Qishloq Ovozi (Archive)

The Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), the second-largest political party in the country and the only Islamic political party legally registered in Central Asia, is days away from being closed down.

According to an August 28 order from Tajikistan's Justice Ministry, the IRPT must cease all its activities by September 7, two days before Tajikistan's Independence Day.

Many, including the IRPT, accuse Tajik President Emomali Rahmon of orchestrating a protected campaign to remove the IRPT as a political force in the country's politics. If that is true then Rahmon appears to have succeeded, but there will likely be some consequences from the IRPT's closure.

Why the Tajik government would want to close down the IRPT, why it is happening now, and what happens next were the topics of a panel discussion organized by RFE/RL's Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk.

(NOTE: This podcast was recorded on September 2, two days before the violence near Dushanbe that Tajik authorities allege involved at least one former opposition field commander.)

Azatlyk director Mohammad Tahir moderated the discussion. Participating were Habibullo Kurbon, editor at the independent Tajik newspaper Nigoh (View), and Edward Lemon, a doctoral candidate at the U.K.'s University of Exeter who lived in Tajikistan and continues to keep close watch on events there. I, as always, said some things as well.

The IRPT was once the main partner in an alliance that fought against government forces during the 1992-97 Tajik civil war. The IRPT and its allies signed a peace agreement with the government in June 1997. The unique peace deal legalized the wartime opponents' political parties and granted them 30 percent of places in government at all levels from village to ministerial.

The opposition's share in government has gradually been eroded since then and following this year's parliamentary elections in March, no opposition politicians remain in any branch of Tajikistan's national government.

Lemon called the August 28 order from the Justice Ministry "quite a surprising move because the Islamic Renaissance Party was always in a way a useful tool for the government in terms of its international relations with other Islamic countries, in terms of giving an impression that the country is in some way democratic."

Kurbon said the IRPT's popularity has been growing for years. "This party has the backing of society," he said, adding that in Tajikistan, where a post-Soviet religious revival in well under way, "the word ‘Islam' helps this party to involve more and more supporters."

But Lemon said it had been clear for some time that Rahmon's government was moving to eventually neutralize the IRPT. "Since the end of the civil war in 1997 the regime has arrested, exiled and sometimes killed its major opponents and I guess people in Dushanbe in the regime have got to the point where they believe that the party is no longer a useful tool," Lemon explained.

Lemon said the regime seemed to feel secure enough now to take this final step to eliminate the IRPT, and some reasons for this feeling of security were mentioned in the discussion.

Also mentioned was the growing economic trouble in Tajikistan (and throughout Central Asia) and that the Tajik government might wish at this time to silence any potential domestic sources of criticism as the country enters a trying and uncertain period.

It was also noted that growing global concern about Islamic extremist groups helped pave the way for Tajik authorities to allege the IRPT provided a "gateway" of sorts for recruiting. In recent days some in the Tajik government have made clumsy attempts to connect the IRPT and the Islamic State (IS) militant group in Iraq and Syria.

Kurbon rejected that connection, saying, "The chairman of the party, [Muhiddin] Kabiri, several times stressed that their party is against this Islamic State and the Islamic State also several times announced that Kabiri would be killed, they sentenced him to death."

Such an allegation by Tajik authorities could also be seen as an attempt to distract attention from the fact that the best-known citizen of Tajikistan fighting in the ranks of IS is Gulmurod Halimov, who was previously a commander of Tajikistan's Interior Ministry troops.

It was generally agreed there is little the IRPT can do to prevent its activities from being banned. "The Tajik opposition has no tribune to raise their voice," Kurbon said, and Lemon pointed out that "in June, Jumhuriyat, the state-controlled paper, published an article alleging that Muhiddin Kabiri, the party leader, was involved in fraudulent property transactions and now he's in self-imposed exile."

Both Kurbon and Lemon believe the authorities will not pursue any campaign against IRPT members after the party is officially disbanded and both also said there was little likelihood that IRPT members would now seek to create problems inside Tajikistan or go abroad to join radical Islamic groups.

