Last week, President Emomali Rahmon spoke in New York with the Secretary General of the United Nations and the King of the Netherlands. The Tajik opposition appeals to Western politicians not to meet with the autocrat who holds hundreds of political prisoners in the country, shoots peaceful demonstrators and robs citizens.
“Do you know if you need a picket permit in Poland?”, Asliddin Sherzamonov asked me a few days ago. I checked, no need. Two days later he was standing outside the British Embassy. All because, according to unofficial information, the president of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon, after visiting New York, where he co-chaired the UN Water Conference from 21 to 24 March, went to London to take part in an economic forum where representatives of the Tajik government to encourage British entrepreneurs to invest in their country.
Asliddin brought a poster to the embassy announcing that Rahmon was a dictator and a letter addressed to the British authorities. He started it strongly, with the fact that the civilized world should not betray humanitarian values, becoming an accomplice of the crimes that President Rahmon committed in Gorno Badakhshan. He reminded that quite recently, the inhabitants of this formally autonomous region of Tajikistan were killed by the Tajik services for their beliefs.
“These honest and sincere heroes were killed or tortured in prison because they fought for their human and civil rights, for freedom and for the values that European societies consider as their foundation.”
Pacified Mountain Badakhshan
Asliddin is a citizen of Tajikistan, a Pamirian. The president of his country has been destroying the region from which Asliddin comes from, the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO), located in the Pamir mountains. Several community leaders were killed there, mainly between November 2021 and summer 2022, and many others were arrested. Some were convicted in absentia, such as Asliddin’s father, Alim Sherzamonov, who was charged last May with organizing a riot. Fortunately, Alim has been living in Poland for a long time, he has refugee status here, so the actions of the Tajik justice system did not directly affect him. Others were less fortunate. For example, the well-known Pamir activist and human rights defender Ulfatchonim Mamadshoyeva, accused in the same trial, has been rotting in a Tajik prison for nearly a year.
The army sent to Pamir is harassing citizens, cutting off their telephone and internet connections. Mass arrests are combined with unpleasant house searches, during which electronics and household appliances are lost. Private schools and other educational institutions lose their licenses, and the government calls in local religious leaders for questioning. In June last year, soldiers destroyed a coat of arms composed of colorful stones, visible on the slope of a mountain above the region’s capital, Khorog – a symbol of the Ismailis, followers of Shia, a liberal variety of Islam. President Rahmon’s government wants to force Gorno Badakhshan into submission, and all those who do not like it to be imprisoned or forced to emigrate. Pamir activists estimate that up to 20% of the inhabitants of this region, which has a population of only 250,000, could have gone abroad. All because the Pamirs feel separate and resist.
They not only profess Ismailism. They also have their own, different from the Tajik, languages, customs and pride, which does not allow them to bend their necks before the dictator.
Back in the 1990s, they sided with the opposition in the bloody civil war that engulfed Tajikistan after the collapse of the USSR. After several months of fighting, the parliament elected as its chairman (which then meant also the head of the young state) the director of a kolkhoz from the Kulyab region, Emomali Rahmonov (at that time his name still had a Russian ending, which he cut off in 2006). When the war ended, he made a pact with the opposition. He was to share power and respect the democratic rules of the game. But the more he became president, the less he cared about the promises he had made. The Pamirs did not want to accept this. They left the service in the state administration bodies, began to organize the life of the region in their own way, relying on local leaders, many of whom were either former civil war field commanders or charismatic spiritual leaders. They were supported in this by the spiritual leader of all Ismailis living in the West, Aga Khan IV.
Questions that cannot be asked
Asliddin was born in 1992 when the civil war started. He spent a decade of his young life outside of Tajikistan. He studied at the American University in Bishkek, the capital of neighboring Kyrgyzstan. Then he decided to stay in this country, where life was much more free than in his homeland. It is in Bishkek that he has lived his entire adult life, he has friends there, and his dog still lives there, with whom Asliddin hopes to meet again someday.
