1907 Solar Eclipse Expedition by Sergei Prokhudi-Gorskii, Russian Photographer in Central Asia.
This is my little weekly newsletter on Saturdays about Tajikistan. You can send news or comments or get it sent by email by writing to me at [email protected]
COMMENT:
So the in-your-face Tajik telecommunications official Beg Zuhorov did keep his word as I reported last week and opened back up the Internet sites Facebook and RFE/RL -- after implying they could be shut any time by having announced that "the public" had complained about "extremism" (never explained precisely). It turns out some of the providers didn't even bother to follow the blocking orders, and one of them was owned by President Emmomali Rahmonov's own son. It always annoys me when a story likes this gets reported by EurasiaNet.org and others as a Bad Thing About Central Asia, and gets picked up by numerous tech sites, blogs, etc. but then the un-doing of the Bad Thing doesn't get reported. At least RFE/RL had a report about its unblocking but it was never clear what it was really all about.
While it may be only a coincidence, given how many of these types of trials are, the blockage came just as a group of people were about to go on trial for this nebulous "extremism" in Khojand (the verdict was announced after websites were running again). This seems a particularly strange and brutal case -- among the 7 defendants are two middle-aged women and their minor teenage sons, 16 and 18 (the defendant was arrested before he turned 18). They all got very high sentences for "advocating the violent overthrow of the Constitutional order". Helpfully, they pleaded guilty using the exact same language of the charges in the criminal code. But we have no idea what they actually did. It's hard to picture these moms and their teenage sons throwing bombs.
I have no use for Hizb-ut-Tahir; I have absolutely no hesitation condemning it as extremist and likely cunning and duplicitous about its ultimate aims. It claims that it is merely "peacefully" going about building a caliphate, i.e. theocratic rule, but it never explains what the plans are for all the infidels who don't want a caliphate. Too often, HuT members or ex-members, as somebody always patiently explains in exasperation at your suspicions, are tried and found guilty of real crimes. Even Western countries like Germany have banned the group.
It's too bad that human rights groups and pundits who see these kinds of awful cases such as occurred in Khujand can't find a way to condemn the way the Tajik government misuses the law and persecutes people -- AND condemn the groups that seem to have gotten their clutches into ordinary poor people in this backward country. I'm quite prepared to believe that all these people involved are innocent, and even the repeat offenders at least suffered lack of due process, yet I'd like to see the literature, the activities and the groups behind these cases as well -- and I don't see anything wrong with morally condemning them and opposing them, even if the opposition should not take the form of prosecution. There is such a legion of determined do-gooders with the position that HuT is innocent because innocent people are wrongfully prosecuted over HuT that I am the only person in the metaverse with this position. I wish I had more company. If I had more company, and if especially Tajik journalists and human rights activists felt more free to condemn HuT and make the distinctions between the group's reprehensible goals and those victimized around it, I think we might see less victims.
The World Bank is telling the Tajiks to cut their already very sparse electricity consumption in half. Tajikistan is already a place with blackouts and the lights going off all the time routinely, yet it's like that old Vietnam-war joke about the Soviets writing to the Vietnamese Communists: "Tighten your belts!" Reply: "What are belts? Send them!"
This outrageous austerity program is unlikely to get consent from the Tajik government, but I really have to wonder why it is even being proposed. Yes, electricity is the cheapest in the world, but the country is also among the poorest in the world AND it is supplying some of its power to war-torn Afghanistan, which the US is usually grateful for. I guess I can think of a lot of things that might be done to save energy in Tajikistan before consumers are told to shut off their lights. It's not like they're leaving their computers and kindles and microwaves plugged in all night running. Example: are there a lot of Soviet-era huge Stalin-type giant buildings all over the place? Why are they being heated day and night? And is the government looking the other way or even taking bribes while some companies steal electricity, as they do in Uzbekistan? If I were Tajikistan, I'd stall on that outrageous World Bank proposal and tell them to get busy doing a usage and hot spots report for a year and get back to them.
Seems like the US military also wants to tell Tajikistan not to run their toasters too much: in a tweet, the Central Asia Newswire tells Dushanbe that austerity, not Roghun, is the answer. To be honest, I don't have an informed opinion as to whether it's true that Roghun is the ecology-busting monster that Uzbek propagandists claim -- who have an easier time making their case in the world media and world's institutions than Tajikistan. The World Bank has gotten stung around the world over the decades backing big, stupid, expensive, destructive dam projects, and now all that Western NGO yammering against them has caught up with them -- and they have to take it out on Tajikistan, I guess. There doesn't seem to be an international multilateral organization that seems to have the stamina to take this issue on -- neither the UN, despite the marbled heated halls of the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy in Ashgabat, nor the World Bank, or OSCE has been able to get the traction to really decide this for the region - read: stand up to Russia, waiting in the wings, and Uzbekistan, which is nasty.
