The Tajik Civil War: 20 Years Later

Tajikistan is at peace; the civil war ended in 1997. President Emomali Rahmon’s supporters regularly boast of his unrivaled role in ending the conflict and bringing security and prosperity to Tajikistan, often assigning him sole credit. However, this peace has not resulted in a confident Tajik leadership. Whenever anybody advocates mobilizing for democratic change or the guarantee of human rights in Tajikistan, the Tajik government answers in the same way, arguing that reckless actions like protests, meetings, or the formation of new social movements or political parties would only create dangerous divisions and could even throw Tajikistan into a civil conflict just like Syria, for example (the country that serves as a warning changes occasionally, depending on what warzone is most prominent in the news).

The Tajik leadership and the state-controlled media are therefore always on message stressing how far Tajikistan has come out of the civil war and into a new era of stability and peace. At the center of this is always Rahmon, who has now expanded the title that state media and others must refer to him by: “The Founder of Peace and National Unity, Leader of the Nation, President of the Republic of Tajikistan, His Excellency Emomali Rahmon.”

But what sort of peace does Tajikistan have 20 years later? Critics stress that it is a peace where torture by security forces is the norm, where elections are neither free nor fair, where the president’s family is looting the country, and where the causes of the civil war – including a grossly unfair distribution of power – are more acute than ever. As for the population of Tajikistan, they are extremely pessimistic about their future inside Tajikistan, but also increasingly apolitical. The vast majority of the population is concerned only about their meager economic survival week-to-week, all the while navigating a heavily corrupt economy and government that are dominated by the president’s family and his inner circle.

The utter social and economic defeat of the Tajik people is on regular display, the most recent example being the lines of citizens waiting outside failing banks trying to determine if their deposits have been entirely lost or not. On their way to the bank they may see on display the billions of dollars wasted on the president’s vanity projects – monuments and glittering, but empty, buildings, as well as billboards hailing the multi-decade project that is the Rogun hydroelectric dam boondoggle. These billions of dollars, diverted to regime insiders and contractors, could have been used to strengthen or bail out the banking sector after the collapse in remittances from Tajik labor migrants in Russia. But as usual, the funds ended up in the pockets of the president’s patronage network. If any Tajiks complain, the retort from Rahmon’s supporters usually includes the time-proven scare tactic: remember what happened the last time Tajiks came into the streets and protested? The civil war.

The War

Estimates for the death toll from the conflict as a whole vary wildly. Some put the number of civil war deaths as low as 25,000; others go as high as 100,000 or more – a massive number for such a small country, and even more devastating considering the fact that the vast majority of deaths occurred over the span of a few months in 1992, predominantly in one area south of Dushanbe, the southern parts of the former Qurghonteppa Province, particularly the Vakhsh Valley.

The suffering inflicted during the war goes far beyond just the deaths. Aside from the deaths of combatants and numerous unarmed civilians, the conflict generated a massive number of refugees and internally displaced persons, led to the large-scale destruction and looting of property as well as the rape and torture of many, and further devastated the country's already damaged economy. Tajikistan’s non-Muslim population fled, taking their skills, international connections, and knowledge with them. Joining these mostly Russian refugees were educated and highly skilled Tajiks who saw no future in their own country. Most of them never returned.

The story of the Tajik civil war is extremely complex, and difficult to describe in brief. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, political battles for control of the new independent Republic of Tajikistan spiraled out of control and, in spring 1992, into ever-increasing levels of violence. By late summer 1992 it was clear that Tajikistan was experiencing a civil war that would not end quickly.

How to describe this conflict is still a topic of contention among scholars and Tajiks themselves. A concise description of the conflict is provided by Brent Hierman, who noted that this was “a war fought between regional elites; specifically, following the collapse of the center, networks of elites, organized according to region, mobilized their supporters against one another in an effort to gain control of the existing state institutions.” One of these regions is the now-defunct province of Kulob, from which the current president, Emomali Rahmon, hails. He was swept along by the wave of victorious Kulobi field commanders who, along with Russian forces, put him into the top position of leadership right before taking the capital city of Dushanbe in winter 1992.

