IRON CURTAIN CALL?
Russia’s Forgotten Little War Might Just Indicate Whether Cold War Flames Are Really Extinguished Post-Yeltsin
By Doug Fine
Duchambe, Tajikistan
In the U.S. Embassy here, hunkered down on the fourth floor of an abandoned hotel one level above, ironically, the Russian diplomatic HQ, I asked Ambassador Grant Smith if the current war being staged in Tajikistan isn’t kind of a replay of the Great Game of the Nineteenth Century. That was when the great empires of Russia and Britain played out a sort of long, low level diplomatic conflict along their respective frontiers in Central Asia.
“Who would the Russian counterpart be now?” Ambassador Smith asked me Socratically. “Who is where Britain was?”
“Aren’t I looking at him?” I asked. This is, after all, the former imperial border of America’s fifty year enemy, an enemy listened-to pundits like Henry Kissinger intimate still has designs on world domination.
“We don’t have that kind of interest in this part of the World,” he said. “That’s not why we’re here.”
I tried to play out a scenario whereby “the Russians” - as if 300 million people represent a monolithic entity - would claim not to have any strategic interest in an unstable place close to the U.S. like, say, Panama, or Columbia, but the Ambassador wasn’t biting. He didn’t care to speculate on the possible outcome of a weird war pitting a Russian puppet government and its 25,000 bodyguards from the Russian 201st Motorized Infantry Division and other units against a coalition of Afghan-style and possibly Iranian-supported Mujahadin, democrats, bandits, opium smugglers and other ethnic separatists.
“The only thing we can say about Tajikistan,” Gregory Balke, Acting Senior Liaison Officer of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Duchambe told me, “is that anything can happen here.”
I had discovered that the previous day when the Red Cross Land Rover convoy I had been traveling with, told that fighting was taking place in the Garm region, 70 miles East of capital Duchambe and close to the crucial city of Tavildara the Opposition took in May, found upon dropping off a truckload of disinfectant at a hospital in a town called Kafirnihan that we had in fact driven through the fighting lines, some 10 miles from the capital. The bullets were flying in small hillside villages north of the road. Cranking Bob Marley and Jerry Garcia tapes as we ambled along oblivious, my Swedish driver David Wiking and I hadn’t heard anything. “Better unload that quick,” the chief doctor in Kafirnihan told Wiking. “We’re expecting wounded.”
Yes, just about the only certainty in Tajikistan is instability. That, and the fact that this quiet, nearly unreported manufactured conflict amidst some of the highest mountains in the world in an artificially created Soviet-era “republic”, has claimed more casualties than the publicized Russian bugaboo in Chechnya. Indeed, 50,000 Tajiks have died since 1992 in a war nearly everyone inside the country says “isn’t a Tajik war.” Many in ugly killing orgies evocative of ethnic cleansing scenes from Bosnia.
But how COULD a war be a Tajik war? It isn’t even a single country, in reality. Tajikistan is actually four distinct nations, if it weren’t for creative Soviet cartographers who drew lines in an intentional ethnic divide-and-rule policy during the 1920s.
So whose war is it, and why aren’t we hearing about it? Well, every time peace talks are near (there’s been an ignored cease-fire in effect for years now), a high profile noncombatant is executed, or a prisoner exchange is sabotaged. The President of the Tajik Academy of Sciences, by all accounts an apolitical character, contributed to the literal brain drain in the country when someone put a bullet in his skull the day before my arrival. Despite the unspeakable war weariness of the Tajik populace, someone benefits from continued long-term instability.
There are actually many countries which face legitimate accusations of fomenting unrest in Tajikistan, from regional powerhouse Uzbekistan with its ethnic claims on Western areas in the country, to Afghanistan, a country not organized enough to field a football team yet painted as the dormitory and arms warehouse for Islamic Fundamentalist rebels.
–The Russian government and military: The argument goes that these want influence along their former frontier in case things ever get straightened out at home. It is true that even the “liberal” and now ousted Yeltsin foreign minister Andrei Kovzyrev, asserted Russia has traditional and legitimate claims on its former republics. And that was before military hero and since-dismissed Alexander Lebed won Yeltsin four more years earlier this summer.
