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Russian and CIS peace enforcement in Tajikistan Forthcoming in Lena Jonson and Clive Archer (eds. ): Russian and CIS Peacekeeping (Westview, 1995). Publication no. 1 - 1995, Centre of Russians Studies. Tajikistan is situated between the five historic empires of Asia: Russia to the north, Turkey to the west, Iran and India to the south, China to the south-east. The civil war in the country may have cost as many as 30. 000 people their lives in 1992 alone. Among Russian and CIS peacekeeping and peace enforcement activities, this one is the most costly in military terms has been the one in Tajikistan.
This working paper presents the roots of the conflict, discusses how Russia and the CIS got involved, and shows that, although the military involvement of approximately 25. 000 mainly Russian troops has probably contributed substantially to keeping an unstable peace, the lack of impartiality and an operational peacekeeping doctrine does not allow the categorisation of the operation as a peacekeeping one in any traditional sense of that concept. Among Russian and CIS peacekeeping and peace enforcement activities, the most costly in military terms has been the one in Tajikistan. The military engagement matches the proportions of the human losses in the area: according to former Prime Minister Abdumalik Abdullojanov, 30. 000 people were killed only in 1992. 1 A further 70. 000 or more migrated from Tajikistan to Afghanistan, whence only perhaps 30. 000 have returned. All in all, hundreds of thousands, perhaps as much as half a million people out of an overall population of 5. 3 million, may have been displaced at one time since independence. This chapter will discuss the roots of the civil war, the Russian and CIS military involvement in the interior of the country, and also their border-guarding undertaking along the 1200 kilometer long border with Afghanistan to the south. In conclusion, it will be argued that although the military involvement of approximately 25. 000 mainly Russian troops has probably contributed substantially to keeping an unstable peace, the lack of impartiality and an operational peacekeeping doctrine does not allow the categorisation of the operation as a peacekeeping one in any traditional sense of that concept.
Thus, whereas we have stuck to the epithet 'peacekeeping' when we want to reflect the usage among Russian and CIS sources, we have insisted on 'peace enforcement' in the title as well as in places where it is our own assessment of the undertaking in a global comparative perspective which comes to the fore. On a more tangential note, we use 'region' to denote now parts of Tajikistan, now Central Asia in its entirety. The rest of this introduction lodges Tajikistan in its historical, geographical and ethnic regional setting, in the latter sense of that word. Tajikistan is situated between the five historic empires of Asia: Russia to the north, Turkey to the west, Iran and India to the south, China to the south-east. Areas which presently make up Tajikistan have roughly been parts of the Russian empire since 1868.
Following the turmoil of revolution and civil war, where Khojand as an old centre of exile for enemies of the tsarist state played the role of regional mainstay for the new Soviet power, Tajikistan took its place inside the Soviet Union. Thus, for 125 years Russia has wielded a measure of control in this part of the world. Half of Tajikistan is situated in the Pamir foothills. The other half of the country lies above 3000 meters, and most of this land is to be found in the Gorno-Badakhshan region stretching up into the Pamir mountains and bordering on China and Afghanistan.
Gorno-Badakhshan is separated from Pakistan only by the contested Afghan Vakhan corridor. The valleys alone, perhaps some 15 % of the territory, are permanently inhabited. A number of Tajiks reside outside of Tajikistan. Of Afghanistan's three million Persian-speakers, most identify as Tajiki's, and according to official Uzbekistani figures, there are some 700. 000 Tajiki's living in that country, lead down from the 930. 000 which were reported in the last Soviet census of 1989). Tajik ethnographers, on the other hand, maintain that the last number may be as high as three million, depending on how one separates Uzbeks from Tajiks. In the Tajikistan lowlands and border areas there are large numbers of Uzbeks; in Kurgan-Tyube, more than 30 % declare themselves to be of this ethnicity.
