Tajikistan’s Troubled Pamir Region

Mainstream media coverage of Tajikistan is patchy, puts emphasis on geopolitics, and is often limited to incidences of violence. For instance, in July 2018 a deadly, Islamic State-inspired attack on foreign cyclists put Tajikistan in the headlines of various international media. In 2015, armed conflict between government forces and a group surrounding the deputy defense minister gained attention, and in 2012 open fighting between the Tajik army and militias of former opposition commanders in the Pamir region raised widespread concern. However, the less visible events and processes that inform these violent incidents, often reaching much further into Tajikistan’s past, have received little recognition internationally. News reporting often leaves the broader audience with stereotypical views of Tajikistan as being under threat by Islamic terrorism and separatism.

Continuing unrest in the Pamir region – officially known as Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) – has, too, been subject to such misrepresentation. In the Pamir region, which makes up 45 percent of Tajikistan’s territory but only about 3 percent of its population, conflict between the central government and former opposition commanders has occurred on a regular basis since the Tajik civil war of 1992-97. Attempts to explain this conflict have drawn on diverse factors. Some media have mistakenly identified Pamiri militias as Islamist fighters, mixing up their former civil war alliance with the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT) with their actual political standing. Other coverage has overemphasized local opposition against the central government and people’s readiness to take up arms. Furthermore, drug trafficking and related business at the region’s southern border with Afghanistan have been mentioned as causes for unrest. While some of these factors are clearly important to understand the ongoing conflict, they have rarely been looked at in all their complexity and against the backdrop of the region’s history, which reveals longlasting, but ambivalent relations with the state.

Throughout 2018, tensions rose in the Pamir region, particularly in Khorog, its administrative center. Khorog, the region’s largest settlement with about 30,000 inhabitants, has long been at the epicenter of power struggles. State agencies, the Tajik army, businesses, international NGOs, and former opposition commanders are all based in the town. To date the bloodiest clash since the end of the civil war in 1997 happened in July 2012 when the head of the regional office of the State Committee of National Security was stabbed to death just outside the city. In reaction, government forces moved into the town to take the alleged murderers into custody. Negotiations with the civil war veteran and militia commander Tolib Ayombekov, who was suspected of having been involved with the alleged perpetrators, failed. Ayombekov feared that the operation would be used as a cover to move on him and other local commanders, an attempt to unseat them from the positions of power they held in the region. Government forces launched assaults on these commanders’ strongholds in different districts of Khorog, employing grenade fire and snipers. According to international observers, the operation ended unsuccessfully for the government in Dushanbe, with at least 22 documented civilian casualties and dozens of fallen soldiers.

Since 2012, discontent has increased in the Pamir region, and the conflict between former Pamiri opposition commanders who were integrated into the Tajik army after the civil war and the government in Dushanbe remains unresolved. While the armed actors are in a stalemate, street protests and political rhetoric are now at a boiling point. Over the past few years, state security services have increased their presence in Khorog and frequently target ordinary citizens. In 2014, two people were killed when a crowd attempted to storm a police station and free a detained man. In a range of speeches, including a widely televised appearance in Khorog in September 2018, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon reprimanded the inhabitants of Gorno-Badakhshan for their supposed lack of loyalty. Shortly after, in October, the state news agency Khovar published the names of five commanders in Khorog, including Tolib Ayombekov, whom they accused of being heads of organized criminal groups. In November, further protests against police violence and excessive security measures in the region forced the governor of Gorno-Badakhshan, Yodgor Faizov, to personally appear in front of the protestors in Khorog.

In the media, unrest in the Pamir region has often been viewed through violent encounters between male public figures represented by former opposition commanders and the Tajik presidential elites. In this regard, researchers Christian Bleuer and Edward Lemon have both argued that the conflict in Gorno-Badakhshan is part of the government’s nationwide attempt to assert control and purge opposition. While this goal has been largely achieved in other parts of Tajikistan, the Pamir region remains a sore point and cause for concern for the increasingly authoritarian regime in Dushanbe. However, reasons for the involvement of ordinary citizens in the persisting conflict seem to run deeper than a mere struggle for political control. Insights into history and contemporary everyday life in the Pamir region suggest the importance of diverse factors, including Tajik state formation, ethnic and religious identity, economy, and international intervention.

Despite its relatively small size and population, Tajikistan is a nation marked by an array of distinct regional identities that have long influenced politics. In this context, Gorno-Badakhshan’s ambivalent status within the broader national framework is not unique. Yet it is exacerbated by the fact that the Pamir region has long been perceived as both constitutive of and separate from the Tajik nation. As historian Paul Bergne argues in his study The Birth of Tajikistan, when the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was formed in the 1920s, the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region became an integral part of nation-building. At the same time, its geography, history, and inhabitants have always been seen as fundamentally different from those in other parts of what became Tajikistan. Despite the region’s gradual and ultimately tight-knit integration into the Tajik SSR and the Soviet Union – which included flight connections and a high degree of educational mobility – Gorno-Badakhshan has never shed the label of remoteness. Its mystique as a faraway mountainous land at the border with China and Afghanistan has persisted in state discourse and in much reporting, despite the long history of Soviet modernization in the region, which aimed to firmly integrate sensitive border areas. This not only resulted in high levels of education among people from the Pamir region but also in employment in state institutions and active participation in Soviet and post-Soviet nation-building.