In a sense, one can’t be surprised that a former Empire is trying desperately to maintain influence in its former spheres, spheres lost virtually overnight. Thomas Lines, a British analyst of Tajikistan for TACIS told me, “Hell, we (the British) haven’t got over losing India yet.”
The regime of President Imomali Rakhmonov - basically a southern clan which gives patronage positions to its members from the Kulyab region and has official bandits who have stolen property from other ethnic groups in the “country” - is generally thought to have a life span of 24-48 hours if Russian troops withdrew. With each Opposition success, Moscow’s frustration with Rakhmonov is widely said to be growing. Other than a massive border patrol operation along the Oxus River separating Tajikistan from Afghanistan, the Russian role of late has mainly been that of menacing bully, not enforcer.
But the Chechnya humiliation is throwing a wrench in the Tajik situation: what will the Russians do if the Opposition continues to gain ground? Will they be willing to take an active role; shed the ‘peacekeeping’ guise and risk another Afghanistan? It’s not a good sign when a Head of National Security describes his troops, as Lebed did in Chechnya in August, as “lice ridden.” It’s no secret that the Russian military is badly in need of a confidence booster, nor that the disillusioned Russian populace would love to embrace the right strong man in the approaching post-Yeltsin era.
For a while, the assignment to Tajikistan was a plum one for Russian soldiers, especially officers - they were well paid, basically noncombatant and free to engage in profiteering surrounding the awesome drug trade from Afghanistan through the Tajik city of Khorog and Duchambe to Osh, Kyrgystan, where Mafia channels work the opium through Russia for refinement and redistribution in the West. The corruption is so bad that one aid worker told me an honest Russian checkpoint officer who gave her vehicle a thorough search for drugs didn’t want to give his name lest word get to Osh that someone wasn’t towing the line. I believe it. I saw Osh, and it is one of those newly capitalistic but still traditional towns that shouldn’t yet have a Mercedes dealership.
But now, is there the psychological mettle in Russia’s military establishment to get mired down in another conflict of questionable immediate import? Would the Russian public stand for more boys flying home in body bags? Or, as Balke suggested to me, is a theoretically easy conflict - anywhere - just what the Russian military needs to get its confidence back? Perhaps a Yeltsin bone to the humiliated and disgruntled uniforms in Moscow? This is often, historically, a ploy for expansionism in a country with problems at home. It is why, a Red Cross official theorized, the U.S. might want to worry about a country which can’t even pay its coal miners and is losing to a few hundred Muslim irregulars in Grozny.
The way Russia has been performing militarily lately, it makes one wonder if RAKHMONOV has placed HIS eggs in the right basket. As in Afghanistan, Russian-supplied Tajik government armored convoys and air superiority are useless against the Opposition’s dug-in mountainside positions. I wouldn’t call this task “easy,” unless one thinks Afghanistan and the Vietnamese DMZ were “pieces of cake.” Meanwhile, the Opposition marches toward Duchambe - again.
I was hiking in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico the other day upon my return from Tajikistan, lost in the largeness of the forest, fearful of bears, the whole deal. A speck in nature. Suddenly, two supersonic fighters boomed across the valley I was in and every creature stopped, every tree in the forest, creaked, certain of Armageddon. The aircraft which buzzed us had some kind of missiles strapped to the underside of the fuselage, probably flying to or from White Sands Missile Range on the other side of the State (we were literally near nothing). It blew us and everything around us to jittery psychic pieces. It had been a peaceful day. A friend’s birthday.
I was so overwhelmed by what my tax dollars were capable of producing, it made me wonder, ‘how on Earth could an army which has THOSE, lose to a crew, like my group of friends in the Gila, mobile to the degree that our legs could carry us, armed (if we had been armed) with what we could carry?’
And yet it happens. It is still happening. To the U.S. and French in Vietnam. To the Russians in Afghanistan, Chechnya and soon Tajikistan. Strategically in Tajikistan I could see how it unfolds with my own eyes. What good are air superiority (even when it costs billions of rubles), and armored vehicles when the one road connecting the country’s spread out cities carves below high ground which five soldiers and a Stinger can blast at will?
There are many towns in Tajikistan for which you can’t get a straight answer when you ask, “Is this place in government or Opposition hands?” Often, it’s business as usual during the day, but at night, woe betide a convoy that an Opposition sharpshooter with a Stinger doesn’t want to pass. Such is the terrain in Tajikistan that in certain parts of the country, on a ten mile stretch you might have to pass through a government checkpoint, a Russian checkpoint and then an Opposition checkpoint.
