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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
Tajikistan had a ministry of foreign affairs for nearly forty years
before it became an independent state at the end of 1991. As long as it
was part of the Soviet Union, however, the republic had no power to
conduct its own diplomacy. The central objective of newly independent
Tajikistan's foreign policy was to maximize its opportunities by
developing relations with as many states as possible. Particular
diplomatic attention went to two groups of countries: the other former
Soviet republics and Tajikistan's near neighbors, Iran and Afghanistan,
which are inhabited by culturally related peoples. At the same time,
Tajikistan pursued contacts with many other countries, including the
United States, Turkey, and Pakistan. In 1995 Tajikistan opened its first
embassy outside the former Soviet Union, in Turkey. The potential for
political support and economic aid is at least as important in shaping
Tajikistan's diplomacy as are ideological and cultural ties.
Former Soviet Republics
Like the other Central Asian republics, Tajikistan joined the CIS,
which was created in December 1991, three weeks before the Soviet Union
collapsed officially. Shortly before opposition demonstrators forced
President Rahmon Nabiyev to resign in August 1992, he asked several
presidents of former Soviet republics, including President Boris N.
Yeltsin of Russia, to help him stay in power. They refused this request.
In the fall of 1992, the increasingly embattled coalition government that
succeeded Nabiyev asked the other members of the CIS to intervene to end
the civil war. However, such assistance was not provided.
Through the mid-1990s, Russia played a role in independent Tajikistan
by its military presence there, in the form of the 201st Motorized Rifle
Division and the Border Troops (see Russia's Role in the Early 1990s, this
ch.). Russian personnel in Dushanbe acted as advisers to the post-civil
war government. Russians also held important positions in the Dushanbe
government itself, most notably the Ministry of Defense, which was led
from 1992 to 1995 by Aleksandr Shishlyannikov. Yuriy Ponosov, who had a
generation of experience as a CPSU official in Tajikistan before the
breakup of the Soviet Union, became Tajikistan's first deputy prime
minister in March 1996.
The protection of the Russian minority in strife-ridden Tajikistan is a
stated foreign policy goal of the Russian government. Russia's concern was
eased somewhat by the conclusion of a dual-citizenship agreement between
the two countries in 1995. Russia also has justified its active
involvement in the affairs of Tajikistan by citing the need to defend the
Tajikistan-Afghanistan border--and thus, the CIS--from penetration by
Islamic extremism and drug trafficking.
Independent Tajikistan has troubled relations with two neighboring
former Soviet republics, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a situation that began
long before independence. In the 1980s, a dispute over two scarce
resources in Central Asia, water and arable land, soured relations between
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In June 1989, the situation burst into
spontaneous, grassroots violence over competing claims to a small parcel
of land. That conflict led to mutual recriminations that continued until a
settlement was reached in 1993. Tensions were heightened in 1992 by
Kyrgyzstan's fear that the Tajikistani civil war would spill over the
border, which had never been defined by a bilateral treaty. Despite tense
relations between the two republics, Kyrgyzstan attempted to negotiate an
end to Tajikistan's civil war, and it sent medicine and other aid to its
beleaguered neighbor. After the civil war, Kyrgyzstan sent a contingent of
troops to Tajikistan as part of the joint CIS peacekeeping mission (see
The Armed Forces, this ch.).
Tajikistan's relations with Uzbekistan present a contradictory picture.
On the one hand, Tajik intellectuals, and at times the Dushanbe
government, have criticized Uzbekistan for discrimination against its
Tajik minority. In response, citing fears of Islamic radicalism in
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan closed its Tajik-language schools in mid-1992. On
the other hand, antireformists in both republics have maintained good
relations based on the interest they shared in the defeat of reformers in
Tajikistan in the early 1990s. Uzbekistan gave military support to the
factions that won Tajikistan's civil war and closed its border with
Tajikistan in the fall of 1992 to prevent opposition refugees from the
civil war from fleeing to Uzbekistan.