So, like a lot of things in Central Asian life, maybe it will be left to the Chinese...
Surprise -- Tajikistan is corrupt, says Transparency International in its latest report. But interestingly, it's not *as* corrupt as its immediate neighbours. There's a 20 point or more gap in their scores, even though all of them are hugging the bottom of the barrel. Now why is that? Is there a fine line between corruption that is deterred through authoritarian persecution (i.e. as in Iran, not an ideal way to handle it obviously) and authoritarian persecution that in fact only leads to corruption to get around it? (Uzbekistan). Or are their cultural factors? Or is it that if you are just too poor, with half your GDP made up of people gone abroad to work, it's hard to be corrupt?
Cue up the garden perennial story that the Russian language is dying out because somebody has made a trip to Dushanbe and has anecdotes to tell. Sorry, this old Russian-speaker isn't buying it. Maybe because I speak Russian to all the Tajiks I ever run into in New York or Washington, even 20-somethings, and they never seem surprised or angry. Now, I get it that Russian isn't being taught as much, that young people aren't speaking it as much, and so on. And there's also the living fact that actual native Russian-speakers are being driven out of Tajikistan by repression and poverty -- doctors and engineers among the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers of the old Soviet Union are forced to leave -- 3661 last year, which doesn't sound like very many, until you realize this is among the tens of thousands who have left since the fall o f the USSR, and they happen to be among many of the professionals. It's brain-drain, which isn't a surprising thing in a country where the dictator turns off Internet pages on a whim.
Even so, I think programmers for this region, whether at RFE/RL or OSI or OSCE or any institution, have really lost an opportunity due to their hatred of Russians and aversion toward the Russian language. Here was this built-in lingua-franca that you didn't have to pay anyone to teach or learn, like English, which still isn't as widespread as these planners believe. There is all kind of literature -- good, democratic literature -- published by all kinds of institutions, including even the old CIA-funded bodies like the International Literary Center, now defunct. Here's a lingua franca, by the way, that would enable these peoples to talk to *each other* and others in the CIS who might support them and at least learn about their issues. Yet the nationalists in the State Department or Soros -- the people who think that every country has to follow the path of Poland by relying on language and religion to gain freedom -- block even the most benign efforts to try to have cross-border Russian materials. The radios don't have Russian-language pages for most of the stans, except Kazakhstan, where the excuse is that there is a large Russian minority. I wonder what their traffic is on that page from all the stans? Somebody in Turkmenistan has to find out free news in Russian from RFE/RL by going to the Kazakhstan page instead of the Turkmen page. The success of fergananews.com and chrono-tm.org in Russian should succeed in making the point to these planners that they are short-sighted and misled. They could be promoting local languages while also trying to use what remains of this lingua franca to promote freedom and understanding.
Here's When to Schedule Your Trip to Dushanbe, Mark Zuckerberg
Ever diligent Facebook friends have found out the office hours of Beg Zuhurov, the brazen Tajik official who justified the closure of Facebook on the grounds that "the public was complaining too much about extremism". The official is only at his desk to meet supplicants on Saturdays from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. Nice! So after a week's hard work, just when you might be sleeping in or spending time with your family or doing your second job to make ends meet, that's when Zuhurov's office is open!
Fergana.com reported that Tajikistan had blocked Facebook on November 27, and that Zuhurov had invited Zuckerberg "or one of his assistants" to come visit him to discuss the matter. All six Internet providers were ordered to block it and complied; mobile providers did the same.
Zuhorov made this evasive comment at the time:
I personally didn't give the order to block the access to the social network Facebook The Communications Service didn't give it either, but if it is necessary, the access will be closed. Every day I receive complaints from people about the contents on the network. The network does not resolve social issues, but purely commercial. Everyone remembers how the civil war began in the country, so then everything then began with criticism. We will not allow war to occur.
I reported last week that Zuhorov then soon promised to unblock the sites -- and he kept his word.
Are Web Sites Unblocked in Tajikistan?
But there was still due diligence to be done. Fergana.com asked on December 4 whether reports from RIA-Novosti, the Russian state news agency, were true that Facebook and other Internet sites were unblocked.
"Access to Facebook is unblocked by the state Internet provider Tajik-telekom," Asomuddin Atoye, head of the Tajik association of Internet providers. "If the state Internet-provider has unblocked Facebook, then I'm sure there will be permission from the Communications Service for other providers and operators as well," Atotyev said.
