The Tajik Civil War
Tajikistan fought a civil war for five years after independence in which some 100,000 people died. The republic was the poorest in the Soviet Union and the least prepared to be a country. Its politics had been organised for decades around regional clans rather than ideology — the northern Leninabad region supplying the party leadership and the southern Kulyab region the security posts, with Garm and the Pamirs excluded from both. Independence in 1991 removed the arbiter. The opposition that formed was a coalition of everyone left out: democrats and intellectuals from Dushanbe, Islamic activists whose party was the only legal Islamic party in the former Soviet space, and Pamiri regional interests. Demonstrations in the capital in spring 1992 turned into rival encampments and then into shooting, and by summer the fighting had spread to the Kurgan-Tyube region with village-level massacres and mass expulsions. Russia's 201st division and Uzbekistan supported the pro-government side, and the opposition operated from Afghanistan. Emomali Rahmon, a collective farm director from Kulyab, was installed as head of state in November 1992. Some 1.2 million people were displaced out of a population of about five and a half million. The peace agreement signed in Moscow in 1997 gave the opposition thirty per cent of government posts, which was implemented and then progressively undone. The Islamic party was banned as a terrorist organisation in 2015. Rahmon has ruled for over thirty years. The war is the only large-scale conflict to follow the Soviet collapse in Central Asia, and the settlement that ended it was for some years cited as a model of power-sharing. What it actually produced was one region's leadership in permanent control of a state with no opposition left.
- Year: 1992 CE
- Category: Civil War
