educational authorities in the minority languages were either non-existent or unavailable.
The situation of religious minorities is relatively better in Tajikistan than in some of its neighbours. While religious groups must register, there are no reports of denial of registration of religious minorities, and Tajikistan permits the formation of political parties of a religious character, something no other country in the region permits. However Tajik lawmakers may be set to reverse this trend: a new draft religion law introduced in January 2006 and in the process of domestic review, was due to be sent to Parliament in late 2007. The law, entitled "On Freedom of Conscience, on Religious Associations and Other [Religious] Organizations", would replace the current law on religion and add restrictions, such as increasing to 400 the number of petition signatures required to form a religious association; prohibiting religious education in private houses; prohibiting proselytizing; prohibiting religious associations from participating in political activities; and prohibiting political parties from having a religion-based ideology (which would effectively disallow the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, a political party with two members in the lower house of the national Parliament). In June 2007 representatives of 22 minority religious groups signed an open letter to the President and Parliament expressing concern that the draft law would effectively outlaw minority religious groups in the country.
The fight against Islamic fundamentalism has led the government to ban one group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, though most outside observers describe it as a non-violent organization. Most of its activists who have been imprisoned since 2000 are members of the Uzbek minority.
While on the surface there are a number of rights guaranteed to minorities under the country’s Constitution and legislative provisions, implementation remains unclear and uncertain for minorities, leading the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to request additional information from Tajik authorities, especially as to the actual use of minority languages in education, the media and other areas. There were however some positive steps, such as voting ballots being available in Uzbek and Russian for the 2005 parliamentary elections, and in Uzbek, Russian and Kyrgyz for the 2006 presidential elections (in addition to Tajik).
After the Kyrgyzstan revolution in 2005, central authorities began to restrict the activities of human rights defenders and NGOs, sometimes accusing them to seeking the overthrow of the government or distorting its policies, with a large number of them being closed down in Sogd province, officially because of problems linked to their registration or procedural matters.
There were reports in 2007 that the government had begun a ‘transmigration’ programme to bring Tajiks into strategic areas traditionally inhabited by members of the Uzbek minority. Tajik authorities started resettling some 1,000 Tajik families in November 2006 to a western region mainly populated by Uzbeks. Observers and members of the Uzbek minority claim that central authorities are trying to dilute the Uzbek percentage in a key industrial area. This raises issues of discrimination in relation to land rights and usage, among others.
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Great article, however, I'd like to clarify a couple of issues.
1. A vast percentage of Russian-speaking population--not just Russians, or even "Slavs" but a wide variety of ethnic group ranging from Volga Germans to Koreans to Estonians--had never chosen to "immigrate" to Tajikistan. They had been forcibly relocated there during Stalin's purges of Russian peasants ("razkulachivanie"), his attempts to wipe out entire ethnic groups (such as Volga Germans) and mass deportation from the regions acquired by the USSR in 1940 (such Baltic states). The people being "resettled" were shipped by railroad in cattle carts, then in trucks and horse driven wagons to uninhabited parts of Central Asia, like the area at the very south of Tajikistan, and dropped off in the middle of the desert. They were forced to build their own GULAG prison camp, and then used as slave labor to dig up canals to bring water into the area to irrigate the land and tranform the desert into cotton fields, which they were to tend and pick for years to come. Since the prisoners were eventually allowed to build their own houses (at night, for they had to work in the fields the entire day) eventually the GULAG camp turned into a liveable small town with electricity, a post office, and even a movie theater--at which point the Tajiks moved in. Since all the positions of power were reserved for Tajiks-only, like in the rest of the Republic, most of the "non-native population" had returned to where they had been originally picked up--almost everyone except for Russians and Germans, both having no place to go, for reasons too long to explain. However, when West Germany offered the citizenship and help with relocation to the ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and the USSR, some Germans moved there, while others, along with Russians, moved to Dushanbe, the capital of Tajik SSR. The town built by the GULAG prisoners still exists, but it still has no name. I was born in Settlement No. 7.
