Emomali Rahmon

Emomali Rahmon has ruled Tajikistan since 1992, through and after a civil war that killed perhaps a hundred thousand people in a country of six million. He was a collective farm director and a Soviet-era functionary, chosen as head of state during the war largely because he was acceptable to the regional factions from Kulob that were winning it. The war ran from 1992 to 1997 between the post-communist government and an opposition combining Islamists, democrats and regional groupings, and it ended in a UN-brokered agreement that gave the opposition thirty per cent of government posts - unusually generous terms, and generally credited with making the peace hold. He then spent two decades removing them. The Islamic Renaissance Party, the only legal religious party in Central Asia, was banned as a terrorist organisation in 2015 and its leaders imprisoned. A 2016 referendum abolished term limits for him specifically, lowered the age of eligibility for the presidency in a way that suited his son, and banned faith-based parties outright. He carries the title Founder of Peace and National Unity, Leader of the Nation, which grants him lifetime immunity. His son Rustam Emomali chairs the upper house, which makes him constitutional successor. Tajikistan is the poorest of the post-Soviet states and something like a third of its GDP has come from remittances sent home by migrant workers in Russia, which gives Moscow a lever that requires no troops. Russia keeps its largest foreign military base there. The 1997 settlement is still cited in conflict studies as a successful power-sharing agreement, which is true of the peace and not of what followed it.

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