The conflict had a strong communal and ethnic character that became clear when street protests revealed that the opposition demonstrators were overwhelmingly Gharmi Tajiks (supporting the Islamic Renaissance Party) and the counter-protesters heavily Kulobi Tajiks (supporting the incumbent leadership).  Through summer 1992 the fighting slowly escalated, resulting in ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks with origins in Rahmon’s home province of Kulob, as well as other groups in lesser numbers, fleeing the conflict epicenter of the Vakhsh Valley as internal refugees.

The capital city was host to a powerless coalition unity government, and its streets were run by opposition forces composed of police officers, militias, and gangs who were either from the Pamiri ethnic minority or were Tajiks with roots in the former Gharm Province and held loyalties to the Islamic Renaissance  Party. Their victims were often Uzbeks or Tajiks from Kulob. Dushanbe had swelled with refugees from the south, while also seeing many flee Dushanbe itself, notably Kulobi Tajiks and Russians. The civil war now had a very strong communal aspect, exacerbating the already poor inter-ethnic and inter-regional relations within society. Newspapers and media outlets run by secular democrats often ran articles attacking Uzbeks and Kulobi Tajiks, as well as the Russian government.

However, the opposition coalition that appeared on the battlefield – Pamiris plus Tajiks loyal to the Islamic Renaissance  Party – was far too narrow, and a counter-attack was gaining momentum. The counter-attack needed some focus and planning, and this was provided by Russian special forces troops of the 14th GRU who joined with field commanders from the Kulob province in late September 1992. The most prominent of these Kulobi field commanders was Sangak Safarov, ostensibly a bar owner and vodka vendor, but in fact a powerful mafia figure in Tajikistan. Safarov acted as the patron of an unknown low-level southern government administrator named Emomali Rahmon. Safarov personally executed the incumbent chairman of the Kulob province and replaced him with Rahmon, a move that would prove to be the first step in Rahmon’s career arc toward his current perch as Tajikistan’s president-for-life.

The counter-attack by Kulobi Tajiks and Uzbek militias – supported by Russian special forces – rode a wave of hate and anger, as many Kulobis and Uzbeks had been expelled from their homes and had their land and belongings stolen. Many had lost family members. The revenge, however, was massively out of proportion. During the counteroffensive that stretched from late 1992 to early 1993, Kulobi and Uzbek militias targeted Pamiris and Gharmi Tajiks, whether armed combatants or civilians. Mass killings and rape of Gharmi Tajiks and Pamiris commenced, along with the destruction or theft of homes and land through the southern regions of Tajikistan and in Dushanbe, leading to a new flight of refugees to Afghanistan (70,000 in total) and to the isolated Pamir mountains.

The losers, whose armed forces were comprised almost entirely of Gharmi Tajiks who supported the Islamic Renaissance  Party, plus their ethnic Pamiri allies (making the opposition a de facto Shia-Sunni coalition), fled Dushanbe along with many of the non-combatant allies of the secular opposition democratic parties. In December 1992 the anti-opposition militias, now organized loosely as the “Popular Front,” entered Dushanbe victoriously. The winners, mostly from Emomali Rahmon’s home region of Kulob, thus began the process of taking over the state structures and the country’s economic assets.

The war at this point transitioned to a well-entrenched government versus a guerrilla insurgency, as well as offensives in marginal, isolated areas controlled by opposition forces. The Tajik government controlled all of the major cities, all of the most productive farmland, and all of the nation’s industrial capacity. The opposition never recovered, and found itself becoming a marginal force in exile.

The Peace Agreement of 1997

1997 was supposed to be the year that Tajikistan turned itself around and headed into a new era of peace and prosperity similar to what many remembered from the 1970s and early 1980s. In June of that year, Tajikistan’s government signed a peace agreement with a broad opposition coalition, now calling itself the United Tajik Opposition – but with the Islamic Renaissance  Party at its core.

The government forces had long been victorious on the battlefield, with a decisive defeat of the armed opposition in winter 1992-1993. Since then, opposition forces had been confined to isolated and impoverished rural areas in the mountainous east, and across the border in their Afghan safe haven. The peace agreement of 1997 was the opposition accepting that it could never win, and the government accepting that it could never achieve total victory over a cross-border insurgency in the isolated eastern regions.

