Rakhmon does not want to be Bakiyev

The fight against the opposition has intensified in Tajikistan

Tomorrow five newspapers will not be published in Tajikistan: “Paikon”, “Ozodagon”, “SSSR”, “Millat Borgokhi” and “Sukhan”. Newspapers in the republic have been published once a week, on Thursdays, for many years, and recently one of the printing houses in Dushanbe notified the editors that it would not be able to print the circulation. As the Tajik service of Radio Liberty reports, citing one of the printing house employees, the corresponding order came from the office of the President of Tajikistan, where they considered that the newspapers were “too insolent.” Indeed, in recent weeks, the Tajik media, which were previously distinguished by a certain independence, began to publish materials with outright criticism of President Emomali Rahmon, the nepotism of the Tajik regime, and to sneer at “His Majesty’s advice and instructions,” as is already quite common practice in Tajikistan to address the president of the country .

In the Paykon newspaper, the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Tajikistan (SDPT), Rakhmatillo Zairov, directly writes about “signs of a personality cult, which have disastrous consequences and become an obstacle to national development.” In an interview with another publication, the leader of the SDPT calls on Rahmon to resign to save the country. And the Najot newspaper publishes statements by Mirzokhudzhi Akhmadov, one of the field commanders of the former Tajik United Opposition (UTO), who, after the conclusion of the inter-Tajik peace agreement in 1997, headed the department for combating organized crime of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Rasht group of districts until the fall of 2008. “We want one thing - to be left alone. But if it turns out that, contrary to the president’s instructions, they want to bring us into the investigation again, we will be forced to take up arms to protect ourselves,” Akhmadov warned.

Former UTO militants accuse Rakhmon of treachery, because last year he personally met with them and called on them to “forget the past.” Back at the end of June, the president celebrated the 13th anniversary of the peace agreement with a circle of former oppositionists in Khorog, the administrative center of Gorno-Badakhshan. But as soon as Rakhmon flew to Dushanbe, the former oppositionists began to be persecuted again.

Observers see Dushanbe’s reaction to the events in Kyrgyzstan in the new aggravation of relations between the authorities and their recent opponents. People around the Tajik president apparently took seriously the numerous forecasts predicting Emomali Rahmon to have the same inglorious end to his career as Kurmanbek Bakiyev .

Tajik special services have begun a series of arrests among those whom official Dushanbe suspects of disloyalty. At the end of last week, 27-year-old Faromuz Amonbekov was arrested in Khorog and taken to the capital, whose only guilt, obviously, was that he did not hide his impartial attitude towards the authorities and, having leadership qualities, could lead people. However, the next day, about 300 elders and authoritative residents of Badakhshan told the leadership of the regional departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and National Security that if Amonbekov was not released, they would do it themselves by going to Dushanbe. Severely beaten, he was immediately returned to Khorog. This incident, by the way, clearly showed how weak the position of the ruling regime in Tajikistan is in the Pamirs, whose inhabitants have always been distinguished by their obstinate character.

In recent weeks, persecution of religious figures has also intensified in the country. In the village of Rudaki near Dushanbe, Mullah Mavlavi Abdukakhhor, as well as 17 of his students, were arrested and beaten. The mullah was accused of “the conditions in which he conducted his teaching activities not meeting any sanitary standards.” In addition, as the press secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs pointed out, “he taught children under seven years old, and according to the legislation of the republic, children under this age are prohibited from teaching religious subjects and Arabic script.” More than 20 mosques have recently been closed in the republic on the grounds that they were not registered by the authorities. The deputy chairman of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, Muhammadali Hayit, warned in this regard: “the secular extremism of the Tajik authorities gives rise to Islamic extremism.”

The authorities also began hunting for discs with recordings of the sermons of the well-known mullah Eshoni Nuruddin, the elder brother of one of the former leaders of the UTO, Khoja Akbar Turajonzoda. Unable to stop thousands of people from gathering for Friday prayers at a mosque in Kofarnikhon, home to a popular confessor whose discussions of power seem dangerous to the regime, Tajik security forces have decided to destroy widely circulated records of those discussions.

According to Vremya Novostei, Russian authorities have recently extradited to Dushanbe 15 former UTO militants who had previously been amnestied. Moscow readily responds to simple accusations in requests sent from Tajikistan about the guilt of former militants in the murder of Russian soldiers and officers. After appropriate interrogations of the deportees in Dushanbe, confessions are shown on Tajik television with comments about the high authority that President Rahmon enjoys in Russia.

Arkady DUBNOV