#9
Tajikistan Struggles for Stability
October 28, 2001
By JIM HEINTZ
DANGHARA, Tajikistan (AP) - The word came from a passer-by as the sun rose: Water was flowing in the pipe along the Danghara road for the first time in a week.
As the news spread, villagers in the area strapped cans to their donkeys and hurried off on hikes of up to 3 miles to fill up. No one knew when the water would stop, or come back again.
Such toils and humiliations are the daily lot of many of Tajikistan's 6.6 million people, stoking an angry sullenness. It has already produced one Tajik rebellion, and the fighting in neighboring Afghanistan is raising new concerns.
If the Taliban are defeated in Afghanistan, they and members of groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network ``will have to go somewhere,'' said Ivo Petrov, head of the United Nations' peace-building mission in Tajikistan.
Tajikistan, with a long porous border with Afghanistan, would be a convenient destination. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, believed to be affiliated with bin Laden, has sporadically kept bases in northern Afghanistan, although it reportedly departed this year.
An infiltration of radicals might galvanize discontented people in this former Soviet republic to rebel, even though there is little sympathy for the Taliban's puritanical version of Islam.
For the moment, with aid groups saying a two-year drought has put a million Tajiks on the edge of starvation, people appear not so much restive as exhausted: A woman stands motionless in a barren field. Men squat at the roadside, their backs turned to the sparse traffic. A phone rings in the Foreign Ministry and an official stares at it bleakly, making no effort to answer.
Tajikistan already was wracked by a civil war that erupted shortly after it became independent with the collapse of the Soviet Union. A 1997 peace agreement has not brought an end to the fighting. Just four months ago, residents of the capital, Dushanbe, were awakened by the roar of artillery as the army fought just south of the city against a band led by a warlord who used the nom de guerre ``Hitler.''
``Peace is better, but I am not tired of fighting,'' said Sharipov Khurshet, a one-time rebel who laid down his arms to work as a laborer on a U.N.-financed hospital reconstruction project in the town of Kofarnihon.
Asked what would induce him to fight again, he said: ``I want to be proud of my country.''
Tajiks universally express pride in their country's spectacular landscape of severe mountains soaring as high as 23,000 feet.
But the smaller details are discouraging. Deserted factories surround the cities. School attendance in some areas has fallen to an estimated 50 percent because children are needed to help scratch out a living or because they don't have clothes good enough for school.
Peasants who grow grain often have no money to rent threshers, so they spread their harvest on the road and let passing cars' wheels separate the seeds from the stalks.
The political landscape also is troubled despite accomplishments.
Petrov noted the country ended the civil war through negotiations rather than military might and ``that's not an easy thing to do.'' Tajikistan also is alone among the former Soviet Central Asian countries in having a legal Islamic opposition party.
However, many Tajiks see the opposition as timid and subservient.
``If you ask if there is real opposition, obviously there's not,'' Petrov said. ``I don't think they are prepared to take power.''
President Emomali Rakhmonov wields a strong hand. In the 1999 election, his only opponent, Davlat Usmon of the Islamic Renewal Party, asked for his own candidacy to be voided.
Some people worry Rakhmonov is trying to establish a Stalin-style cult of personality. Billboards dot the countryside bearing huge portraits of him standing in a lush wheatfield or striding purposefully in a business suit.
Amid tensions and frustrations, it takes little to touch off fighting, as former rebels themselves recognize.
``At the beginning, we had no understanding of what we were doing. I was just defending my city, my neighbors,'' said Murudov Azamov, another ex-fighter working at the Kofarnihon project.
The former rebels ``perhaps are not so much exhausted as they are looking for a clear course to shoot for,'' said Marie Struthers of Human Rights Watch.
