Tajikistan

A mountainous landlocked country in central Asia, Tajikistan is a former member of the now-collapsed Soviet Union. The country's population totals just over 7 million, whose diverse ethnic and regional fragmentation was the main cause for the prolonged civil war (1992–97) that had disastrous effects on the economy. Allegiance to different clan networks provoked the different factions of Tajik society to fight against each other in a bloodied struggle that claimed the lives of at least 50,000 people, although some sources double that number. The Tajik war is an example of how upsetting the social balance between different networks of people can lead to tragic consequences.

The main ethnic group is the Persian-speaking Tajik, who are closely associated with Afghans and Iranians. Ethnic Russians represented almost 10 percent of the entire population of Tajikistan before the civil war, due to the Soviet policy of sending colonists to member republics. Yet, as the war broke out, these ethnic Russians fled the country in fear of political persecution; their number, along with that of the Uzbekis, who represented another sizable minority before the war, is declining. The Pamir people, who live in the Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous province along the southern border with Afghanistan and China, are often referred to as Tajiks, but their cultural and religious traditions greatly differ from that of the Tajiks. Because their province is in a remote geographical area that is difficult to reach and to communicate with, Pamirs have preserved more traditional ways of life compared to the rest of the country. In addition, they speak different languages from Tajiks and follow the Ismaeli faction of Islam, while Tajiks are overwhelmingly Sunni.

Yaghnobi people still exist in the northern Sughd Province. Their tribal network remained isolated from the rest of the country until the 1930s, when the Stalinist purges forced them into exile. During the 1960s and 1970s, most of the Yaghnobi were forced to relocate from their mountainous province to the semidesert plains of Tajikistan.

The civil war opposed the national government of President Rahmon Nabiyev to the ethnic groups of Pamiris from the Garm and Gorno-Badakhshan areas. These groups are thought to be underrepresented in the ruling elite against which they rebelled. While this was the immediate reason for the conflict, its deepest motifs must be looked for in the Soviet period, when Tajik society and community organization were severely disrupted. In particular, the southwestern regions of the country (where the civil war broke out with incredible violence) were the target of forced and involuntary immigration in the decades following World War II, and the predominant Turk-speaking groups were soon replaced by Tajiks. The Soviet government forced immigration to expand the land [Page 842]area devoted to cotton production but failed to promote effective integration among the different ethnic groups. At the beginning of the civil war, liberal and democratic reformers and Islamists formed an opposition network called the United Tajik Opposition. During the conflict, a faction seceded, forming a more fundamentalist Islamist movement. The ruling elite, on the other hand, were mainly formed (as in the Soviet era) by clans from the Leninabadi region, who were also supported by people from Kulyab. Because of this long conflict, Tajikistan is the poorest of the countries that were part of the Soviet Union, although a certain degree of political stability following the civil war, coupled with international help, has engineered economic recovery. So divisive was the legacy of this civil war that researchers and international observers recommended that the reconstruction following the conflict should attend to not only the country's physical infrastructure but also its social networks that provide the means for sustainable development.

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