2. The ethnic minorities did not start leaving "when the civill war broke out in 1992". Almost everyone I knew had been already gone by 1992--and not because of clashes between Tajiks from different regions (by the way, Nabiyev was forced to resign at the gunpoint when one of the warring side, the one usually referred to "the islamists" or because they had received support from Wahhabis--the fundamentalist wing of Islam in other countries. The are also called "anti-government forces" or the most ridiculous label, "the communists." In reality, the Civil War in Tajikistan had very little to do with Islam and nothing whatsoever with Communism. It was a struggle for cotrol between two regional groups: the Garmis and the Kulobis (with Pamiris and Khudjanis loosely attached to each of those, in the order listed.
After Nabiev "abdicated", he was allowed to leave the country and died from a heart attack very soon afterwards. This is the part in the article has the apples and oranges mixed the most: the people who exiled Nabiyev were NOT the people who assigned Rahmonov--that were their enemies, the opposite side in the civil war, and it happened months later. The way the Nabiyev-Rahmonov transition is described in the article amounts to saying "when the Confederation Army won the American Civil war, they deposed Lincoln and elected General Grant in his place."
When Garmis came to power for a few months--which was more than enough for everyone, for they weren't governing the part of the country under their control, they were pillaging it. Also, since Garmis owed Wahhabis a favor for the financial support, they tried to implement some measures towards Islamization of the country. That is when the Kulobis--the opposing region rebelled, formed an army out of paramilitary groups that had existed, on both sides, way before 1992. The movement was The People's Front and its leader, a former convict Sangak Safarov turned out to be a gifted military strategist, so in a matter of months, they reached Dushanbe and kicked out the Garmis. That is when Emomali Rahmonov was assigned to be the leader of the country. No one had ever heard of him, and I don't think he'd even participated in the war. Picking him makes perfect sense, for most of the Civil War in Tajikistan were not so much battles as mass slaughter of civilians who happened to belong to the "enemy region." It was gruesome and ugly, so any of the military leaders from each side would have qualified as a war criminal and a mass murderer. Which would not look too good in terms of the government being recognized by the international authorities. So they pulled a "collective farm manager" out of somewhere in Kulob, the region that had won the war, and put him on the top. I don't remember if there was any kind of a parliament to "elect" him, for most of the past power figures in Tajikistan had hightailed out of the country even before the minorities could afford to do it--after the February 1990's riots. Those riots, and nothing else: not the economic situation (which was worse where they were going) nor being threated as second-rated citizens (that was nothing new, from the establishment of Tajik SSR, there was a clear directive established by the government in Moscow that all the positions of power were to be given to Tajiks only, whether they were qualified or not. Which means that being a minority automaticly precluded one from any kind of a political career (the token Russians in the government of Tajik SSR had been all sent in from Moscow). The existence of the ethnic minorities in the Republics had never been as much as acknowledged--it was as if the Soviet Union consisted of 15 100% homogenous republics: all Ukranians lived in Ukraine, all the Georgians lived in Georgia, and there surely could not be any Russians or anyone else besides Tajiks in Tajikistan. But you know--people get used to be second-rate citizens if that is all they had ever known. They had put up with it for 70 years, they would have continue to do so for another 70, had it not been for the riots. What most Western sources tend to call "a peaceful demonstration brutally squashed by the Soviet Army with a bunch of civilians killed in the process"...in reality, it was a mob of vicious animals that quickly spread all over the city, beating up, stabbing, raping and killing hundreds of people including small children, pregnant women, old people--it did not matter to them. My high school was half-a-bus stop away from the government building and I missed the start of the riot by half an hour. But when I got home, I stood at out living room window that faced an intersection and watched the rioters stop each car, drag the people inside of it and--what they did to them, before setting the car on fire. I was wondering if they were going to get bored with the cars at some point and move towards the condominium buildings. Ours was the closest one. I was sixteen years old.
