The Poorest Soviet OutpostIf all the 15 Soviet republics, Tajikistan was at the bottom of the social and economic scale. Its economy was singularly based on cotton, which was traded to Russia in exchange for basic commodities and industrial parts. Well into the 1980s, thousands of hectares were hoed by women and their children, toiling in the suffocating heat and drenched with pesticides from passing
crop-dusters.Given its economic and political dependence on the Soviet Union, when the empire disintegrated Tajikistan was ill-prepared for self rule. Never had it been an independent state; rather it was more a jigsaw puzzle of four unconnected regions, separated by snow-laden mountains that are impassable for more than half the year.
For centuries the Tajiks had occupied the eastern end of the Persian empire, ruled by the great imperial centers of Samarkand and Bukhara. Tsarist Russia conquered Central Asia in the mid-19th century and the Bolsheviks battled hard against local resistance when they annexed the region into the new Soviet Union.
In 1929, when the Soviets created republics out of the territory then called Turkestan, they placed the ancient imperial capitals under the rule of neighboring Uzbekistan, a far more populous turkic-speaking rival. The Persian-speaking Tajiks were cut adrift, and a humble village, Dushanbe, was named as their capital.
Favored by Moscow, the northern region of Khujand (formerly Leninabad) enjoyed the republic’s highest level of economic development, and thus could claim to be the political power center. The central region, mostly mountainous, claims the capital and the eastern district of Garm. Stretching across the south are the two districts of Kulob and Qurghonteppa, united since the war and renamed Khatlon province. The fourth and most remote region is the Pamir Mountain district of Gorno-Badakshan, home to the Tajik Pamiris, Ismaili followers of the Aga Khan.
The ethnic make-up of the republic’s six million people is nearly two-thirds Tajik, followed by ethnic Uzbeks (25 percent). The final nine percent consists of the Russian settlers, Jews, Germans, and others who remain from the hundreds of thousands who packed up and left during the early 1990s.
It is difficult to imagine many nations with a less advantageous geopolitical location for building peace and prosperity. To the south lies Afghanistan, with its large Tajik and Uzbek populations, ruined by two decades of war. To the west lies a hostile regional power, Uzbekistan, and not far to the north looms the former imperial giant, Russia.
Moreover, Tajikistan is not merely landlocked, but it is walled-in to the east by some of the world’s highest peaks. Buried within those mountains are minerals and gas, but the challenge of extracting and transporting them to the world market erects an additional barrier to this republic’s economic dreams. Similarly, its vast potential for hydroelectric power remains untapped, and most of the country has no electricity or heat throughout the winter months.
Antecedents to the 1992–1993 War
There is a cruel irony in the lessons of Tajikistan’s migration history, and it is for scholars to determine to what degree the Stalin regime’s forced population movements created the cleavages of the recent civil war. After the Bolsheviks defeated the Central Asian resistance fighters and brought the region under Soviet control, Moscow’s economic planners set out for the territory’s vast, arid plains. Their vision was to create huge collective farms for cotton, which would be harvested and shipped back to Russia.
The two major rivers of the region were siphoned off for gargantuan irrigation canals, and thousands of Tajiks were forcibly relocated from Garm district to perform backbreaking labor. Once resettled, many Garmis built separate villages and coexisted along side settlements of Tajiks and ethnic Uzbeks who were native to the south. Sharing the same Persian language with the local Tajiks, the immigrants from Garm quickly came to regard the south as their adopted homeland, although they preserved their own regional accent and traditions.
Locally, the Garmis earned a reputation for hard work and enterprise. By the end of the 1980s, they held administrative positions on the huge state farms and managed the majority of shops in the towns. According to some analysts, the prominence and relative prosperity of the Garmis bred resentment among other Tajiks and local Uzbeks, and this was only kept in check by the system of Soviet security.
At the national level, by contrast, the Garmis were largely excluded from political power. The Tajik communist elite, hailing from the north, formed a strategic alliance with Tajik clans in a key southern cotton-producing district called Kulob.
When Tajikistan gained independence in September 1991, following the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, the long-excluded groups of Tajiks—Garmis and Pamiris from Gorno-Badakshan—actively participated in the peaceful street protests aimed at dislodging the communist-backed leadership.Camped in the center of Tajikistan’s gentle, tree-lined capital, the opposition drew a variety of followers, from pro-democracy intellectuals to Islamic fundamentalists. By May 1992, a counter-demonstration of government supporters from Kulob pitched camp at the opposite end of town and gunfire broke out after both camps obtained hundreds of weapons.