Some Tajik Providers Are More Equal Than Others
Radio Liberty's Tajik Service Radio Ozodi reported that it was blocked on December 1, and apparently later that it had been unblocked, fergananews.com reported. RFE/RL confirmed that the site was unblocked on December 3. This apparently happened after Tajik state agency for communications sent out SMS messages with "a demand to unblock the site". Fergananews.com was still trying to check whether this was true on December 4, and also discovered that some providers had never blocked the sites in the first place.
Fergananews.com says a source reported:
"You know why? Because, for example, the Saturn-Online provider belongs to the son of the president of the country, Rustam Emomalievich, and the Ministry of Communications doesn't touch that company."
RFE/RL reports: A Tajik who grew up in Dushanbe but only
recently returned after decades in Russia has noticed a change in the
Tajik capital. Hardly anyone speaks Russian anymore.
As Konstantin Parshin at EurasiaNet.org tells it:
Evidence is mostly anecdotal, but the linguistic changes are obvious to Tajiks who have been away for years. This past summer, for example, Ruslan Akhmedov wanted to sell an apartment he inherited, so returned to Dushanbe from a small Russian town where he's lived for most of his adult life. "I placed an ad in a local paper indicating my phone number," Akhmedov recalled. "Out of about thirty people who called me during the first couple of days, only three or four easily switched into Russian. With the others, I had to communicate in my primitive Tajik. Regrettably, I've almost forgotten the language."
The heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States met in Ashgabat on December 6.
Nothing happened.
The Golden Age, the Turkmen government website, reported:
The meeting participants considered and discussed a series of issues, including organizational. Owing to them, it was made relevant decisions.
Wait. Did something happen? According to trend.az:
The Declaration stressed that organized crime, terrorism, illegal drugs and psychotropic substances traffic are a serious threat to the security of CIS states.
"We declare our intention to fight against these threats," the document said.
Russia thinks something did happen, however. Putin hopes to use his leverage hosting the G20 and G8 meetings in Russia to represent Central Asia's intersts. RT reports:
However, it can happen only on condition that these interests are timely and duly formulated, the Russian president added.
Developing the topic of international cooperation, Vladimir Putin told the participants that they should develop and promote a common agenda in various other international organizations, such as the OSCE.
Putin added that the current situation in this organization “was not a source of optimism”. “OSCE should have long ago stopped servicing the interests of certain countries and concentrate its attention on unification issues,” the Russian leader said. Putin also expressed hope that when Ukraine takes it turn to chair the OSCE in 2013 it would promote this very position.
Transparency: Two-Thirds of Countries Said to Be 'Highly Corrupt
RFE/RL reports:
The anticorruption group Transparency International (TI) says high levels of bribery, abuse of power, and secret dealings continue to “ravage” societies around the world, despite a growing public outcry over corrupt governments.
The annual Corruption Perceptions Index, published on December 5 by the Berlin-based group, shows that two-thirds of 176 countries are perceived by citizens to be highly corrupt.
Tajikistan is among them, of course. But as you can see from the map, it ranks only 157, by contrast with its neighbours Turkmenistan, at 170, and Afghanistan, at 174, Uzbekistan at 170, but not as good as Iran, at 133 and just a tad worse than Kyrgyzstan which is at 154.
Intervention at the OSCE Ministerial Council
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a little bit to say about Tajikistan in her speech at the OSCE meeting of foreign ministers:
In Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, there are examples of the restrictions of the freedom of expression online and offline as well as the freedom of religion.
Ok, that's it. The resolution on digital freedom didn't pass, despite now finally -- after some hard negotiations -- having 47 signatories. Still, 57 are needed in this consensus organization.
Russians Leave Tajikistan for Russia
Asia-Plus says 3,661 people left for Russia this year.
3,661 people have left Tajikistan for Russia under the Russian national program to assist the voluntary resettlement of fellow-countrymen living abroad to the Russian Federation since 2007.According to the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS)’s office in Tajikistan, 62 percent of them have higher education.
So these are ethnic Russians or Russian speakers of other "nationalities", i.e. not Tajiks or Tajik-spakers.
Speaking at the meeting, Viktor Sebelev, the head of FMS’s office in Tajikistan, noted that 30 percent of those who had left Tajikistan for Russia under the mentioned program were technical and engineering employees and 15 percent physicians. 30 percent of physicians that have left Tajikistan fro Russia have scientific degrees.
Court Sentences "Extremists" in Tajikistan
Asia-Plus reports December 8 that in Khujand, seven people have been tried for "extremism," accused of membership in Hizb-ut-Tahir, which is a "banned religious extremist party" under Tajik law (in Russian).