After the civil war, Uzbekistan's attitude toward Tajikistan became
increasingly ambivalent. One aspect of Uzbekistan's policy continued its
earlier effort to prevent the opposition from taking power in Tajikistan;
a 1993 cooperation treaty between the two countries, stipulating a role
for Uzbekistan's air force in the defense of Tajikistan--which has no air
force of its own--manifested that concern. However, the government in
Tashkent was increasingly displeased that the dominant factions among the
victors in Tajikistan's civil war were much less amenable to Uzbekistan's
leadership than were the factions that had controlled Tajikistani politics
before the war. By 1995 the Uzbekistani government was urging the
government in Dushanbe to be more conciliatory toward the opposition in
postwar peace talks.
The leaders of Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan repeatedly extolled the value of regional economic and
environmental cooperation in the early 1990s. In reality, however, only
limited progress was made toward such cooperation. Oil and natural gas
producers Kazakstan and Turkmenistan interrupted fuel deliveries to
Tajikistan, in the hopes of improving the terms of the sales agreements
that had prevailed under the Soviet system. With consumer goods generally
in short supply, Tajikistan has taken measures to prevent citizens of the
neighboring republics from purchasing such items from Tajikistani
stockpiles. Tajikistan also is wary of regional water use plans that might
increase the share of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in water emanating from
Tajikistan.
Iran
When Tajikistan declared independence, Iran was one of the first
countries to extend diplomatic recognition, and the first to establish an
embassy in Dushanbe. In 1992 Iran provided training for a group of Tajik
diplomats from Tajikistan. After 1991 bilateral contacts in the mass media
and in sports increased significantly, and Iran funded construction of
several new mosques in Tajikistan. Some of Tajikistan's most important
contacts with Iran in the early 1990s were cultural. For example,
Tajikistan held an Iranian film festival, an exhibition of Iranian art,
and two exhibits of Iranian publications. Dushanbe was the site of
international conferences on Persian culture and the Tajik language. In
the early 1990s, Iranian books and magazines became increasingly available
in Tajikistan, and Dushanbe television carried programs from Iran. The
main obstacle to such cultural contact is the fact that only a very small
portion of the Tajikistani population can read the Arabic alphabet (see
Ethnic Groups and Forces of Nationalism, this ch.).
Despite the obvious ideological differences between the Islamic
revolutionary regime in Iran and the secular communist regime in newly
independent Tajikistan, Nabiyev actively cultivated relations with Iran.
When Nabiyev's position was threatened in 1992, his speeches repeatedly
stressed both the cultural and the religious ties between the two
countries. He subsequently made a direct request for aid from Iranian
president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (see Transition to Post-Soviet
Government, this ch.).
The leading figures of the Islamic revival movement in Tajikistan say
emphatically that whatever eventual form of Islamic state they advocate
for Tajikistan, Iran is not the model to be followed. Part of the reason
for this position is that Iran is predominantly Shia Muslim while
Tajikistan is mainly Sunni, a distinction with important implications for
the organization of the religious leadership and its relationship with the
state. An equally important reason is that the social structures of
Tajikistan and Iran are considered too different for Iran's linkage of
religious and political powers to be adopted in Tajikistan.
In the fall of 1992, Iran repeatedly offered to help mediate
Tajikistan's civil war in cooperation with other Central Asian states.
Although such offers produced no negotiations, Iran did send food and set
up camps for refugees from Tajikistan. After the civil war, relations
between Iran and the new government in Dushanbe included efforts to
develop a modus vivendi as well as periodic recriminations. Iran worked
with Russia in attempting to negotiate a peace agreement between the
Dushanbe government and the opposition. In July 1995, Tajikistan opened an
embassy in Tehran, one of its few outside the former Soviet Union.
