Sharofiddin Gadoyev’s Odyssey

On February 15, a video appeared on YouTube showing Sharofiddin Gadoyev, an exiled Tajik political activist with asylum in the Netherlands, standing in a park explaining to the camera how he had returned to Tajikistan willingly.

“I returned to Tajikistan with the help, support and assistance of the Interior Ministry after six and a half years abroad,” he said in the video, fidgeting and looking down frequently. As Gadoyev speaks, the camera occasionally and randomly cuts to scenery shots, snow covered mountains or trees rustling in the breeze.

Gadoyev, who had traveled to Moscow to meet with a representative of Russia’s Security Council to discuss Tajik migrants in Russia, was kidnapped and returned to Tajikistan instead of using the ticket he had for a February 16 flight back to Amsterdam.

Before leaving the Netherlands, however, Gadoyev reportedly recorded a video of his own. It surfaced online on February 19, uploaded by other exiled Tajik political activists. Seated, Gadoyev calmly explains in the video that “if I suddenly appear on Tajik television or some YouTube channel saying that I have returned [to Tajikistan] of my own accord, you must not believe it. I do not plan to go to Tajikistan willingly. Ever.”

This episode in Tajikistan’s increasingly bizarre political melodrama, meticulously chronicled by Eurasianet over the past few weeks, unraveled in full when Gadoyev was allowed to leave Tajikistan on March 2.

After arriving in Frankfurt, Germany, Gadoyev appeared in a live video thanking his supporters. “It is thanks to you that I am able to speak in a free and calm atmosphere,” he said.

Gadoyev’s interview with Eurasianet shortly after is damning. His experience adds another example to the list of cases demonstrating Tajikistan’s well-established efforts to force opposition figures back to the country in contravention of international law – and the complicity of the Russian state in those efforts. It also, if what Gadoyev said is true, blows the lid off President Emomali Rahmon’s plans for Tajikistan’s rapidly approaching 2020 presidential election.

The Exeter Central Asian Studies Network’s Central Asian Political Exiles (CAPE) database includes more than 55 Tajik cases, a number of which fall into what the project’s methodology identifies as “stage 3,” meaning “Rendition and/or attack, which includes a formal extradition to face torture and imprisonment, informal rendition often following release from detention, disappearance, assassination and serious attacks with an attempt to murder or disable.”

A number of Tajik opposition figures have disappeared and reappeared in Tajikistan days later, including Mahmadruzi Iskandarov in 2004, Nizomkhon Jurayev in 2012, and Maksud Ibragimov in 2014. In most cases, the Tajik state argued that these men returned to the country voluntarily.

Knowing this history, Gadoyev, in a sense, baited a trap for Dushanbe with himself.

In his interview with Eurasianet, Gadoyev said he had been invited to Russia by “a person close to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin… When a person close to the president invites you, any misgivings you might have take a back seat.”

He’d been assured, Gadoyev said, that he would be safe but nevertheless took the precautionary step of recording a video, just in case. He flew to Moscow on February 14 and got into a car, expecting to be taken to his meeting with a high-ranking Russian official. The person’s assistant informed Gadoyev that they would need to switch cars partway through the drive, so when the car stopped he was not worried. He assumed the group of men in black with earpieces were security. But once he got into the other vehicle, a white van, Gadoyev said, he was handcuffed and a bag put over his head. The men said they were from the Russian Interior Ministry.

Gadoyev says he even warned his captors that he’d taken precautions. “I warned them that they risked causing an international scandal,” he said. But he was nevertheless transferred into the custody of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), who put him on a plane to Dushanbe.

Gadoyev told Eurasianet that he tore the tape off his mouth on the plane and began shouting and tried to get to the main cabin from the business class section he’d been seated in:

When that happened, two policemen with the Tajik Interior Ministry began to strike me on my arms and legs, on my back and head. They hit me in the face and I started to bleed from my mouth. 

At a certain point … a member of the crew pushed my head to the ground while another taped my mouth shut. Then they tied my hands and legs with tape. I flew to Dushanbe for four hours with my head pushed down to my legs. 