During the bloody Tajik civil war in the 1990s, Pamiris fought as part of the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) and were subject to targeted killings in Dushanbe. Nevertheless, they have maintained important positions in state institutions and NGOs within and outside the Pamir region. As a result, far from all people in the Pamir region participate in the unrest and some criticize those who side with the former opposition commanders, locally known as “the authorities” or “informal leaders.” It is also important to emphasize that the population of the Pamir region (roughly 220,000) is extremely heterogeneous, particularly with respect to ethnic and linguistic identities. A vast majority of Pamiris speak different Pamir languages and share a common identity as Ismaili Muslims, a branch of Shia Islam oriented toward the Aga Khan IV. However, distinct places of origin in the region, differences between separate Pamir languages, and individual positioning toward the transnational community of Ismaili Muslims are also hugely important.

While in Khorog some opposition commanders and their militias enjoy popularity in times of crisis, Pamiris in villages elsewhere in the region often view unrest “in the city” with suspicion. In my research in Tajikistan since 2008 I have frequently encountered Pamiris from all over the region who see themselves as loyal Tajik citizens notwithstanding the disadvantages that the ongoing authoritarian consolidation has brought to their lives. At the same time, ideas of violent resistance have become part of popular culture, most famously represented by Pamiri singer-songwriters and rappers based in Tajikistan and Russia. For instance, in his widely known hymn to the traumatic fighting in Khorog in 2012 titled “I love you, oh Motherland,” the Shughni singer Sash Zaifi praises the Pamir region as an Ismaili homeland whose protection is worth dying for.

The distinction between Pamiris, who are predominantly Shia-Ismaili Muslims, and the government in Dushanbe that is led by Sunnis is mentioned in passing in much of the reporting on the conflict. It is true that this distinction has been of significance, especially since the civil war, but it should not be imagined as a static relationship. Attitudes toward religious actors are diverse among Pamiris as well as among Tajik government officials. State institutions have an infamous track record for the poor treatment of pious (Sunni) Muslims with bans on beards, veils, and supposedly Arabic names. At the same time, references to Pamiris as “infidels” have been part of the register of the Tajik officials with whom I talked during my research, ironically often over vodka-infused dinner meetings.

Similarly, Sash Zaifi’s popular reference to the defenders of the Pamir region as following the path of Imam Ali, an important figure in Shia Islam, does not reflect any official stance of Ismaili organizations. In contrast, institutions headed by the current Ismaili leader based in France, the Aga Khan IV, have played a central role in the establishment of peace in the Pamir region. The Aga Khan IV participated in the negotiations that ended the civil war in Tajikistan and his humanitarian and religious institutions continue to remind Pamiris to be loyal Tajik citizens. In addition, the Aga Khan Development Network has been integral to the maintenance of infrastructure, educational institutions, healthcare, and social services. Yet, the presence of Ismaili institutions has had paradoxical effects in the Pamir region. New hierarchies and religious practices imposed from abroad have caused local dissent. Nevertheless, the sense of a common and distinct Ismaili identity has been strengthened over the years, promoted in religious education and international exchange programs. Ismaili organizations’ highly diplomatic relationship with Tajik state institutions, which is inevitable to get things done in the country, has led to blurred boundaries. For instance, it is no coincidence that Yodgor Faizov, who is now the governor of Gorno-Badakhshan and in charge of appeasing protestors, was previously the director of the Aga Khan Foundation in Tajikistan.

More generally, it is often difficult to see clear-cut boundaries between Tajik state institutions, development actors, and businesses of all kinds. The government in Dushanbe has gone to great lengths to brand the opposition commanders in Khorog as criminals, but this is a label that could be equally employed for a number of high-profile officials. In their book Dictators Without Borders, political scientists Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw show that Tajikistan largely operates as a business model for the presidential family and their entourage. In this business model state-owned companies, infrastructure, nature, development funds, and ordinary citizens function as resources from which maximum profit is to be extracted. These funds – possibly billions – end up in offshore accounts, robbing a country with a GDP of below $7 billion of its means of existence. In the Pamir region, trade with China is an important focus of such extraction, where trade regulations often favor transport companies with ties to the presidential family. Lines of separation do not thus necessarily run between Pamiris and Tajiks from the western parts of the country. As in other regions, they run between those who are part of the kleptocratic system and the economically disenfranchised who are forced into labor migration.

Unrest in the Pamir region is rooted in Gorno-Badakhshan’s long history of being integral to Tajikistan as a nation, but still not quite fitting into it. It is therefore not surprising that the recent events mean fundamentally different things to different people. President Rahmon might see recent events as an opportunity to assert control over an unruly area and, in return, opposition commanders may view them as an attempt to preserve their economic and political basis. Yet with few ordinary citizens actively participating in the conflict, many Pamiris are watching it unfold with an uneasy mixture of anger, pride, and deep concern.