This battlefield dead-end was a classic “hurting stalemate” combined with a “ripe moment” – with that moment being the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The armed component of the Tajik opposition, almost entirely from the Islamic Renaissance Party, was hosted by the Afghan forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani. The famous mujahideen commanders were soon to enter into an alliance with Russia (the Tajik government’s major supporter) against the Taliban, as was Iran, another smaller supporter of the Tajik opposition. The patrons of the combatants in Tajikistan needed the civil war to end so that they could join forces to focus on resisting the northward expansion of the Taliban, all while using Tajikistan as a base for that operation. Essentially, Russia, Iran, and Ahmed Shah Massoud foisted a peace upon the combatants in Tajikistan – despite the claims of various other international actors (e.g., the United Nations) of having played a major role in creating the conditions for negotiations. It was a decisive demonstration of the ability of foreign patrons to end wars between their clients – if they so desired.

As one of the terms of the peace agreement, the opposition received 30 percent of government posts and prominent figures within the opposition were given valuable economic assets to keep them satisfied. Many opposition commanders, however, were not able to adapt to the new system, and resorted to violence. The government was equally enthusiastic about the use of violence or prison to deal with former opposition fighters they wanted out of the political and economic scene.

The post-1997 era witnessed semi-regular fights between government forces and stubborn opposition commanders, as well as with pro-government commanders who themselves were not always perfectly loyal to the top leadership. The government was usually victorious, as in the most recent round of fighting in 2015 between the government and the deputy defense minister – a former opposition commander. In a few cases, the government failed to achieve its goals, as is the case with an ongoing quasi-stalemate in parts of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region after a government military offensive there in summer 2012. The president was able to make a tour of the region, and to arrange for locals to be brought out to sing his praises, but the state structures do not have the control over the region that they would like – and that they have in every other part of the country.

Tajikistan 20 Years Later

Every few years,  when government forces engaged in short bouts of combat, worries about instability have intensified. But these worries ignore the fact that the government is almost always victorious – fighting the government with arms ends in death, exile, or life in prison. Since 1997 the Tajik leadership has put most of its efforts into suppressing political opposition parties and taking over as many sectors of the economy as possible. The effort that has gone into fighting former opposition commanders is dwarfed by the state’s focus on controlling the electoral system, society, religion, and the economy.

As for peacefully mobilizing against the government, Rahmon has ruthlessly suppressed opposition political parties, forbid public demonstrations, and managed fake elections. The main target here has been the Islamic Renaissance  Party. The party has been destroyed in Tajikistan following a government campaign that culminated in 2015. The government banned the party and designated it as a terrorist group. This ban on the party – which was completely without merit as the Islamic Renaissance Party is a thoroughly moderate Islamic movement with no ties to violent militants – followed by the jailing or exile of many members, has effectively ended the movement in Tajikistan.

NGOs and civil society groups in Tajikistan are tightly controlled, with almost none truly challenging the government in defense of the people. There are no longer any peaceful options available to the people to defend their rights or to change their government. As for violent means, there are Tajik militants and terrorists that wield arms. They do this, however, outside of the country and in small numbers. The idea of them returning to Tajikistan to take their fight to the Tajik state at any serious level of strength is unthinkable. They die on foreign battlefields – Tajiks comprise the highest number of non-Syrian or Iraqi Islamic State suicide bombers, for example – or return to Tajikistan to face jail, or, in the case of some early returnees from Syria, to beg forgiveness and be used as props to warn Tajiks against the lies and dangers of the Islamic State.

The conditions for creating an insurgency or a capable terrorist movement inside Tajikistan do not exist. As for those Tajiks arrested for terrorism offenses, they are usually just people who have been radicalized in front of a computer screen – not operatives in some dangerous movement inside Tajikistan. At best they can leave Tajikistan to join a movement elsewhere, itself an increasingly difficult thing to do given the current vigilance of Turkish and Russian security forces and the suspicion directed toward Central Asians. Furthermore, the Tajik security forces’ use of torture to ensure confessions and the near guarantee of convictions in the Tajik court system puts the government’s claims of a pervasive terrorist movement inside the country in doubt. Many jailed “militants” are just young men who are more religious than the state would like them to be.