Once back in Dushanbe, Gadoyev recounts being put in a basement and told he had a choice: He could be killed or jailed, or he could cooperate. The authorities wanted him to make statements confirming all of Rahmon’s wildest fantasies about his opposition: “They wanted me to stand in front of a camera and say that [Muhiddin] Kabiri [the exiled leader of now-banned opposition party IRPT] gets money from Iran, from human rights groups, from [George] Soros, that he wants to destabilize Tajikistan. And to say that the IRPT is a terrorist organization.”

Gadoyev was trotted around as well, with the authorities using his own social media to post pictures of him visiting his family under the watchful eye of the police.

In his meeting with State Committee for National Security (GKNB) chief Saymumin Yatimov, the authorities laid out the plans they had for Gadoyev: That he would re-create Group 24 inside Tajikistan under the guise of opposition but take orders from Dushanbe; that he would marshall support for Rustam Emomali, Rahmon’s eldest son, in the 2020 elections; and that he would campaign for others from among the opposition to return to Tajikistan.

Gadoyev’s claims are all at once shocking and unsurprising. They are difficult to verify, but certainly fit a pattern of behavior on the part of the Tajik state. The claim about Rustam in particular, if true, blows the lid off a closely held strategy to convert Rahmon’s 27-year presidency into a true family dynasty. Regional watchers have long suspected that Rahmon was grooming his eldest son to take over, but the mechanics were up for debate: Would Rahmon, now 66, remain president until his death or try to manage succession more deliberately in advance? The lowering of the minimum age to run for president in 2016 and Rustam’s appointment as mayor of the capital city in 2017 gave weight to the belief that Rahmon was keen to enshrine his son in power. The same referendum in 2016, however, also removed presidential term limits, meaning that not only can Rahmon remain president as long as he likes (not that term limits ever stopped a Central Asian president from re-election) but if Rustam were to become president in 2020, at the age of 32, he could have quite the run thereafter.

If, of course, Tajikistan’s political opposition was permanently kept off the chessboard.

Why did Tajikistan allow Gadoyev to leave in early March? First, with the release of Gadoyev’s pre-recorded, I-swear-I’m-never-going-back-to-Tajikistan video, the state’s not-quite-believable voluntary return video was useless as a fig leaf on a windy day. Dushanbe, as in the past, wanted to be able to deflect criticism using their video of Gadoyev. Previous state-produced videos have not been believable, per se, but they provided the thinnest of diplomatic covers.

Second, Gadoyev has asylum in the Netherlands and his abduction drew international attention. In his interview with Eurasianet, Gadoyev said, “The German Embassy in Dushanbe in particular contributed to [the international pressure]. They said that Sharofiddin had been kidnapped and that he should go free. The European Union and the United States also did their bit. The Netherlands was not passive either.”

Part of the reason for Tajikistan being sensitive to European pressure is that the country is currently in negotiations with the EU to be included in the Generalized Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP+), which would exempt more than 6,000 Tajik goods from export duties into the EU market.

Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, had been scheduled to travel to Dushanbe to continue talks on GSP+ on March 3-4. But the visit was “postponed,” with Tajik government sources telling Tajik news outlet Asia Plus that it was for “technical reasons.” It was then cancelled. A glance at the Luxembourgish foreign ministry’s Twitter feed includes Asselborn making stops in Afghanistan (March 5-6), Uzbekistan (March 6-7), and Pakistan (March 7) – not a single mention of talks in Tajikistan.

Having botched this plan, what’s next for Dushanbe? If history is any guide, the Tajik authorities will stick to their narrative but perhaps avoid kidnapping anyone for a few months. That same history, however, would suggest that Dushanbe will not give up on its efforts to destroy any opposition to Rahmon, especially as the president attempts to plan a long-term future at the top for his family dynasty. Furthermore, while Russia has long tolerated the presence of large numbers of Tajik migrants and exiled opposition figures, it is quite obvious that Moscow is no friend to the Tajik opposition. While the bulk of the leadership of Tajik opposition groups – some now under the umbrella of the National Alliance of Tajikistan, formed by IRPT head and Rahmon’s nemesis Muhiddin Kabiri – are based in European countries, Russia is home to an estimated million Tajik migrant workers. Russia, and access to Tajik migrant communities in Russia, will remain critical for opposition groups and the trap set for Gadoyev could easily be sprung again.