He stopped going to Tajikistan a few years ago. When his parents settled in Poland and his father, long involved in political activism, began to be active in the émigré opposition organization National Alliance of Tajikistan, it was known that for Aslididin, any trip to Tajikistan could end in arrest. For a long time, however, he thought that he would be safe in Bishkek. He loves this city.
In the spring of last year, when the Tajikistan authorities not only began to pacify the Pamir, but also began hunting for known Pamirs living outside the republic, Asliddin had to flee. Friends helped him get to Georgia, where he got a Polish humanitarian visa and soon joined his parents in Warsaw. Since then, he has been trying to help refugees from his region who were less fortunate than himself, and to publicize the Pamir issue in the world.
Asliddin assures that he does not want to impose on the king and the government of Great Britain who they can host in their country. However, he wants to ask some questions that Tajik journalists are not allowed to ask. Why in November 2021 the police killed the young Pamir leader Gulbiddin Zijobekov. Why, in May, he was brutally suppressed for peacefully demonstrating in Wamara, a county town in Gorno Badakhshan. Finally, why the well-known Pamir sportsman Czorshanbe Czorsnabiev was deported from Russia and then sentenced to many years in prison for only publicly referring to himself as a Pamirian.
Turbid water… An official from the embassy approached Asliddin Sherzamonov, who was picketing in front of the building, accepted his letter and asked for details. Tajik activists who had protested in New York a few days earlier were not so lucky. They were ignored by officials. Meanwhile, on the pages of the Tajik Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one could read that “On March 20, the builder of peace and national unity, the leader of the nation, the President of the Republic of Tajikistan, Honorable Emomali Rahmon, left for New York in the United States to participate in the Water Conference organized by the United Nations.” The president’s visit was hailed as a great diplomatic and image-building success for Tajikistan. The dictator, who had been in power for 31 years, co-chaired the Water Conference without any obstacles.
Delegates from around the world drew attention to the problem of increasing water consumption and the depletion of its global resources. An important topic was the melting of glaciers and the difficult access of millions of people to drinking water. Rahmon, together with the King of the Netherlands, opened and closed the proceedings of the conference, and then gave an interview to the UN media, which, of course, did not even ask him about anything not related to water.
The problem of clean water has always been the apple of his eye. In the National Museum of Tajikistan, in the main hall, hangs a giant portrait of the president, depicted against a blue waterfall. Two decades ago, Rahmon initiated the Obi toze (“Clean Water”) program in his country, which was aimed at protecting local water resources and making people aware of their importance. On his initiative, the UN even declared 2003 the International Year of Clean Water.
In fact, water is one of the few resources that Tajikistan can boast of. And there is the most of it in Gorski Badakhshan. Most of its territory is high mountains, there are the largest glaciers in the world (including the 16-kilometre Fedchenko Glacier, the longest glacier outside the Arctic and Antarctica). In addition, there are over 1,300 natural lakes throughout the country. Tajik water resources account for 60% of the water resources of all Central Asia.
However, access to clean, running water is very limited in this country. When the Obi toze program was launched in the early 2000s, I was doing research among local political leaders. Those in the opposition often ridiculed Rahmon’s campaign as a propaganda hoax. One even turned on the faucet in his kitchen in downtown Dushanbe in front of me, pointed to a trickle of gray-orange liquid, and sneered: “This fresh water, according to our president, is actually cloudy. One big sham.”
Today, the situation in Tajikistan is not much better, with only a third of households having access to clean, safe water. In rural areas, only a few percent of households are equipped with sewage systems, and diseases of “dirty water” take a heavy toll every year, especially among children and the elderly.
… and Muddy Politics
It is not only in the case of water that President Rahmon’s public declarations differ from what is actually happening in the country. When in early March information about the Tajik leader’s travel plans reached the media – apart from New York and London, he was also supposed to visit Germany – the Tajik opposition, which was almost entirely in exile, began to protest.
