The end of a trial this week in Tajikistan has again highlighted the ongoing campaign against outward displays of pious Islamic behavior and the anger it is provoking.
A court in Dushanbe this week sentenced 18 residents of the town of Roghun — site of the planned giant hydroelectric dam — to jail terms of between three-and-a-half and 10 years. The charge appears to have been for “calling for the forcible overthrow of the government.”
RFE/RL’s Tajik service, Radio Ozodi, reported that the defendants were aged between 20 and 35.
The arrests were carried out in March and sparked an immediate backlash from residents of the Firdavsi district, who picketed the police station. This rare impromptu rally inspired an official statement of remarkable Orwellian linguistic truth-bending.
“None of the close relatives of the detained or witnesses gathered at the police station in the Firdavsi district since unsanctioned meetings are banned under the laws of Tajikistan, and the people are aware of this,” the Interior Ministry said at the time.
Relatives had told reporters that the men were detained at a local mosque for displaying Salafist behavior. Among the reported detainees were an imam for the village of Kalai Nav and a doctor. Asia-Plus reported that there were two imams among those convicted.
Salafist behavior can imply any number of things, from style of praying and dietary choices to dress and the adoption of beards.
An Interior Ministry press officer at the time was clear about the consequences for anybody perceived to be a Salafist.
"Anyone who adheres to Salafist beliefs and behaves like a member of this movement will be detained. People should remember the Supreme Court decision of 2009 which states that that the activities of this movement are prohibited,” the spokesman said.
Between now and then, something must have changed though since the accusations against this group of men was seemingly upgraded to a categorically political offense. In effect, membership of a banned group is now considered tantamount to a call for the overthrow of the government.
The charge of coup-plotting is theoretically more straightforward in the case of the followers of supposedly disaffected deputy defense minister Abduhalim Nazarzoda. The government maintains — but has produced no credible evidence to that end — that Nazarzoda last September led an assault on a sleepy police station almost one hour’s drive east of the capital, Dushanbe, as part of a purported attempt to topple President Emomali Rahmon from power. The only other armed clash on that day is said to have occurred at a checkpoint on the eastward exit route from Dushanbe.
Reuters news agency reported this week, citing General Prosecutor Yusuf Rahmon, that 170 people have been jailed in connection with the alleged coup. Such trials as have taken place — and it is quite unclear that they have indeed been held — were kept away from the prying eyes of journalists, rights activists, diplomats, and mostly likely lawyers as well.
It is, consequently, curious that some news outlets, like Reuters, continue to mechanically report what happened in September as a coup. This unqualified consensus has been rubber-stamped by the US State Department, which happily reproduces official Tajik versions on the alleged coup in its reports, such as this one on global terrorism.
If this were ever just a technical distinction, it became a little less so last week, when the General Prosecutor, Rahmon, called for re-instituting the death penalty for “terrorists, traitors and people who try to organize coups.”
Even the normally catatonic Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was spurred into firing off a statement of concern by that one.
“Countries in the OSCE have committed themselves to consider the complete abolition of capital punishment, not to reconsider that abolition,” Michael Georg Link, director of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said in a statement. “[The] call by the Prosecutor General in Tajikistan for the reintroduction of capital punishment in that country is completely out of place in a region where most of the countries recognize the inherently cruel, inhuman and degrading nature of a punishment that fails to act as a deterrent and makes any miscarriage of justice irreversible.”
Even this is patent Pollyanna-ish sentimentality, since talk of deterrence assumes that specific offenses need to have been committed in Tajikistan for a punishment to be enacted. But recent years in Tajikistan have illustrated in stark terms that the mere possibility of an unspoken desire to formulate an intent to affect some kind of political change is sufficient grounds for severe retribution. “Miscarriages of justice” are not the risk that Tajikistan’s justice system is willing to take for the sake of stability, but are rather the very raison d’être of the system.
And in case anybody is keeping tabs, the US government, which enjoys a cosy security relationship with the aggressively incompetent and corrupt Tajik government, has made nary a peep about any of this. All of which makes total mockery of the US State Department issuing a statement last week, after a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers of the five Central Asian nations, invoking the need to “protect human rights, develop democratic institutions and practices, and strengthen civil society through respect for recognized norms.”
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