Tajikistan’s elections are neither free nor fair, except in the eyes of China, Russia, and other authoritarian post-Soviet states, who assess them quite favorably. In the most recent presidential election in 2013, Rahmon secured 84 percent of the vote against a field of fake government-created political opposition parties and virtual unknowns (any prominent personality not personally loyal to Rahmon had long ago been exiled, jailed, or killed). The Tajik leadership is not content to have guaranteed election victories and has taken to referendums to approve constitutional amendments, most of which are changes to the law that allow the Rahmon family to secure lifetime rule and an easy line of succession. Most notably, term limits on Rahmon have been eliminated, allowing him to serve indefinitely. In an amendment with an eye to creating a family dynasty, the minimum age for the presidency was lowered enough to ensure that the president’s eldest son Rustam – too young to serve as president without the amendment – could become president if the incumbent dies, or at least run for president should his father retire when his present term is finished.

Rahmon’s long campaign to consolidate power around himself, his family, and an ever-narrowing group of friends and associates, is mostly complete. The most recent sign of the family’s stranglehold over Tajikistan is the replacement of the previously irremovable Mahmadsaid Ubaydulloev, the long-time mayor of Dushanbe, with Rahmon’s son Rustam. Ubaydulloev is now under investigation for corruption, a swift fall from grace for the man who was previously considered Tajikistan’s second most powerful man.

The Tajik government most fears reporting on corruption, the economic crisis, and human rights abuses – all of which undermine Rahmon’s legitimacy. Within the last two years, the Tajik government has wiped the country clean of any real political opposition parties, and it is now, according to local journalists, in the middle of a campaign to do the same to independent journalists and media outlets. Throughout 2016 journalists continued to flee from Tajikistan, citing either the end of their profession or a threat to their personal liberty. The Tajik government has jailed journalists connected to opposition parties, with some suffering continual abuse and torture in prison.  Under pressure, several critical media outlets in Tajikistan have shut down operations in the last year. Most recently, the newspaper Nigoh, and the website TojNews – both known for criticizing the Tajik government – ceased publishing, citing the restrictive media environment.

Controlling the Economy, Robbing the Country

There is actually enough money in Tajikistan to pay for all of its infrastructure and social spending needs, without the assistance of loans and grants from foreign countries and international financial institutions. This money, however, is collected and diverted in a predatory manner by the president and his narrow group of high-level supporters into their own pockets and into secretive offshore bank accounts. Tajikistan is being looted on a scale rarely seen in the modern world. Rapacious dictators syphoning money offshore may seem like a normal thing over the last few decades, but when a president’s family seeks to become billionaires on the back of an economy with a GDP under $7 billion, the effects are devastating. Tajikistan is not a state like Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan whose oil and gas wealth can more easily produce billionaires among the elite.

With all rivals and inconvenient allies now sidelined, Tajikistan’s elite may be turning against itself, including disputes with the extended presidential family over valuable economic resources, such as the massive TALCO aluminum plant, an asset that has in the past accounted for about one-third of Tajikistan’s GDP. 

Tajikistan in Exile

The Tajik people have mostly resigned themselves to living in a dynastic dictatorship. The only signs of resistance are seen among those in exile: the peaceful Tajik opposition activists who are seeking asylum in the West, and militant Tajik Islamists who have joined the Islamic State and other groups in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  

Exile is of course dangerous for those who go to battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan, but exile can also be dangerous for peaceful opposition activists. Tajik security forces have been accused of carrying out and attempting assassinations and attacks in foreign countries. This includes the leader of the opposition movement Group 24, Umarali Quvvatov, who was assassinated in Istanbul in March 2015, and several opposition activists and regime critics over the years in Russia who have been stabbed or beaten severely. The Tajik government also uses rendition tactics and kidnaps those in Russia or elsewhere in Central Asia. Outside Turkey, Russia, and Central Asia, the Tajik government tries to use the international extradition system, but fails as foreign governments refuse to send peaceful opposition activists back to Tajikistan where they suspect they will be tortured.

For exiles, they also must worry about the treatment of family members back home. The police and legal system have directly targeted relatives of opposition members. The wives and children of opposition figures have been detained, often taken away by unknown people and held for days at a time. The State Committee for National Security (the successor to the KGB in Tajikistan) has summoned the daughter-in-law of Islamic Renaissance Party leader Muhiddin Kabiri for questioning ten times, sometimes with her newborn baby. Other relatives have not been detained, but have been subjected to threats of violence by security officers. Wives and children of opposition members, their lawyers, and in one case even a driver, have materially suffered as the state has often confiscated their apartments and houses, evicting families into the street.