Incidents of ethnic cleansing of ethnic Tajiks by ethnic Uzbeks have been known to take place. A recurrent theme in Uzbek nationalist rhetoric is that Tajiks are simply Persianised Uzbeks - that is, Turkic peoples who have succumbed to Persian cultural pressured and have taken on foreign ways. It goes without saying that such theories, emanating from the titular nation of a 20 million strong neighbouring state, are hardly popular with ethnic Tajiks, and especially not among those who are intent on furthering Tajik nation-building (Subtelny 1994). The Bukhara khanate, which ruled some of the area around today's Tajikistan from the 15 th and well into the 18 th century, is an undertaking often enrolled by Uzbek politicians in their own nation-building work. 2 However, it makes little sense to talk about Bukhara and Samarkand as mainstays of the Uzbek nation for two reasons, both of which are relevant for an understanding of today's situation. First, it makes little sense to talk about 'nations' in this area of the world before this political category was forced on the indigenous populations as an organising principle by Stalin in the 1920 and 1930 s.
Secondly, the majority and leading circles of these two towns were actually Persian-speaking. Speaking some variant of Persian was the criterion Stalin used when he initiated Tajik nation-building in the 1920 s. Thus, the disparate groups huddled together in the Tajikistani Autonomous Republic inside Uzbekistan from 1924 to 1929 may also claim the Bukhara and Samarkand khanate's as political forerunners (Akiner 1983). 3 The very fact that Tajikistan was located inside Uzbekistan may, however, serve as precedents for Uzbekistani prevention in the area. So may the fact that the Uzbek capital Tashkent served as an organisational hub for the entire Soviet Central Asia, housing, for example, the Turkestan Military District headquarters. To present the country in terms of ethnic categories such as 'Tajiki's' and 'Uzbeks' is already to impose a set of foreign Western terms on an unwilling Tajikistani reality (Atkin 1993). Over the last 200 years, the idea that a group of people which shares a common language and culture for this reason alone should and must gather in 'their own's tate has grown so strong that it is hard to grasp that politics may also be organised along other lines than the national ones.
The clash of the idea of 'the nation', brought to Central Asia in the 1920 s by the unlikely figure of Joseph Stalin, clashed with the existence of multiple loyalties. In Tajikistan, it never sprouted deep roots. The tension between the imposed and idealized idea of a Tajik 'nation' on the one hand and the unrelenting importance of competing Tajik regional identities on the other, is one of the two dramas of Tajikistani politics. The other drama is partly a result of the instability resulting from the first, and is to do with the way outside powers like Russia, Uzbekistan and Afghan-based warlords take advantage of Tajikistan's civil war to enhance their own presence in the country. This section will elaborate on the former and the next on the latter of these dramas. Although there exists a Tajik 'nation' on paper, the work of what one may call Tajik 'nation builders' - politicians who seek to streamline disparate dialects, variants of Islam and other cultural mores into a more easily governable whole - has not proceeded very far.
A key example is Gorno-Badakhshan, a region which formed an autonomous district (avtonomnaya oblast') inside the Tajikistani Soviet Socialist Republic and vainly tried to increase its autonomy in 1991 - 1993. 'Gorno-Badakhshanis' is state-speak. 'Pamir' is an epithet which comes into use in contexts which also include people from outside Gorno-Badakhshan. In local contexts, the around 200. 000 'Pamir' are Shughnani and Wake (reading in the western and central parts) Yazgholami and Darwasi (in the northern part bordering Afghanistan, and also in the region of Gharm), and Ishqashimi. They speak Eastern Iranian languages which are referred to eponymous (Atkin 1994). In addition to language and territory, a diacritic which often comes into play is religion - all these groups are Ismaili Shiites, and not Hawaii Sunni as is the majority of Tajiks. 4 Ismaili Shia was brought to the area by the poet Nasir Khosrow during the seventeenth century. Then again in another region, Kurgan-Tyube, the standard view of origin is that it is Arabic rather than Persian. The situation, then, is that in the hierarchy of identities in this part of the world, the national identity is weak, and not privileged above the others in the same way as it is in Europe.
This is not to say that a Tajik identity does not exist - it does indeed, and it comes into play for example when talk turns to relations with neighbouring Uzbekistan. However, whereas for example in Serbia, Serbian identity would very often be so strong as to forge most or even all Serbs against Croats in a conflict, in Tajikistan the regional identity of people for example in the Leninabad region may in some cases drive them to join forces with Uzbeks against other Tajiks. Thus, the weak status of the Tajik nation and the tenuous grip of the Tajikistani state on Tajik society are among the main factors which make local politics a very different animal from what it is in Europe. The main identity is the regional one, but the regions do not coincide with the administrative regions. 'Identity regionalism' is a lose translation of the local term mahalgaroi. Little work has been done on how it was generated. For centuries, mountain ranges have hampered the possibilities for communication between valleys, facilitating social organisation in valley communities.