Tajikistan is - as little quiet hotspots like Laos and Nicaragua often are for world powers - a crucial indicator of what the future of the New Russia will look like, and possibly the very battleground where it will be played out. Whereas the world chooses to remain largely silent about atrocities in Chechnya, buying the Russian line (which even Russian citizens don’t) about it being an “internal security issue”, Tajikistan transparently goes to Russian imperial intent. This part of the world has been the frontier of what Russians call the “Near Abroad” since Czarist times. The view of the Russian Right Wing about be-turbaned Central Asian Islamists sweeping north to the gates of Moscow and messing with the women is akin to, and even more deeply rooted, than the ’80s Reaganite paranoia about Sandanistas infiltrating Texas.
–Next suspect: the Uzbeks: Rakhmonov’s Southern Clan from the Kulyabi region of Tajikistan hasn’t been too kind to the prosperous industrial Northern State of Leninabad, a place as different from the rest of Tajikistan as Alaska from Texas, Tijuana from Chicago (thanks again, Soviet map makers). In fact, ethnic Uzbeks are a practical majority in Hojant, Leninabad’s major city. All history, of course, depends on how far back one wants to go - the Russian Czars only finally subdued Chechnya a century and a half ago. So what if it’s a different culture and religion. It’s an “internal issue.”
Trade in Leninabad is far more connected - and physically close - to the Uzbek Fergona Valley than to Duchambe (the road to the latter is closed due to weather half the year). Yet Kulyabis ran the bureaucratic show in Leninabad until massive riots in May. Rakhmonov then temporarily fired 70 or so cronies there.
Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov certainly has an interest in keeping a finger in the Tajik pie, for a number of reasons. For one thing, he is adamant about preventing any kind of Islamic revivalism - a threat to his power - from spilling over his borders. Then there are the territorial claims in Hojant - why not increase Uzbekistan if the only obstacle is a “border” to a practically nonexistent government? (Plenty of Tajiks will tell you they think at least some of their country will be called “Uzbekistan” within a decade.)
Finally, there is the seldom talked about reality that Uzbekistan’s biggest tourist cities - Samarkand and Bukara - are actually Tajik majority cities penned into Uzbekistan by those same Soviet Cartographers in the ’30s - they’ll never know how influential they were. Karimov certainly has nothing to worry about militarily from much weaker Tajikistan, but that hasn’t changed the fact that few people admit to being Tajik in Southern Uzbekistan these days. You never know, people in this region are all-too-aware, when nationalistic feelings might boil over. One generation down the road? Three?
“The only thing that the Uzbeks have changed since independence,” says one Western Diplomat. “Is the statistics.”
“I speak Tajik,” another told me, “went to Samarkand, and had no problem.”
The dispute has lead to a comical attempt to coopt the same historical figures - poets, scientists, warriors - as National Fathers by three or more countries at once. “That damn astronomer was a Tajik,” “No, he was a Turk,” is the kind of conversation you could hear in a Duchambe bar, in the same situation where you might hear, “Those Niners are better than the Cowboys,” in the States. The various governments are erecting statues to this “Tamerland” guy, a pretty powerful invader in his day, as fast they can cast them.
–Contestant #3: Afghanistan: Russian propaganda news stories always talk about the destabilizing influence of Afghanistan in supporting the Tajik rebels and the drug trade, and surely much of the Tajik opposition is based and trains there. But as has been stated, Afghanistan isn’t organized or unified enough to field a football team let alone finance a revolution. A European aid worker (these people in Tajikistan don’t give their names - 38 journalists alone have met violent ends since 1993) told me that crossing the border to help refugees is difficult because one warlord might not recognize the visa signed by a rival a few miles north.
Afghanistan’s main role just now seems to be further hampering relief efforts for some of the 150,000 Tajik refugees (in a country of 5.5 million) forced abroad by the fighting and forced eviction (entire villages have been torched). A diplomatic war of words between Tajikistan and Afghanistan over alleged support for the opposition - rifleman across the Afghan border sometimes take potshots at flights into the Western Tajik city of Khorog, now that the road dividing the country is in Opposition hands - has closed much of the southern border recently. It is undeniably an ugly little war. Several diplomatic sources confirmed for me a cloak and dagger story out of Bond movie whereby a rebel leader was invited by a Russian garrison officer to tea in a gesture of good will. He ate nothing and drank only one cup, but died horribly of plague-like symptoms a week or so later.
