Tajik Civil War Offers Lessons for Kyrgyzstan

One of the resistance leaders during Tajikistan’s five year civil war says Kyrgyzstan must avoid making the same mistakes if it is to prevent the recent ethnic clashes sparking a prolonged conflict.

Davlat Usmon told IWPR that a combination of peacekeeping and mediation could offer Kyrgyzstan a way out of crisis. But he warned that if politicians pretended everything was back to normal and failed to address local concerns, violence could recur.

Usmon was a leading figure in the Tajik opposition bloc that fought a five-year guerrilla war with government forces until a peace deal was signed in 1997. Afterwards, he led a commission set up to disband paramilitary groups, and later served as a government minister under a power-sharing arrangement that was part of the peace agreement.

After standing unsuccessfully in the 1999 presidential election, he left politics and is currently an academic at Tajikistan’s Institute of Philosophy.

Usmon says he has long warned of the risk of ethnic trouble in the Fergana valley.

The Kyrgyz authorities say around 300 people died in clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks that began on July 10-11 and lasted several days in the Osh and Jalalabad regions. Other estimates put the death toll much higher. The bloodshed temporarily displaced 400,000 people from their homes.

Usmon says the complex demographics of the Fergana valley, which runs through eastern Uzbekistan, northern Tajikistan and the south of Kyrgyzstan, mean that an outbreak of violence in one place can spread outwards rapidly.

“The population is mixed in the three Uzbek provinces, three Kyrgyz provinces and the Soghd region of Tajikistan, so a conflict here can draw in supporters of this or that ethnic group, and expand the focus of tensions to other parts of Central Asia,”

Usmon said that despite some obvious differences, the Tajik civil war had enough parallels with the violence in southern Kyrgyzstan for important lessons to be learned from it.

The war in Tajikistan stemmed from political, economic, and to an extent ethnic rivalries, brought to a head by a battle between elite groups for control of the post-Soviet republic.

“As central government lost control of the regions, and political parties engaged in a power struggle, all these problems came to the surface, and this led to civil war,” said Usmon.

In Kyrgyzstan, similarly, the authority of the interim government which has been in place since April has been weakened and its nationwide reach has been eroded.

Ethnic divisions were not the dominant factor in the Tajik conflict, but did play a part. Tajiks in the eastern mountains were generally aligned with the opposition. So were their kin whom Stalin had resettled in lowland areas, and ethnic Uzbeks and local Tajiks who had long resented these incomers took up arms against them on the side of the government.

In Kyrgyzstan, Usmon sees the roots of conflict in the mixed Kyrgyz-Uzbek populations living on both sides of a border drawn fairly arbitrarily between the then Soviet republics, and now sovereign states, of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan tended to be successful in commerce, a position which assertive local Kyrgyz elites in the newly independent state wanted to redress, he says.

Fixing the underlying problems requires a concerted action plan, Usmon believes. But before that, the Kyrgyz government needs to acknowledge that these problems continue to exist.

“There are times when officials deceive themselves and regard problems as having been solved. That’s a mistake. If one looks back at history, one can see that if the disease isn’t treated, events of this kind tend to repeat themselves in five, ten or 50 years,” he said, adding that the same risks still existed in Tajikistan precisely because the post-conflict peace-building process had been flawed and incomplete.

As a first step, he said, the Kyrgyz authorities should focus on containing conflict on the ground to ensure that it does not erupt again and spill over to other regions.

Usmon believes the best way to do this would be by bringing in peacekeeping troops. These should come from a neutral player like the United Nations, as regional states like Russia and Uzbekistan are “to an extent interested parties”.

“The reality today is that Kyrgyzstan is divided into two parts – the south, where Uzbekistan, followed by Russia, have interests; and the north, where the interests of Kazakstan and Russia dominate,” he said.

Relying on Kyrgyzstan’s own security forces is a non-starter as the preponderance of ethnic Kyrgyz in their ranks means they will not win the Uzbek community’s trust, he added.

Any peacekeeping mission would have to have a clear end date. “Their presence must not be extended under any circumstances,” he said.

The next step in the process would be a commission made up of neutral figures which would open up channels of communication with the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities, listen to their concerns, attempt to mediate a settlement.

This process should ensure that both the Uzbeks and those Kyrgyz political groups that are hostile to them are given a fair hearing. In addition, smaller ethnic minorities should also be drawn into the process.

Then the authorities must set about fixing as many of the problems as they can, tackling specific concerns at a local level and broader systemic issues at national level, and prioritising them so that the most urgent things are dealt with first.

Usmon believes that in some ways the situation in Kyrgyzstan is “fundamentally different” and therefore more hopeful than it was in Tajikistan.

“In the early 1990s, Tajik society was poorly-prepared and closed-off. For instance, there were effectively no international organisations present in Tajikistan at that time. And that meant that events got rapidly worse. The mass killings continued for nearly a year,” he said.

“The main task now is to prevent the situation in Kyrgyzstan getting worse.”

Jahongir Boboev is the pseudonym of a journalist in Tajikistan.

This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.

The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.