"Most of the young supporters among the IRPT, most of them although they are religious and believe religion should play some sort of a role in politics they often do not agree with the very extremist, jihadist views of groups like [IS] so I don't think that risk is too great," Lemon said.

Kurbon said, "There are also voices [favoring] opening a new party...but they know that in Tajikistan it is almost impossible to register a new party, political party, it is very, very difficult if you are an opponent of the government."

It was the opinion of the panel that once the IRPT is gone from Tajikistan's political scene it is likely to be many years before there is another legally registered Islamic political party in Tajikistan or anywhere else in Central Asia.

But as Lemon suggested, inevitably Islam will play a role in Central Asian politics. "The regimes are faced with an increasingly religious population who are demanding that religion play an increased role in politics but obviously being raised in the Soviet Union, the current elite is unwilling to listen to the demands from the more religious people within their society and obviously this is not a sustainable model and eventually religion will have to be better incorporated into the political system in Central Asia."

The discussion dealt with these issues in greater detail as well as touching on other subjects. You can listen to the full discussion below:

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The Demise Of Tajikistan's Islamic Party

by RFE/RL

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Once again, Qishloq Ovozi is pleased to feature the work of another up-and-coming authority in the field of Central Asian studies. Qishloq friend and frequent visitor Matthew Kupfer returns with a look at a recently released email sent to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton right after the ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan in June 2010.

Emails released by the U.S. State Department as part of an FBI investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for official government business -- which may violate State Department recordkeeping rules -- offer an intriguing, if small window into Kyrgyzstan's 2010 revolution and subsequent interethnic unrest -- at least as Clinton might have understood it.

In April 2010, protesters in Bishkek overthrew Kyrgyzstan's kleptocratic and authoritarian President Kurmanbek Bakiev and installed an interim government headed by Roza Otunbaeva. Two months later, clashes between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the city of Osh exploded into four days of interethnic rioting across southern Kyrgyzstan. The violence, which left more than 470 people dead and over 100,000 homeless, largely targeted Kyrgyzstan's Uzbek minority. The events of April-June 2010 came at a time of high U.S. government interest in Kyrgyzstan, where the Pentagon maintained an air base to support the war in Afghanistan.

Since 2010, Central Asia watchers have debated several aspects of Kyrgyzstan's interethnic conflict: the degree to which the violence was planned or organized, ousted President Bakiev's role in the unrest, and the possible participation of organized criminal structures in the chaos. Some scholars, such as Eric McGlinchey and Erica Marat, respectively, have also looked at the role that decisions by the interim government and the culture of the Kyrgyz security forces may have played in the breakdown of law and order in southern Kyrgyzstan. Still, many of the central issues in the unrest remain unclear and there are conflicting narratives of the violence.

A June 17, 2010 e-mail to Clinton, titled "Kyrgyzstan crisis, report and recommendations," provides a glimpse into the kind of information the secretary of state received in the wake of the violence. The message shows Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal passing on a report by lawyer and journalist Scott Horton, a trustee of the American University of Central Asia who had recently returned from intensive meetings with the Kyrgyz interim government.

Horton's report, replete with policy recommendations for the U.S. government, paints a distinctly dim portrait of a "dysfunctional" interim government plagued by disunity and ill equipped to respond to violence that he suggests was provoked by the Bakiev regime.

'Demagogic Approach'

"[The interim government] operates as a collection of individual fiefdoms, with leaders engaged in constant squabbles over patronage appointments. Career civil service personnel report being terrorized and extorted," Horton wrote. "I spent the better part of three days inside the current government headquarters…and was able to directly observe primitive horse-trading, threats and counterthreats between key government functionaries, sometimes in agitated voices."

He described interim President Otunbaeva as "the glue that holds things together" and the only official commanding respect from all the other players, who often appeared more concerned with jump-starting their own parliamentary campaigns than with the business of stabilizing the country.

Specifically, Horton painted the pugnacious Azimbek Beknazarov, then deputy prime minister in the interim government, as "hot-headed and crass and an untrustworthy partner in any future discussions." He suggested that Beknazarov took a "demagogic approach" to the Pentagon's controversial Manas Transit Center, calling for the air base's closure, but actually planning to use the base as a key issue in his parliamentary campaign and "as a sort of stick to use to extort more money and other concessions from the Americans."