–The US: Why IS the U.S. in Tajikistan, a country so small, weak, and poor it doesn’t even have a DC Embassy and it’s diplomatic needs are “handled” by Moscow’s embassy? To keep an eye on Russia? Iran? The two or three aluminum and mining operations which are still operational and have one or two US citizens working there? There just don’t seem to be answers to these questions forthcoming.
–The Opposition: They’re winning, and they have the country’s only major East/West road cut off at Tavildara. Some of the more jaded foreigners in Tajikistan say that fighting has flared up like this before, and it’ll die down again. It’s a schizophrenic, almost surreal, nasty little war which can “lull you to sleep, then pounce,” in the words of a government official. But even several Western diplomatic officials expressed surprise about the fighting I had encountered so close to the capital, and a conversation-stopping mortar explosion outside the bar at my hotel prompted a contact of mine to admit nervously, “Maybe things will be changing around here in the next few months.”
But a Khemer Rouge-like sweep into Duchambe is unlikely (fierce street fighting hasn’t been seen in the capital since 1992-3, when the U.S. Embassy/Hotel Suite was evacuated, to almost no press, to Tashkent, Uzbekistan). For one thing, the “United Opposition” isn’t unified enough to know what it wants. Far from the monolithic Fundamentalist loonies of the Islamic Renaissance Party portrayed in Russian media reports, which are just about the only source of information on Tajikistan for the outside world, (a reality akin to reading the “Pyongyang Worker’s Daily” for news on Seoul), the opposition is also composed of secular democratic factions and Eastern Pamiri region separatists.
The Opposition explicitly and repeatedly states that the establishment of an Iranian-style Islamic Republic is not its goal…at least not right away, though I did overhear some Iranian aid workers calling them “Mujahadin.” I didn’t meet a Tajik who said he wanted such a theocracy. There ARE a lot of Iranian “relief workers” here, all I met seemingly fine people (one was instrumental in helping me get out of the country safely). But this place does have an ethnic and religious bond with Persia, many opposition leaders have summer homes in Tehran, and to discount this factor would be naive. What it comes down to is that, yes, the Opposition certainly benefits from continued instability in the countryside - as negotiation leverage - even before the most recent Chechnya debacle. This could explain the 38 journalists who have been gunned down in the last three years.
So the bottom line is almost everyone with a gun destabilizes Tajikistan. Black marketeers love it when the populace is desperate, and drug smugglers don’t take issue with the porous borders and all the corruption. Some hinterland checkpoints along the Khorog to Osh route - usually Tajik irregulars with a Russian officer - are so poorly supplied that aid convoys (and presumably bad guys too) pay their way through with gifts of food and cigarettes.
Is their any hope for Tajikistan? Many surviving intellectuals who have stuck it out in Duchambe speak of The Third Force: not unlike Luke Skywalker’s Force. It is this unknown savior no one can quite identify, which will swoop in and build a nation where there never was one. The leading candidate for the role of Obi Wan Knobe is Abdumalik Abdulajanov, who probably won the rigged election to Rakhmonov in 1994, but as a Northerner (from the Uzbek-influenced Leninabad Oblast, or Province) is regarded with suspicion in large parts of the country. He is making his posturing from Moscow, another suspicious maneuver. Flipping of patronage jobs from one clan to another hardly solves Tajikistan’s underlying problems.
John Sandrock, Acting Head of Mission for the OSCE in Tajikistan, got very close to the heart of the problem when he explained, “All over the world we see that ethnic tensions that are produced by colonization and forced population migration continue to exist.” Not a new story.
Ms. Oinihol Bobonazavova, a leader in the banned Democratic Party, envisions a Tajikistan with separate regions governed in a loose confederation. Good luck.
