TAJIKISTAN STILL SCARRED BY WAR, DROUGHT AND DRUGS

Both
the beard and the gun of a Mujahid are gone and a suit and tie have taken
their place, along with a post in the government as Minister for Customs. And
he is happy that he is no longer fighting. ‘I never wanted to fight’, says
the former Mujahid, ‘but sometimes if you don’t fight you will be
killed’. 

A
frail peace has descended over Tajikistan since 1997, when an agreement was
signed between the Russian-backed government and the Islamic opposition ending
five years of civil war. Now Kozmov Mirzokhuzha and the other commanders who
so vehemently battled against President Emomali Rachmonov sit side by side in
his cabinet. 

But
for many others the scars of the war remain unhealed. In the south, the
villages populated by the mountain people of Garm - who in Soviet times were
brought to pick cotton in the plains - rest largely in ruins without any money
to help rebuild them. Many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have
returned from Afghanistan are living in deep poverty, a fact made worse by a
yearlong drought. 

The
chaos of the war, as well as the deaths of 50,000 people from a population of
less than six million, has similarly devastated the economy. The carcasses of
factories stand idle under the sun across the country. Almost nothing remains
except a large aluminum plant, a gold mine and the cotton fields, which are
slowly shrinking from the breakdown of the Soviet-installed irrigation system.
Even with the peace agreement, the political power of the government barely
reaches beyond the capital, Dushanbe. In fact, only 30km to the east of the
city one finds a group of armed and irregular troops at a checkpoint on the
road who answer not to the President but to a local warlord called Umar. 

Even
more serious than Umar is the mysterious rebel leader Juma Namangani, a former
Tajik opposition commander who has started an organization known as the
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. His main aim is supposedly to establish an
Islamic state in the deeply Muslim area of the Ferghana valley in Uzbekistan,
which contains up to a quarter of the republic’s population of 25 million.
Throughout last summer Namangani repeatedly attacked both Uzbek and Kyrgyz
territory, causing serious disturbances, and on one occasion even causing
Uzbek authorities to drain a large dam for fear of sabotage. Inside Tajikistan
the cause that Namangani and his 1,000 followers represent is far from clear.
Tura Jumaev, a doctor in Dushanbe, says that ‘for the handful of people who
know Namangani there are thousands who understand nothing about him at all.’
But his movement’s name has reached as far as Washington and in the autumn
of last year the US State Department placed him on their international
terrorist list because of his alleged links to the Saudi militant Osama Bin
Laden, and the IMU kidnapping of American mountain climbers. 

But
for the Russians, he represents - along with the Taliban - a far more
frightening specter, that of a second Islamic front along with the one in
Chechnya. The Russians, who still guard the Tajik border with Afghanistan,
have 25,000 troops stationed in the republic, and were unofficially helping
the government during the civil war, though the conflict is now seen as being
more politically than religiously motivated. Even Kozmov Mirzokhuzha admitted
that, ‘as for Islam, I probably know more about Marxism and Leninism, so
no-one could call me an Islamic fundamentalist’. But Islamic fundamentalism
remains for Moscow the bugbear that communism was for Washington during the
Cold War. Russian and Taliban troops are already face-to-face across the river
Pyanzh, which separates Tajikistan from Afghanistan. It is a thought that
brings back the painful memories of the ill-fated Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan in 1980. 

Added
to the fear of Islamic militants is the problem caused by the routing of
enormous amounts of heroin and opium from Afghanistan through Tajikistan to
the markets in Eastern and Western Europe. Last year’s United Nations
estimates put the Afghan opium crop at a record 7,000 tons, almost double
that of 1999. Even Amirku Azimov, head of the Tajik Security Council, openly
admits that ‘only ten percent of what comes through is seized.’ The
problem in Tajikistan is accentuated by its poverty. Very few people make a
wage of more than $10 per month; the drug trade offers a source of instant
riches. According to local officials there is not a part of life that drugs no
longer touch, from providing arms to Juma Namangani to the large Mercedes cars
seen driving through the streets of Dushanbe.

By
Makhmud Yusupov