TAJIKISTAN TODAY: CONOMICS AND POLITICS AT HOME AND ABROAD

Abstract

Ten years ago, on 27 June, 1997, Emomali Rakhmon’s government and the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) signed the General Agreement on Peace in Tajikistan in Moscow. S.A. Noori, the UTO head, died in the latter half of 2006; several months later President Rakhmon began another 7-year presidential term by forming a new Cabinet in which, for the first time since the Moscow Agreement, there were no members of the former opposition. The post conflict period in Tajikistan had come to an end: in the summer of 2007 the U.N. Security Council closed the U.N. Tajikistan Office of Peacebuilding.

The decade that has passed since the end of the civil war was used to achieve relative social, economic, and political stability. Despite the fairly low GDP level (60 percent of Soviet times) and the poverty level, which remains the highest among the Soviet successor states, the nation is positive about the prospects. This is an important factor of political stability—probably even more important than the much-discussed fear of another bout of domestic unrest.

The shadow economy (migration of about a million Tajiks to Russia and the growing drug created profits of certain groups engaged in drug trafficking from Afghanistan) plays an important role in the positive economic dynamics.

The official economy is also growing: the GDP is increasing by 6.7 to 10.6 percent every year. A successful macroeconomic policy and  balanced foreign policy allowed Dushanbe to attract investments in large-scale hydropower projects and the transportation infrastructure. There is another successful project—the Tajik Aluminum Plant (TadAP), the source of at least half of the republic’s export earnings.

In November 2006, the presidential election completed the period of the final consolidation of the political system based on strong central power personified by President Rakhmon. A campaign to revise the post-1997 domestic political balance was launched by a constitutional referendum in 2003. The parliamentary and presidential elections in 2005 and 2006 squeezed the rivals and opponents of the incumbent president—former UTO members as well as those of the Kulob clan who brought Emomali Rakhmon to power—out of the country’s political life.

Elbowed out of power, the Tajik opposition, which has lost its leader, is still the most effective in Central Asia. The Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan—IRPT (which has preserved much of its former political resources) remains one of the key factors of domestic stability, not to be treated lightly by those at the helm.

In the last two years and in the changed Central Asian geopolitical context, Dushanbe has been demonstrating less dependence on the Kremlin (which did much to bring the ruling regime to power) in its foreign policy preferences: while the United States lost several points, Russia scored several points by establishing allied relations with  Uzbekistan. This cooled the relations between Dushanbe and Tashkent.

While moving closer to the West and China, as well as to Iran and to a certain extent India as the regional powers, the Tajik rulers never forget about Moscow as the guarantor of their position.

On the whole, the republic’s dynamics can be described as positive even though the country remains burdened by a vast number of pending socioeconomic problems and certain negative political circumstances. This explains the cautious optimism displayed by most of the nation and all the foreign actors involved in the country