As “Mohammed”, a former professor of English and now a Duchambe translator puts it, “There is no sense of nation building here. Any clique in power this century just tries to grab what it can, knowing every other group will be rioting to overthrow it and its cronies who prey on its people.” Mohammed might be a little sensitive: Originally from Garm, Kulyabi students at first demanded inflated grades from him at gunpoint, before he had to flee his home altogether when local authorities, well, told him to pack what he could in his car and move on. When they found out he was Garmese, they took the car, too. “I know who’s living in my house,” he told me. “It wouldn’t be too wise for me to ask for it back.”
The argument can be made that Tajikistan is very small and remote from the problems of welfare reform and taxes which concern most Americans in the 1996 election season. But American foreign policy has a way of getting caught up ideologically and symbolically in small places. Like Laos. And Nicaragua.
But personally, that’s not the main reason I’m inclined to see Tajikistan as much more worthy of attention than its population and oil reserves indicate.
The humanitarian situation here doesn’t get much ink. Tajiks don’t have lobbyists on the Hill. I think about the Tajik woman, her two long braids looped back to her head like a pretzel, who couldn’t just sell me a bottle of water, she had to bless me and wish I could see how wonderful her country was in better times.
As usual in the politics of warfare, the millions of Tajik civilians are suffering the most from this flimsy Iron Curtain Call. This Great Game Two: the Lame Sequel. Wages don’t get paid. I witnessed educated old women on the street, months without pension, begging for bread. Typhoid is rampant - the Red Cross doesn’t even really know the scope of the problem the Prime Minister told me is “under control.”
Relief efforts are hampered by the malleable front lines. Spring mudslides ruined a grain crop official figures say will feed only half the population this year. There is no economy, really. Some cotton collectives are still operational, but as the Tajik government recently discovered, people can’t eat cotton. The Gray Market, an unofficial combination of household goods hawked in bazaar and homegrown vegetables which literally fill the cracks between tenements, is running dry with each year of suffering. A hungry winter looms.
Sandrock told me more than one prisoner a day dies of STARVATION in Tajik prisons - a figure worse than Rwanda’s. Returning refugees among the 160,000 exiled, who are resettled by the UNHCR and other aid organizations, often face arrest and reconfiscation of their reclaimed houses by the KGB, which is still called the KGB. Other Central Asian former Soviet republics have at least changed the initials. Literally tens of thousands of families are separated, and have been for years, with no end in site.
One particularly discouraging analysis comes from Gabi Muller-Stutser, who runs the Federation Of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Tajikistan - an organization madly trying to tread water and keep the humanitarian situation from getting worse: “Even with an end to fighting I don’t see a government entity really equipped to begin rebuilding this society.”
The U.S. should be studying very hard why Russia is playing such a role in torturing these people. 25,000 troops? That’s a lot. If Ambassador Smith is right that America is not the other player in a new Great Game, what were all those Cold War billions spent for? Suddenly it’s not called the Soviet Union and the State Department doesn’t care about the same issue, essentially, that caused the boycott of the 1980 Olympics? If the U.S is going to expend so much energy and money to get the new Russia on its feet, surely it should be keeping an eye on, and an open channel toward discussing the possible imperial aims of said rejuvenated Russia, especially given recent reports of uncertainty at the top, and restlessness in the military.
Surely the Clinton Administration didn’t prop up Yeltsin so that we have another Cold War - or worse - on our hands in ten years. Tajikistan is focal point for all of Central Asia - would, for instance, Russian aggression there signal a prelude to ambitions for Kazakhstan’s estimated $3 trillion in oil reserves, for example? You wouldn’t find too many doubters in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s capital.
Truth be told, when the proverbial textbook-writers-of-the-future look back on the Russian presence here it will almost certainly just be one more in the endless stream of invasions and retreats (commonly illustrated with smeared arrows across continents in diagrams) that take place in this part of the world. We think it all so much more permanent because there are tanks and Stingers now, instead of horsemen. But there are real people suffering now. And real geo-political issues at stake.
Let’s start taking a look at Tajikistan. Put those stethoscopes to the ground on the fourth floor of the Former Istiklal Hotel. One day we’ll find out one way or another what the various players were up to here. The Russian military establishment can’t claim it’s an “internal issue” like it bogusly does with Chechnya. It’s out there for us to see. What I saw was pretty ugly.
A radio report of Doug Fine’s from Tajikistan ran on the public radio program, “The World”. For a tape of the broadcast, call (617) 492-2777, and ask for transcripts from…”that feature from Tajikistan back in 1996 or 97.”