Judge Shukhrat Akhrorov said that the sentences were announced in investigation-isolation building no. 2 in Khujand, and that among the convicted were three women and one minor. Most of them pleaded guilty in exactly the language of the law itself, including "the forcible change of the Constitutional order," said the judge.
Among them were two Chkalovsk residents, Islom Boboyev, 16, and Sukhrob Khafiz, now 18, were sentenced to 6 and 10 years incarceration, respectively, and were serve their terms in prison colonies under "strict" and "common educational" regimes, respectively.
Others sentenced:
Mavloniddin Ermatov, resident of Isfar, 28, second-time offender, 3 years strict regime colony
Sattorkul Kholikulov, 36, resident of Zafarabad district, also repeat offender, 3 years strict regime.
Mukhayyo Khafizov, mother of Sukhrob, 39, 12 years, common regimen prison colony
Mukhabbat Khafizov, 28, 10 years prison
Minir Boboyev, 40, mother of Islom Boboyev, sentenced to 8.5 years, common regimen prison colony.
The sentences are being appealed.
According to the Sogdi region prosecutor, "56 active members of religious and extremist parties have had their cases sent to court."
4.7 magnitude, in Murghob.
Tajik and Afghan authorities nabbed nearly 1,000 pounds of drugs in a six-day border operation.
“The successful 6-day joint operation was launched in northern Afghan province of Badakhshan and Khatlon province in [southern] Tajikistan,” the Xinhua news agency reported Afghan Deputy Interior Minister Baz Mohammad Ahmadi said at a press conference. The seized drugs included heroin and opium.
Thirteen Afghan citizens are now in custody, the minister said. There has been no official statement on any Tajiks arrested in the operation, although two Tajik women who had been taken hostage by the drug traffickers were released.
No word on any psychotropic drugs.
World Bank Advises Tajikistan to Hike Electricity Price 50%
Central Asia Newsire reports:
The World Bank has advised authorities in Tajikistan to hike electricity prices by 50 percent as part of its solution to the country’s perennial winter power crisis, local media reported on Tuesday.
The study, entitled “Tajikistan’s Winter Energy Crisis: Electricity Supply and Demand Alternatives”, notes that aside from the country’s inability to meet energy requirements, consumers are not incentivized to use power carefully.
That article doesn't mention Roghun, yet the US military-funded Central Asia Newswires has some advice on top of the World Bank's report in the tweet sent to link to the World Bank report:
#Rogun is not answer to #electricity woes - increasing fares, conserving #energy is
Automatic Check-in Down at Dushanbe Airport
Central Asia Newswire reports that Tajikistan’s international airport at Dushanbe have been checked-in the old fashioned way for the last two weeks over a pay dispute, citing local media outlets.
David Trilling of Eurasianet.org calls this "one of the world's worst airports" and tweets that it "just got more inefficient".
Forests and Wildlife Increased in Endangered Area in Tajikistan
Good news! UNDP reports:
Tajikistan’s Vakhsh River valley is crucial to the livelihoods and food security of millions of people, but the degradation of natural resources has been persistent and extensive over the past 100 years. The tugai forests, reservoirs of biodiversity and source of income for local communities, have been stripped at an ever-escalating rate, either to clear land for agriculture or as source of energy.
But UNDP stepped in with a project to reverse these trends.
After four years, an evaluation of the project found that tree-cutting had declined by 90 percent since 2008, allowing the forest to regenerate, while populations of birds and animals increased by 50 percent. Community members say they feel a sense of pride and ownership in what they have been able to accomplish. "Protecting the forests is a noble cause that should always be supported," says Bekmurodov Kurbonmahmad, a member of the committee.
Did they stop cutting trees merely because they ran out of them? What are they using for fuel now? Animal dung? And while it's great that the animals returned, how are the people doing?
In the district of Jura Nazarov, UNDP assisted communities with other aspects of sustainable rural development. Almost all of the district’s 14,000 inhabitants depend on farming, but more than 70 percent of the land is no longer arable, after years of poor agricultural and irrigation practices during the Soviet era.
Yet, UNDP says it has good news there, too:
Seventy-five percent of the respondents reported that they were able to sell additional crops, with a 25 percent increase in income on average. The extra funds have gone into renovating family homes, hiring farm labour to expand production, repairing irrigation systems and sending children to school.
Feeling Glum About Tajikistan? Here's a Nice Promotional Video
From the Embassy of Tajikistan in the US. It has a nice American narrator with a mellow accent, despite that "Ta-JICK-istan" to rhyme with "ick" and will be broadcast on ABC News. The message is that with US investment and lots of mining, the region will become more stable and the relationship will grow stronger.
