Freed Tajik Opposition Leader Defiant

Sunday, 20 November, 2005

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IWPR Central Asia

Leading Tajik opposition figure Mahmadruzi Iskandarov is in defiant mood after spending four months in custody in Russia. Iskandarov, who heads the Democratic Party of Tajikistan, is promising to stand against President Imomali Rahmonov in the next election due in 2006, as prosecutors in Dushanbe insist they still want to arrest them.

The opposition leader was arrested by Moscow police in December after Tajikistan’s prosecution service issued a warrant for his extradition, citing charges including attempted murder, terrorism and embezzlement.

But Russia’s chief prosecutor ruled turned down the extradition request, citing lack of evidence, and Iskandarov was freed on April 3.

At a press conference held in Dushanbe on April 8, Democratic Party deputy chief Rahmatullo Valiev said, “It has now been confirmed that Iskandarov’s arrest was a purely political affair.”

According to Valiev, Iskandarov wrote to Russian president Vladimir Putin thanking him for the decision, saying, “You have given me back my freedom, and I will try to give it back to my people.”

The release of a major politician whose arrest had caused shockwaves in Tajikistan was greeted enthusiastically by the opposition.

The deputy head of the Social Democratic Party, Shokirjon Hakimov, said that “through its actions, the Russian political leadership has shown that it intends to work both with the official structures of Tajikistan and with the political opposition”.

However, Hakimov added the proviso that the decision to free Iskandarov was the result of “international influence and pressure on the Russian leadership”.

The prosecution authorities in Tajikistan, a Central Asian ally of Russia, reacted furiously to the news.

Chief prosecutor Bobojon Bobokhonov gave a press conference on April 11 at which he insisted, “Iskandarov is a particularly dangerous criminal, and all his guilt in committing crimes has been proven.”

Iskandarov has yet to be convicted on any charge in a Tajik or Russian court.

“If Moscow does not correct its error in releasing Iskandarov, and fails to re-arrest this terrorist, then we will declare him wanted internationally, through Interpol,” said Bobokhonov.

The prosecutor said his office had yet to receive the official reasons why the Russians had let Iskandarov go, but he even suggested that “bribery and connections cannot be ruled out, although this has yet to be proven”.

The prosecutor’s office continues to accuse Iskandarov of responsibility for a range of crimes, perhaps the most serious of which is an armed attack on official buildings in the remote Tajikabad district in August last year. Although Tajikabad is Iskandarov’s home area, he was in Moscow at the time of the incident, and it has never been explained why he would seek to provoke such a dangerous situation in a country where stability is still precarious.

The Democratic Party chief is also accused of embezzling funds while he was head of the national gas company Tajikgaz in 2001-03.

Iskandarov is a prominent political figure, and his Democrats are one of the leading opposition groups.

During the Tajik civil war of 1992-97, Iskandarov was a guerrilla commander with the United Tajik Opposition, UTO, but he came back into the political fold following the 1997 peace treaty which required Rahmonov to allot his former enemies a quota of government posts.

His party, together with its former UTO ally the Islamic Revival Party, the Communists, the Social Democrats and the now-split Socialist Party, found common cause last year in a joint Coalition for Fair and Transparent Elections.

The group is still disputing the results of the parliamentary election held on February 27, 2005.

Iskandarov initially held off joining the coalition, because he met President Rahmonov in April 2004 and the two appeared to come to an understanding. The opposition leader was then angered by changes to electoral legislation passed by parliament in June, which he saw as a betrayal of the pledges Rahmonov had made to him, and took a much more confrontational stance. The changed law, he believed, gravely weakened the election chances of opposition parties.

Iskandarov’s increasingly vocal criticism of the Rahmonov administration culminated in an interview he gave to the émigré newspaper Charogi Ruz in October, in which he accused the president of reneging on the peace deal which has underpinned Tajikistan’s post-conflict political development.

After the interview came out, the Tajik prosecution service began demanding that the Russians arrest and extradite Iskandarov, by now in Moscow.

Given the normally close relationship between Moscow and Tajikistan – the Russians sent former interior minister Yaqub Salimov back to Dushanbe in February 2004 following a similar former extradition request – some observers are asking why the unexpected decision to free Iskandarov was taken.

Some are even suggesting that Moscow is adopting a more nuanced approach to its relationship with the Tajik government and its opponents out of concern not to promote the kind of confrontation that led to the ousting of President Askar Akaev in neighbouring Tajikistan.

The director of the Institute for Political Studies in Russia, Sergei Markov, said at a recent press conference in Moscow, that, “Russia should gently push regimes in the Commonwealth of Independent States towards modernisation, so as to avoid ‘colour revolutions’, which are possible in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.”

In Tajikistan itself, analysts have been cautious about predicting that Ukraine’s “orange revolution” or the Kyrgyz “tulip” one could be replicated in their country.

“There are many factors in Tajikistan that would constrain the development of revolutions,” said political scientist Tursun Kabirov.

But he warned that “given the uncontrollable nature of such processes as a whole, it is impossible to rule out an aggravation of the political process in Tajikistan”.

One of the many thousands Tajiks who have personal knowledge of Russia from working there, an engineer who gave his name only as Sobir, offered his own analysis, “Russia released Iskandarov because it is aware of the pro-opposition sentiments of the million-strong army of labour migrants who work there….

“Russia is probably scared of a repeat of the Kyrgyz revolution in Tajikistan, where it has its own goals to pursue.”

Rustam Nazarov is the pseudonym of a journalist in Dushanbe.