After several days of negotiating and shooting, the president ceded power and formed a coalition government with portfolios for the opposition.
But the battle quickly shifted from Dushanbe to the south, where Garmis and other opposition forces battled with the Kulobi militias defending the old order. By October, the Kulobis gained the military edge with crucial support from the former Soviet forces in Tajikistan and from neighboring Uzbekistan.
The Kulobis, led by prominent local criminals and now named the Popular Front, launched a campaign to kill or expel
all Garmis from the south, looting and burning their villages. Having completed that, the Popular Front pressed on to Dushanbe, where they arrested and killed scores of prominent Garmis and Pamiris, often on the mere presumption of their sympathy with the opposition.By year’s end, the government forces were solidly in power, buttressed by the Kulobis, as well as Russia and Uzbekistan. Some 100,000 Tajik refugees were huddled in northern Afghanistan, while another 600,000 were internally displaced. Estimates of the dead range widely from 20,000 to 60,000. More than 100,000 Tajiks, many of the land’s best-educated citizens, fled to neighboring countries.
For the next five years, the United Tajik Opposition (UTO), trained and armed in Afghanistan, waged a low-intensity
conflict with government forces until signing the peace accord in June 1997.The Lost “Transition”
“It’s not the Tajikistan we left. I wish it was like before. We wanted to organize a new life, a democratic life. Others didn’t understand that. Yes, a democratic life, and raise it to a higher level.”—A recent returnee
Unfortunately, Tajikistan hurtled to a lower level than ever imagined at the same time that other former Soviet republics were staggering out of their shock from lost subsidies and guaranteed markets and lurching toward some form of political and economic equilibrium.
Today, the United Nations places Tajikistan among the world’s 20 poorest nations, with a per capita income of $330. In 1997 alone, hyperinflation sapped the value of the new Tajik ruble by half. Tajikistan’s infant mortality, always the leader among Soviet republics, stands alarmingly high at 115 per 1000. Most families have no access to potable water. And although the potential for hydroelectric power is formidable in this land of towering mountains, many parts of the republic, including the capital, go without electricity and heat during the winter.
The signs of war and blight punctuate the drive southward from Dushanbe, through the miles of scrubby cotton plantations past village upon village of gutted mud houses. Some 27,000 houses were destroyed during 1992-1993, according to a survey by the U.S.-based Save the Children, which has helped rebuild at least 22,000 of them.
In addition to meeting the urgent demand for housing materials for the newly arrived refugees, Save the Children is rebuilding some of the wrecked schools across the south. But Tajik children, already severely disadvantaged by a half-decade of upheaval, lack not only books but warm clothes and shoes to enable them to attend school in the winter.
Tajikistan thus poses an ongoing challenge to be placed on the continuum from emergency aid to development. Its predicament is certainly complex, and while it is not an emergency, it is ever on the brink of disaster in any one of its impoverished regions. Officially, Tajikistan may no longer be in a state of war, but it is ever ready to erupt in armed conflict, as it did in March, April and early May of this year.
This, then, is the context facing the international community when focusing attention on helping reintegrate the refugees who have recently repatriated from Afghanistan. “Ten thousand refugees have come back, but we are feeding 10 percent of the population [more than 500,000],” reminds one UN official. “We have to be very careful not to be diverting too much aid to the refugees.”
Social Indicators for Tajikistan
Average Salaries $9.60 per month
Average Salaries for Health Employees $3.80 per month
Average Salaries for Teachers $4.70 per monthPopulation per Doctor 475 people per doctor
Morbidity Rate 36% with respiratory
and other infections
Infant Mortality 32 per 1,000 births
Maternal Mortality 87 per 100,000 births
Iodine-Deficiency More than 33% of the population
Access to Clean Water Less than one third of the populationSchool Enrollment Rate 62% and falling
Vacant Teaching Posts 16,000
Modern Equipment and Textbooks ScarceExpenditure on Social Welfare $16.9 million (less than $3 per person
Minimum Pension to 566,000 people $1.21 per monthSource: United Nations, International Support to Peace and Reconciliation in Tajikistan, September 1997.
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