What I had seen was not the worst. For months afterwards, I heard stories from other people about what had happened to them--and what they had seen happening to others. An 8-year-old girl being kicked around by a few guys "like a soccer ball." Young women having their clothes ripped off and pushed into a crowd of rapists. People beaten to death.
The rioters targeted everyone who did not look Tajik as well as the Tajik women wearing European clothing instead of the traditional (more ethnic than "Muslim") attire: wide trousers tapered at the bottom, loose "empire-waist" dressed, usually of the same pattern as the trousers, and headscarf--the kind that in the U.S. is called a "bandanna" covering most of their hair and tied in the back. I don't think I've seen many young woman wearing anything else for the next few years. At the very least, if it was not "the proper Tajik dress", it had to be a skirt reaching all the way to the ankles, and a long-sleeve shirt. That's what the minority girls had to war, too. I never went out outside wearing jeans, but I've heard of what happened to those who tried.
The riots were going on for three days. It took three days for the government in Moscow to come up with the idea than perhaps they should send in the military, since the police was obviously helpless. So finally, there came the tanks. There were NO "armed clashes" between the rioters and the army. The heros terrorizing women and children vanished like summer snow at the first rumor of the military coming in. The rioters were as much "fighters" as they had been "peaceful demonstrators." The Soviet Army, when they finally showed up, were treated as the saviors. People bought flowers and gave them to soldiers, there were tons of flowers piled up on the tanks. There was one thing that was missing--the "official reaction." The news media, both local and "central"--the Moscow based TV and radiostation kept silent about what was happening in Dushanbe while the riots were going on. I don't know where the Tajik SSR government was hiding out at the moment, I don't remember them delivering any public speeches addressing the situation. The was no word from Moscow, either. Finally, a few rather vague, and nowhere close to the front page articles mentioned some kind of "disorderly events" that had happened in Dushanbe a few days back. On article mentioned that seven people died--but they retracted that statement the a matter of couple days. When the official statement issued by the Soviet Government and printed in the newspapers came out, it said "There had been a minor public disturbance in the capital of Tajikistan. It has been handled. There have been no victims and no one got seriously hurt."
That is when all the minorities "saw the writing on the wall." It said NEXT TIME, THEY WILL KILL US ALL, AND NO ONE IN THE WORLD WON'T EVEN NOTICE, LET ALONE CARE."
There is one thing being a second-rate citizens. "No one got hurt" meant were were NO ONE. Definitely not humans whose having gone through horrendous experiences deserved a mention in the news. Some people got plane tickets and left in a matter of days, never to come back. The very first one, as I've mentioned were the Tajik goverment elite--they had stolen enough money in their careers as "party leaders" to live comfotably for the rest of the lives. So did everyone else who had money. For others, it was a struggle, because could not really afford to move--and the people in Russia made it very clear that "they did not want no refugees." They were denied, employment and housing, being continiously harassed by the locals, being told, once again to "go back where they'd come from." I know of a case when a man in his late sixties was burned alive when the locals set his house on fire "because he had too much stuff." More than they did. The refugees from Tajikistan were treated so horribly in Russia, that quite a few came back, saying "We'd rather get killed by the Tajiks." But of course they did not want to get killed. Nobody wanted to go through "the February events" as they were officially called, when referred to at all, the second time. About 90% of the ethnic minorities, as well as the Tajik elite and those Tajiks who simply did not want to live in a place plunging into the Middle Ages--90% of those who emigrated had done so BEFORE the mess of 1992. I know that because I was there. With very few exceptions, everyone I knew--or did not really know, but had seen around in the neighborhood--had packed up and left within the two years between 1990 and 1992. All but three families in our condominium building. All of my schoolteachers except for 1. About 80 percent of my classmates (a lot of them were kids of the government members that had split first--they all live in Moscow now). All but two girls and 5 guys with my major at the university--out of about 40 accepted just a year earlier. Those who stayed were mostly people like my