Similarly, Horton wrote, Almazbek Atambaev -- Kyrgyzstan's current president, elected in 2011 --"also has somewhat demagogic impulses, though they are mild by comparison." Otunbaeva, in contrast, served as the "voice of reason" on the Manas base. (The transit center closed last year, after the Kyrgyz government declined to extend Washington's lease.)

Horton also reported that, as the Kyrgyz interim government proposed a new constitution strengthening the role of parliament over the presidency, it faced opposition from neighboring Kazakhstan. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev reportedly pressured Bishkek to retain a strong presidency using "not-very-subtle threats" and restricted access to the economically critical Kyrgyz-Kazakh border, which Kazakhstan closed following the Kyrgyz revolution.

Although he left the country before the interethnic violence erupted, Horton wrote that the interim government expected the ousted Bakiev and his associates to provoke unrest in the South, his political base, but that the government was unprepared for the interethnic element.

Horton suggested that the violence was led by police and military leaders with close ties to the former president (security forces' failure and misconduct were essentially proven by the independent Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission investigation after the unrest). "Bakiev was the only person who clearly had something to gain from the violence," he concluded, later writing that "[Bakiev's] objectives would have been to derail the [upcoming constitutional] referendum, demonstrate the weakness of the interim government, and fuel calls for an iron-fisted central government through the resurrection of his presidency."

Horton also argued that criminal gangs and drug traffickers likely played a role in the unrest, possibly after being paid by political actors, although he did not identify the source of this information.

Intriguing Questions

The solution to the crisis in the south, Horton suggested, lay in the democratization of both regional and national governance in Kyrgyzstan and cooperation between the United States and Russia to jointly sponsor an international humanitarian initiative. Such an initiative, he wrote, would include an exit corridor for civilians in the conflict zone, a peacekeeping operation, an independent investigation of the unrest backed by a credible international organization, and internationally monitored elections.

It is unclear whether Horton's memo influenced U.S. policy, although several aspects of the humanitarian initiative were eventually put into place. However, in a subsequent e-mail, Clinton instructed her assistant, Lauren Jiloty, to print out three copies of his message.

Horton's report paints a colorful and intriguing picture of tensions within Kyrgyzstan's revolutionary government. But his account of the June 2010 interethnic violence also raises some interesting questions. Having left the country before the start of the unrest, Horton appears to have been largely reliant on his high-level Kyrgyz contacts for information on the violence. His narrative stays fairly close to that of the interim government, which insisted that the unrest was a clear "provocation" by Bakiev and his associates. The claim is not outlandish, but it also is far from certain. To what degree was Secretary Clinton hearing alternative views, such as the diverse accounts I heard as an eyewitness to the violence in Osh? To what degree was she hearing about other factors in the unrest -- surging Kyrgyz ethno-nationalism, regionalism, economic rivalry between ethnicities, and the proliferation of provocative rumors of abuses committed by the other ethnic group?

Three days after writing the report that reached Clinton, Horton teamed up with Baktybek Abdrisaev, Kyrgyzstan's ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2005, and published an op-ed on CNN.com in which they argued the "methodical and clearly well planned" violence was likely provoked by Bakiev and escalated by criminal groups and drugs traffickers eager to settle scores. Thus, it was not really an ethnic conflict, but an external provocation. They also advocated a joint U.S.-Russian humanitarian initiative like the one Horton had previously outlined.

I can't say for sure Horton was wrong. But I sure hope his report isn't the only one that reached Clinton -- either through her State Department inbox or her private one.

Matthew Kupfer is a writer focusing on Central Asia, Russia, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union. His work has been published in EurasiaNet.org, the Moscow Times, Eurasia Outlook, and Registan.net. Previously a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he is currently pursuing an M.A. in Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia regional studies at Harvard University. The views expressed in this blog are his own. You can follow Matthew on Twitter (@Matthew_Kupfer)