DUSHANBE — Imams at several mosques across Tajikistan have urged Muslims to support the closure of the Islamic Renaissance Party, calling for a referendum to dissolve the only officially registered Islamic party in former Soviet Central Asia.

A letter distributed to imams before Friday Prayers on March 27 said that dissolving the party would help Tajikistan «avoid the fate of other nations where Islamic extremists are disrupting peace and order.»

The letter is believed to have been circulated by a state-backed Islamic center that often sends imams recommended texts for sermons.

It sharply increased the pressure from the government and mainstream Muslim authorities on the Islamic Renaissance Party, which failed to win even a single seat in parliament in the March 1 elections that were marred by fraud allegations.

The party said their image was blackened by state media reports ahead of the poll that linked them to extremist groups in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

At the central mosque in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s Deputy Mufti Domullo Saidakbar called on believers to dissolve the party through a referendum.

Saidakbar said that Tajiks are Muslims historically and culturally, not through membership in political groups.

The imams’ call comes a week after Tajik President Emomali Rahmon publicly urged the country’s intellectuals to outline the concept for the national development until 2050 that would establish a «democratic and secular country based on the rule of law.»

Speaking at the annual meeting with Tajikistan’s intellectuals on March 19, Rahmon stressed that the concept has «to be mainly focused on development of secularism and national and secular thinking.»

Deputy Chairman of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, Saidumar Husaini, told RFE/RL that the imams’ proposal is an «order.»

Husaini said that his party’s activities had been conducted in accordance with all international norms and Tajik laws and its closure must be justified by «concrete reasons.»

Husaini said that an open discussion of the party’s activities must be conducted via a roundtable discussion by his party members and those of the Islamic center «in order to find out if the Islamic Renaissance Party is, in fact, an obstacle for Tajik society’s further development and a threat to the country’s national security.»

«Let them prove that it’s the Islamic Renaissance Party’s fault that there are electricity shortages during cold seasons, that operations at the country’s most important industrial facilities have been suspended, that the state organs are corrupt. If they prove that all this is our party’s fault then, fine, let them close our party,» Husaini said.

The Islamic Renaissance Party is one of the oldest political parties in the former Soviet Union. It was founded in 1990 but banned by Tajik authorities during Tajikistan’s 1992-97 civil wars. The party played a major part in the conflict and the peace talks and was legalized again after a peace accord was signed in 1997.

Since 1999, the party has been the second-largest party in Tajikistan after the ruling People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan led by Rahmon.

In the 2005 and 2010 parliamentary elections, the Islamic Renaissance Party won two out of 63 seats in the parliament, but in recent parliamentary polls the party failed to clear the 5 percent threshold needed to win parliament seats.

The party leaders said the elections were not fair and alleged fraud in vote-counting.

Ahead of the March 1 parliamentary elections, the Islamic Renaissance Party’s Jamoliddin Mahmudov, who was a member of Tajikistan’s Central Election Commission, was detained on suspicion of illegal weapons possession.

The party condemned the arrest, saying it was politically motivated.

In July, the leader of the Islamic Renaissance Party’s local branch in the eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Province, Saodatsho Adolatov, was sentenced to five years in jail for inciting social hatred, a charge he claimed as politically motivated.

In April, Husaini and his son were beaten by a group of unknown assailants in Dushanbe. No arrests were made.

In January 2014, a member of the Islamic Renaissance Party, Umedjon Tojiev, died in a prison hospital in Tajikistan’s northern city of Khujand. Officials claimed the 34-year-old Tojiev died of a heart attack, but the Islamic Renaissance Party said Tojiev was tortured.

http://www.rferl.org/content/tajikistan-imams-islamic-renaissance-party-closure/26924305.html

A group of Tajik militants who claim to be fighting with the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria has posted a new video in which it threatens to transfer its activities from the Middle East and fight in Tajikistan, RFE/RL’s Tajik Service, Radio Ozodi, has reported.

The 16-minute video was shared on the Russian-language Odnoklassniki social network on March 19 and shows a group of 16 masked militants, most of whom appear to be Tajiks. It is not possible to independently verify the date or the exact location in which the video was shot.

Tajikistan’s security authorities have yet to comment on the video, Radio Ozodi reported.

One masked militant said that the video was the militants’ final address from Syria and Iraq and that their next video could be filmed «from the mountains of Tavildara in central Tajikistan, or the Tajik capital, Dushanbe — or even from the Kremlin.»

One of the men in the video appears to be a notorious Tajik militant, known as Nusrat Nazarov or Abu Kholodi Kulobi, who says he is 38 years old and hails from the village of Charmagon in the Kulob district of Tajikistan. Nazarov claims to be now living in a suburb of Raqqa, an IS stronghold in Syria.