family, who had neither a place to go nor the means to get there. It was also common for families without adult males. Those who left between 1992 and 1994 did not do so because of the war, either. Neither group of Tajiks fighting with each other recognized us as humans, although the Wahhabi-backed Garmis were slightly worse. Here's an example: my cousin and her husband lived in a building next to others. One night, their Tajik neighbor had a bit too much to drink, so he fell down a flight of stairs. My cousin's husband helped him get back up the stairs (no one in the party place had noticed the noise or the screaming when one of their friends was counting steps with his head). So, my cousin-in-law had to walk him all the way inside his neighbor's place. Seeing a Russian guy holding up their friend all covered in blood somehow made the Tajik guys think it was my cousin's husband who had hurt him. They beat him, seven against one, until they got tired of it. When my cousin called the police, they hang up on her as soon as they realized that the victim was Russian. That was not an exception, that was the norm. Another woman I know had been repeatedly raped by the same man who just came by whenever he felt like it. Once, she tried to stop him by placing a metal bar across the door. That made him so furious, when he finally broke in, he hit her a few times until she fell down on the floor, by the couch in her living room, telling her if she tried something like that metal bar again, she would get worse than this. When she fell down he started kicking her, long enough that she lost conscioiusness,--and raped her after that. Her elderly grandmother, present in the room all this time also tried to call the police, telling them what was happening, and begging them for help. But they told her "they had more important things to do." I've got more similar stories, in case anyone's interested. THIS is the reason the non-Tajiks of any ethnic background have been leaving Tajikistan up to this day. There still is about a fraction of a percent of overall population left, but they are not going to stay--there is no future, for them or their children. There is no other place in the world that wants them, either. So, they don't know what to do. But they are "the last of Mohicans" and they will have to go, earlier or later. The examples I've given above have long since become the NORM. Some of the people still there have small children, including girls, who will eventually grow up. Would you want to stay at a place where you teenage daughter, on her way home from high school, could be dragged into a car and raped by four men in their 40's, right there, a few steps away from your front door, and you won't be able to do anything about it, because the rapists are of ethnic majority, and you are an "illegal immigrant" like Estonians claim _their_ ethnic minorities are--even if your family had lived in that area for four generations? You are not a human, you have no rights, nor you have a right to ask for any rights. Your crime is having been born where you have with a wrong heritage you did not choose, therefore you have no right to exist. I've been to Estonia, it's a much more "refined" and "well-mannered nation". They won't be going around raping children--they'll just build a few concentration camps, to dispose of _their_ illegal ethnic minorities in a much more effecient and organized manner. While the European Union that Estonia is a member of, will blissfully look the other way. I bet they'll also "have more important things to do." If Russian-speaking minority in Estonia is an ethnic group, then what Estonian government is doing amounts to genocide, or "ethnic cleansing," and they don't even make it a secret--their self-proclaimed goal is to make "the Russians" in Estonia physically not present in their country, by any means necessary. If that bothers no one in the European Union, who in the world is going to care about the happenings in Tajikistan?
At any rate. I just wanted to let you know that the people deposed Nabiyev, the Garmis were NOT the people that brought Rahmonov to power--that were their very enemies, the Kulobis. So this article is basically leaving out the most crucial part of the civil war in Tajikistan--the part when the tables have turned.
I feel like I should let you know that--I don't know what are your sources, but I was there, and I got to see what had really happened.
That, and the other thing--that most ethnic minorities had left Tajikistan before 1992, for reasons that had little to do with either "the economic conditions" (someone should take a look at the conditions in rural Russia) nor the war between the Tajiks. Which, by the way had neither started in 1992 nor ended in 1997.
Thank you for you time. Even if the moderators don't approve this for whatever reason, this would be just "for your information."
Posted by Marina Yereshenko on 11 December 2008