One hypothesis is that this general pattern congealed in a new constellation during the 1920 s and the 1930 s, as part of the military resistance to Sovietisation. Whereas basmati referred to the resistance movement as such, mahalgaroi referred to specific military attachments and 'laid the foundation for exercising local power over extended families, with groups based on blood and geographical origins' as some observers have it (Jawad & Tadjbakhsh 1995: 13). The six main identity regions are Kulyabis, Gharm, Gorno-Badakhshan (or 'Pamir'), Kurgan-Tyube, Leninabad and Hussar. 5 People keep their regional identification when they move to Dushanbe and other centres, so that on the elite level, representatives of these groups may be found in any larger town. Thus, although these identity regions are territorially based, they are sometimes referred to inaccurately as 'clans'.
They consist of a core of key elite families, and a host of other families which may be blood relatives or simply hangers-on for economic or political reasons. One loose parallel which may shed light on this structure is the phenomenon of the mafia family, which often has a core consisting of a biological family, but which is also so amorphous as to be a family first and foremost in the symbolic sense. The infighting between the different identity regions has led to different power constellations between them. In Brezhnev's time, the Leninabadis drew on good relations with Uzbeks and Russians as well as support from the Kulyabis in order to hold sway inside the communist party. Leninabadis and Kulyabis used their control of the political apparatus to channel economic investment from Moscow into their own regions, which further strengthened their power vis -- vis the other identity regions, which in turn further strengthened resentment towards the Leninabadis and Kulyabis amongst the other mahalgaroi. From the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 onwards, the religious fissures inside that country provided an opportunity for the Gorno-Badakhshanis to strengthen their hand.
Gorno-Badakhshanis are Ismaili Muslims, as are a number of people in Afghanistan. Religious affiliations inside Afghanistan played a role in determining who opposed and who fought the government. Generally, Afghan Ismaili's supported the communist government brought to power by the Soviets, and so their brothers in faith across the border in Tajikistan received a new card to play in their local power struggles inside Tajikistan itself. This strengthened the standing of Tajikistan's Ismaili Gorno-Badakhshanis inside Tajikistan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB. Gorno-Badakhshanis and Gharmis also held another power card inasmuch as they were overrepresented in the Tajik cultural intelligentsia, simply because such a high number of intellectuals from other identity-regions gave priority to participating in cultural activities conducted in Russian or Uzbek. With perestroika, the other identity regions saw an opportunity to challenge the party structure, which was in the hands of Leninabadis and Kulyabis.
They organised in various organisations, three of which were especially important. The Rebirth Movement (Rastakhiz) was dominated by Gharmis, Gorno-Badakhshanis and other Tajik intellectuals interested in further nation-building. The Islamic Renaissance Party was also dominated by Gharmis. The Democratic Party was dominated by Gorno-Badakhshanis, as was the Last Badakhshan, an organisation advocating autonomy for this region (Chicherina 1990).
The last years of perestroika and the Soviet Union saw a power struggle erupt between the Leninabadis, the Kulyabis and eventually the His saris on the one hand ('the communists' reorganised in a new People's Front), and the Gharmis and the Gorno-Badakhshanis on the other ('the opposition'). Since liberal intellectuals and Muslim elders made up the leadership of the opposition, the latter camp is often referred to as an alliance of democrats and Islamists. This should not, however, be taken to indicate that this was basically a struggle of ideas. Rather, various ideological movements like communism, democracy and Islamism served as nests or power containers for identity-region politics.
Initially, it looked like there was a chance that Tajikistan may emerge out of the Soviet rubble with a government consisting of representatives from a variety of identity regions. Indeed, in 1991 and 1992 uneasy compromises were made, and a certain balance reigned. In relative regional terms, Tajikistan was considered to have a fairly functional multiparty system in 1990 and 1991 (Martin 1993). After the November 1991 presidential election, when the former Communist party leader and Leninabadis Rakhmon Nabiev won, Leninabadis and Kulyabis ('the communists') sought to eliminate political opposition within the parliament and government. As a consequence demonstrators began its siege of the parliament in late March 1992, followed by a counter-demonstration organized by the government (Brown 1992). The prospects of civil wa...
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