In mid-March, the National Alliance of Tajikistan, a coalition of several of the largest opposition parties, in which Asliddin’s father, Alim, is active, issued a statement after a meeting in Warsaw. In it, she reminded the world’s public opinion that “the journey through countries as committed to democratic values as Germany, the US and the UK takes place against the backdrop of unprecedented human rights violations by the Rahmon regime. In Badakhshan, there are still fresh graves of dozens of people shot and tortured to death in this region, who became victims of purges only because they took part in peaceful protests in Wamara and Khorog.
The authors of the statement pointed out that at the same time when Rahmon will visit free states, hundreds of citizens who criticize his dictatorship will be tortured in prisons in Tajikistan. And Rahmon himself will use the foreign trip as alleged international support for the order introduced at home.
A letter addressed to the UN was also sent by a group of anonymous Tajik activists. In it, they ask officials from the organization to raise the issue of respecting human rights in talks with the Tajik authorities.
“Take every opportunity to help the Tajik people,” they begged. The media did not provide any news that would indicate that this happened. In New York, Rahmon talked about water that gives life, but not about his soldiers and policemen who, on his orders, recently took the lives of at least several dozen citizens of Tajikistan. The authors of the letter did not make their names public for fear of persecution by the regime, which sometimes targeted its critics even beyond the borders of the republic.
For example, in March 2015, in Istanbul, Umarali Kuvwatov, one of the leaders of the opposition movement Group 24, was killed by a shot in the head, for whose extradition Tajikistan had unsuccessfully demanded from the Turkish authorities.
In turn, in 2021, Izzat Amon, known for helping Tajik labor migrants and criticizing the Tajik authorities, disappeared in Moscow. After two days, he “found himself” in a Tajik prison. Accused of fraud, he was sentenced to 9 years in prison.
There were many more such cases. The Tajikistan authorities do not take their critics lightly. In 2015, they dissolved and accused of terrorism and attempts to destabilize the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, the largest opposition party, the only one that has managed to remain in parliament continuously since the 1990s despite electoral fraud committed by the authorities and constant harassment by the security authorities.
And in the fall of 2021, Dushanbe set about pacifying the eternally defiant in formally Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO).
Believe the refugees
The Tajik opposition in Germany also protested last weekend. A total of several hundred people gathered in front of the Tajik embassy, in front of the German Foreign Ministry and in front of the Bundestag. Muhiddin Kabiri, chairman of the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan, who was present in front of the parliament, emphasized that the demonstrators included people from every region of the country, from Gorno Badakhshan to Sogd in the north.
Kabiri mentioned that the West had already learned that dictators like Putin or Lukashenko should not be hosted. The citizens of Tajikistan must convince Western societies and their leaders that the same odium should fall on Rahmon.
The protesters received information from the German authorities that Rahmon would not be an official guest in any of the European countries that Rahmon was supposed to visit. It seems that the dictator’s visits to London and Berlin have been canceled altogether. The Tajik independent news website Asia Plus reported on March 25 that the president of Tajikistan had flown from New York to Dushanbe. He is scheduled to attend the Persian New Year celebrations, Nowruz, in the north of the country this week.
However, the real victory of the protesters will only be possible when democratic European countries start treating political refugees from Tajikistan in the same way they treat Belarusians fleeing Lukashenko’s dictatorship. Currently, they are most often denied international protection. Such was the fate of several Pamirs who had recently applied for refugee status in Poland. They were also denied asylum in Austria and other European countries. Some have already been sent back to their country of origin.
The case of Abdullohi Shamsiddin is the most famous. In January, Germany deported him to Tajikistan. The officials made such a decision due to formal irregularities (the refugee gave the wrong name during the interrogation), even though they knew that Shamsiddin was the son of a well-known Tajik oppositionist and member of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan.
For some time, nothing was heard about the deported person, and in early March, independent media reported that he was being held by the Tajik authorities. He was arrested straight from the plane. A similar fate may befall many more citizens of Tajikistan, if the authorities of European countries do not start to believe that Rahmon is exactly the same dictator as Lukashenko or Putin.
Ludwika Włodek is a sociologist and reporter. She works as an assistant professor at the East European Studies, where she heads the Central Asia specialization. Author of the recently published book “Rebel Girls from Afghanistan“.
Source: NEW