Foreign Relations

Tajikistan was able to raise its profile in the post-9/11 era, as it shares a 1,300 km river border with Afghanistan. However, despite offering the United States basing rights in southern Tajikistan, the Americans instead chose Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The consolation prize for Tajikistan was a bridge to Afghanistan and a French military base that operated until 2014. Nevertheless, Tajikistan ended up receiving more attention and more development aid, especially help with its border management, as a result of the war in Afghanistan. Still, the importance of Afghanistan has ebbed and flowed, and as Afghanistan is the only thing keeping Tajikistan relevant to the United States and Europe, and (to a certain extent) to Russia, Dushanbe has no hope of continued engagement with interested parties aside from short-term projects. The only long-term commitment appears to be Russia’s 201st military base, which has a lease agreement through 2042. American involvement is limited to supporting border management and training a small number of Tajik special forces. And with massive cuts coming to American spending in Central Asia likely in fiscal year 2018, even short- and medium-term U.S. commitments to Tajikistan are in doubt.

Tajikistan’s main partner continues to be Russia, a country where the number of Tajik labor migrants has been as high as one million in recent years, out of a total population of just almost 8.5 million. Living off of remittances from Tajik workers in Russia – at a level equivalent to almost 50 percent of the country’s GDP – leaves Tajikistan at the mercy of Russian labor and migration policy, and thus at the whim of the Russian leadership and their feelings toward Tajikistan. Another source of financing for the Tajik state are Chinese loans, comprising nearly half of Tajikistan’s external debt. Tajikistan’s ability pay back these loans is in serious doubt, and it is unclear what its neighbor China will want in exchange for loan forgiveness.

Civil War as Memory and Warning

In terms of remembrance, the civil war memory is a black hole for most of Tajikistan’s young population. They know that it was bad, but they know very few of the details. For now, the war is brought up only to praise the president for his grossly exaggerated role in ending it, and to be used as a warning against protesting government depredations against the people. For the leadership, they frame any resistance against the state as something that will only create the conditions for anarchy and a repeat of the civil war. The war in Afghanistan is occasionally presented as a danger, but Afghanistan is a foggy area that Tajiks know little about. And the impact of instability along the Afghanistan border since 1992 pales in comparison to the massive suffering during the civil war. Afghanistan cannot be used as effectively to scare the people as can the memory of the civil war.

With the younger generation having not experienced the civil war, some believe that the schisms of the war era no longer run so deep. Tajikistan’s civil war is long over, but its wounds are still there if you know how to look for them. The imbalances in the government and the economy that were created when men from Rahmon’s home region seized as many government posts and economic assets as they could still persist, and people are very aware of the power imbalances based on region and ethnicity. At a lower level, people in rural areas are equally aware of this. In some areas of the Vakhsh Valley local people have no choice but to work for next to nothing on land they do not own, knowing full well that the land once belonged to them – and that their uncles and fathers may well be buried nearby in an unmarked grave.

As for those who have been able to grab land, assets, and government positions, they live with the fear of knowing that the fall of Rahmon’s family from power would likely mean a fight to keep what they have gained thanks to his ascendancy. Rahmon has created a system that many in Tajikistan believe would likely fall into chaos, anarchy, and violence without his family in charge. The government’s warning of a civil war replay are not entirely unrealistic.

But even being from the president’s home region is no guarantee of security for high-level government administrators and businessmen, and it has not been for some time now. Being from the president’s hometown or marrying a son or daughter into the large presidential family is far better. But the inner circle is closing as the closest members of the network have faced financial shortcomings over the last few years. The pie is getting smaller, and the strongest are pushing out their old friends and associates as they fight over the scraps. People who fought to bring Rahmon to power and then fought again or at least worked tirelessly to keep him there are now being cut out of his narrowing network. Warnings that he is repeating the mistakes of Kyrgyzstan’s second ousted president, Kurmanbek  Bakiyev – cutting out too many people from the top patronage network – make for a sound comparison.

There is, however, no guarantee of a new civil war or a street revolution in Tajikistan. Immoral and predatory behavior by an often incompetent government do not necessarily lead to instability. It could just mean more misery for the common person in Tajikistan. In either case, the future of Tajikistan is bleak.