Afghanistan
Tajikistan's relations with Afghanistan, the country with which it
shares its long southern border, have been affected not only by the
cultural and ethnic links between inhabitants of the countries but also by
the way the Soviet regime tried to use those links to ensure the survival
of a communist government in Kabul after 1979. The Soviets put Tajiks from
Tajikistan in positions of power in the Soviet-backed Afghan government
and sent propaganda publications from Tajikistan to Afghanistan. Afghans
were brought to Tajikistan for education and communist indoctrination, and
Tajiks served in the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan. In 1991
the political climate in Tajikistan allowed some citizens to criticize the
war openly, although there was no reliable gauge of how widely this
antiwar opinion was shared.
Into the early 1990s, the communist government in Dushanbe and the
then-communist government in Kabul favored the development of economic
relations and exchanges in the fields of education and publishing. During
the civil war, the antireformist side alleged that its opponents relied
heavily on the subversive actions of Afghan mujahidin . Most
neutral observers dismissed the large-scale role of Afghans as a
propaganda ploy.
Rugged terrain and poor border enforcement make the Tajikistan-
Afghanistan border very permeable. Beginning in 1992, border
crossings--for private smuggling, to escape the Tajikistani civil war, or
to obtain weapons for one side or the other in that war--became
increasingly numerous. By early 1993, the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees estimated that 50,000 to 70,000 refugees had gone from
southern Tajikistan to northern Afghanistan. By 1994 many of them had
returned home, although the exact number is not available.
Relations between Tajikistan's post-civil war government and
Afghanistan often were troubled through the first half of the 1990s.
Tajikistan accused Afghanistan of complicity in cross-border attacks by
exiled opposition members based in northern Afghanistan. In turn,
Afghanistan accused Russian forces on the Tajikistan side of the border of
killing Afghan civilians in reprisal attacks. The situation changed in
late 1995 and early 1996, when Russia began to support President
Burhanuddin Rabbani's faction in the ongoing Afghan civil war. Rabbani
then tried to improve relations with the Dushanbe government and to
mediate a settlement between it and the opposition.
The United States
Although the United States was the second country to open an embassy in
Dushanbe, that outpost was evacuated in October 1992, at the height of the
civil war, and was not reopened until March 1993. Beginning in 1992,
antireformists and the opposition both sought support from the United
States. Thus, a trip by Secretary of State James Baker to Tajikistan in
February 1992 antagonized members of the opposition, who saw the visit as
granting tacit approval to Nabiyev's political repression. Relations with
the opposition were improved somewhat a few months later, when a human
rights delegation from the United States Congress met with several
opposition leaders.
During the civil war, the United States provided emergency food
supplies and medicines to Tajikistan, and independent Tajikistan continued
the cooperative program on earthquake forecasting techniques that had
begun with the United States during the Soviet era. By the mid-1990s,
United States policy toward Tajikistan centered on support for peace
negotiations and on encouraging Tajikistan to develop closer relations
with the IMF and other financial organizations that could help in the
rebuilding process.
China
The main source of tension between China and Tajikistan is China's
claim on part of Tajikistan's far eastern Gorno-Badakhshan region. Between
1992 and 1995, sixteen rounds of negotiations between China and a
commission representing Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakstan, and Kyrgyzstan
failed to produce a border agreement. An interim agreement, scheduled for
signing in April 1996, stipulated that no attacks would be launched across
the border in either direction and that both sides would provide ample
notice of military exercises in the area. Despite their border dispute,
China and the post-civil war government of Tajikistan share a hostility
toward reformist political movements, especially those that could be
stigmatized as Islamic fundamentalist. By the mid-1990s, this common
ground had become the basis for a working relationship between the two
governments.
International Organizations
Tajikistan joined the UN in 1992. In the fall of that year, the
Tajikistani coalition government requested UN aid in ending the civil war
and supporting political democratization, but only a UN mission and a call
for an end to hostilities resulted. Tajikistan joined the CSCE in February
1992. In 1993 and 1994, membership was obtained in the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the World Bank (see Glossary),
the IMF, and the Economic Cooperation Organization (see Glossary).
Data as of March 1996
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