Tajikistan - The Country

Tajikistan is one of those "stan" places (like Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.) we skip over in geography lessons. Its kissing cousins are Afghanistan (another stan-fabrication of a colonial power), Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Now Tajikistan acts as a lifeline to the beleaguered Afghan government under Ahmad Shah Massoud and a whipping boy for Mother Russia.

To say there is a civil war would assume that there are two clearly defined sides in a conflict. The truth is that in Tajikistan there is no solid definition-only that if a warlord doesn't like what the Russian-backed stooge of the week says, he fights back. You can always tell if a peace agreement is about to be signed by the number of bombs that go off in Dushanbe.

This beautifully mountainous, handsome-peopled but sparsely populated country is hard, ugly, deadly and controlled by tribes and clans. If space dictates simplification it could be said that the western third is lowland plain with most of the infrastructure and civilization while the country ascends in height and descends in civilized amenities towards the east. The borders are not marked because only Afghan drug smugglers brave the narrow mountainous passes into its rough-and-tumble neighbors of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, China and Afghanistan.

The main geographical feature of Tajikistan is the Pamir, an almost impassable range of mountains that act as a physical barrier between southern Asia and Russia. Here is where the radiating Asian mountain ranges were twisted into a huge knot to create a vast wasteland of stark beauty. It is also the new buffer zone between the Russians and the Muslim "barbarians." Remote border posts manned by bored and brutal veterans of Afghanistan have become high speed distribution centers for the ancient but rapidly-expanding Afghan drug trade. In between buying drugs, they also fight skirmishes with Tajik separatists, rogue warlords and each other.

But if you thought the Russians just started killing Tajiks (or vice versa as is more often the case) in the last few years, you need to brush up on your history. China, Russia and Afghanistan have been using the area called Tajikistan as a battleground ever since the Mongols under Tamerlane came cruising through. Tamerlane's habit of making mountains of skulls make today's terrorist seem like Jimmy Carter. In 1717, an entire Russian army that came to explore Tajikistan was killed. Even in 1917, there was a group of terrorists called the basmachis who fought the Bolsheviks for an independent Muslim homeland. They were defeated after four years and fled to Northern Afghanistan creating the nucleus of the current Tajik rebellion.

When the area was known more appropriately as Central Asia, Stalin (a Georgian mountain boy) decided to chop his Southern real estate into five quasi ethnic clumps. His artificial boundaries were designed to lump together and divide minorities. The Russians created a Tajikistan to be an autonomous satellite of Uzbekistan in 1924 and then changed to a full union republic in 1929. In the Russian tradition of totally screwing up ethnic and indigenous history, they left 475,000 Tajiks in Uzbekistan and every important government position was usually run by a round-faced, hard drinking Soviet from the north. Things were relatively calm (or undocumented) under the iron fist of Mother Russia. In the '80s a fundamentalist group called the Islamic Resistance Party began pushing for Tajik nationalism and started to raise hell. They really didn't come into their own until 1990 when the Russians threatened to resettle Christian Armenians in Muslim Dushanbe.

In 1991, when the rest of post-Soviet central Asia declared independence, Tajikistan's lack of national wherewithal and importance as a buffer zone for Russia, delegated it to its current status as an independent republic. The population magically voted in a corrupt communist government. This didn't sit well with some locals, who decided to take over the presidential palace to install a coalition government run by Akbarshah Iskandarov. Other factions also realized that the gun was much more efficient than the ballot box and began to use bullets instead of stern memos to get their point across. The lines broke down as the Moscow-friendly old liners from the North battled the Kulyabis from the south.

The civil war erupted in a very nasty shoot-out until 1993. Over 40,000 people lost their lives in this flare-up and not too many folks in the west even heard of the massacre. The ethnic cleansing and precarious political structures opened the door to the Russian army who then stepped in to babysit their puppet ruler Imamali Rakhmanov (from the Kulyab district) and then proceeded to spank all the various warring factions. Seemingly blind to the history lesson dealt them in Afghanistan, Russia still views Tajikistan as a buffer zone and does not want nasty Islamic fundamentalists sneaking in to mess up their nice Moscow neighborhoods.