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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
TAJIKISTAN, LITERALLY THE "LAND OF THE TAJIKS," has ancient
cultural roots. The people now known as the Tajiks are the Persian
speakers of Central Asia, some of whose ancestors inhabited Central Asia
(including present-day Afghanistan and western China) at the dawn of
history. Despite the long heritage of its indigenous peoples, Tajikistan
has existed as a state only since the Soviet Union decreed its existence
in 1924. The creation of modern Tajikistan was part of the Soviet policy
of giving the outward trappings of political representation to minority
nationalities in Central Asia while simultaneously reorganizing or
fragmenting communities and political entities.
Of the five Central Asian states that declared independence from the
Soviet Union in 1991, Tajikistan is the smallest in area and the third
largest in population. Landlocked and mountainous, the republic has some
valuable natural resources, such as waterpower and minerals, but arable
land is scarce, the industrial base is narrow, and the communications and
transportation infrastructures are poorly developed.
As was the case in other republics of the Soviet Union, nearly seventy
years of Soviet rule brought Tajikistan a combination of modernization and
repression. Although barometers of modernization such as education, health
care, and industrial development registered substantial improvements over
low starting points in this era, the quality of the transformation in such
areas was less impressive than the quantity, with reforms benefiting
Russian-speaking city dwellers more than rural citizens who lacked fluency
in Russian. For all the modernization that occurred under Soviet rule, the
central government's policies limited Tajikistan to a role as a
predominantly agricultural producer of raw materials for industries
located elsewhere. Through the end of the Soviet era, Tajikistan had one
of the lowest standards of living of the Soviet republics.
Independence came to Tajikistan with the dissolution of the Soviet
Union in December 1991. The first few years after that were a time of
great hardship. Some of the new republic's problems--including the
breakdown of the old system of interdependent economic relationships upon
which the Soviet republics had relied, and the stress of movement toward
participation in the world market--were common among the Soviet successor
states. The pain of economic decline was compounded in Tajikistan by a
bloody and protracted civil conflict over whether the country would
perpetuate a system of monopoly rule by a narrow elite like the one that
ruled in the Soviet era, or establish a reformist, more democratic regime.
The struggle peaked as an outright war in the second half of 1992, and
smaller-scale conflict continued into the mid-1990s. The victors preserved
a repressive system of rule, and the lingering effects of the conflict
contributed to the further worsening of living conditions.
Data as of March 1996
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