What role does Tajikistan's military conscription process play in the violence that has wracked the country for the last couple of months? A couple of Tajikistan experts says it is a significant one. Conditions for Tajik conscripts seem miserable, even by post-Soviet standards, and the government has reportedly had to resort to press-ganging.
In a couple of excellent analysis pieces, John Heathershaw and Sophie Roche describe how, contrary to government claims, the roots of the uprising are not transnational Islamist terror groups, but homegrown discontent with the government. And one of the significant factors in that discontent is conscription, they write:
Compulsory military service is another source of tension. This has become a torment for young men who face great hardships including food shortage, heavy beatings and disease during their two-year service. Many young men come back ‘unable to marry’ due to illness and injury. This has caused increasing resistance. To avoid service, young men are sent to Russia which, as one villager remarked, is a ‘hard school as well but at least they earn some money and come back mature’....
Following the first event of 19 September [when 26 Tajikistan government troops were killed in an ambush], it turned out that among the people killed were conscripts of no more than 18 or 19 years old. They barely knew how to handle weapons when they were sent to capture well-trained and experienced mujohid fighters. The slogan that ‘Rakhmon’s army is an army of peasants’ seems to have proved true – boys of poor families unable to send their sons for work overseas or to hide them from forced conscription faced hardened fighters and their new recruits.
Meanwhile, the Tajikistan government says that their operation against the rebels is "a success and is almost complete," RFE/RL reports. Even if that's true, it sounds like they're just getting at the symptom, not the cause, of the problems.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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