Nazarov addressed the Tajik government and pro-government religious leaders, saying that they would be «held accountable» for actions carried out against militants in the Central Asian state.

In a recent interview with Radio Ozodi, Nazarov said that his goal is to introduce Shari’ah law throughout the world, including among Native Americans.

Nazarov has also claimed that there are as many as 2,000 Tajiks fighting in IS, and that around 500 have been killed, figures that are almost certainly highly exaggerated.

The State Committee for the National Security of Tajikistan said in November that as many as 300 Tajiks have gone to join the fighting in Syria and Iraq. Edward Lemon from the U.K.’s University of Exeter, who researches and tracks Tajik militants in Iraq and Syria, has found evidence of over 60 documented Tajiks in Syria.

Would IS Send Its Tajiks To Fight In Tajikistan?

Nazarov’s boasts that he and his fellow IS militants will soon be fighting to impose their version of Shari’ah law in Tajikistan is also likely hyperbole.

There is no evidence that the IS leadership in Syria and Iraq is planning to send militants home to fight for the group.

A video released by Tajik IS militants in January explained that several Tajiks had asked permission from IS’s senior leadership to wage «jihad» in Tajikistan with the extremist group Jamaat Ansarullah, but had been refused.

The militant in that video, who gave his nom de guerre as Abu Umariyon, said that IS commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi told the Tajik group that they would «have to wait.»

That the IS leadership is not keen to allow its militants to leave Syria and Iraq and fight elsewhere is not surprising. IS cannot afford to risk losing its rank-and-file militants as it faces ongoing military pressure and sustained losses in both Syria and Iraq. In Syria, the militants have taken heavy losses from the U.S.-led coalition and Kurdish militias, while forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are also targeting IS militants. IS in Iraq is facing air strikes from the United States and its allies, as well as ground assaults and opposition from the Kurdish peshmerga and Iran-backed Shi’ite militias.

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan said on March 21 that IS had been weakened in Iraq and Syria.

IS Is Expanding

Though IS is reluctant to allow its militants to leave for «jihad» elsewhere, as the group comes under increased military pressure in Syria and Iraq its leadership has welcomed the expansion of its influence into new parts of the world.

The IS leadership has purportedly accepted the pledges of allegiance made to it by militant groups outside of Syria and Iraq. In November, IS leader Baghdadiissued an audio recording accepting pledges of allegiance from groups in «The Haramayn [Saudi Arabia], Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Algeria.»

This month, IS accepted a pledge of allegiance from the Nigerian extremist group Boko Haram.

In another sign of the increasing military pressure IS is facing, the group has released a number of videos calling on Western Muslims to carry out attacks on their home soil — but only if they are unable to join IS in Syria and Iraq.

Indeed, CIA chief Brennan noted that — even though IS has been weakened in Syria and Iraq — the group’s reach is extending beyond Iraq and Syria and that it will take a combined and extended international effort over the next decade to repel the threat.

— Joanna Paraszczuk

http://www.rferl.org/content/tajikistan-isis-islamic-extremism-threats/26915731.html

March 20, 2015

WASHINGTON — The United States has finalized a review of its strategy for Central Asia, a region facing economic and political uncertainty tied to Russia’s flagging economy amid the Ukraine conflict and the murky succession plans of aging regional autocrats.

Experts say that while Russia’s military interference in Ukraine last year was not the sole factor prompting the review, the reassessment shows the Kremlin’s actions continue to cause ripple effects across U.S. foreign policy.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration «recently completed an interagency policy review, which reaffirmed our enduring commitment to the people and governments of Central Asia,» a U.S. State Department spokesperson told RFE/RL.

The State Department, which spearheaded the policy review, declined to disclose details of the assessment or when they would be available. People familiar with the matter said they expect conclusions of the review to be made public in the coming weeks.

A congressional staffer told RFE/RL that the strategy would likely be made public in the form of a document that would «lay out goals and objectives for the region.»

The State Department spokesperson said that United States «will continue to work» with Central Asian governments «to uphold regional security, increase economic integration with regional and global markets, demonstrate respect for human rights and democratic governance, and promote other bilateral and regional issues of mutual interest.»

Recent statements from senior U.S. officials indicate the updated policy will not differ radically from Washington’s previous Central Asia strategy, which includes the New Silk Road initiative aimed at boosting regional trade to promote stability following the departure of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan.

While the pace of the New Silk Road plan has been sluggish, Richard Hoagland, the U.S. principal deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, said in a March 18 speech in Washington that the initiative «is our long-term strategy to make Central Asia, including Afghanistan, once again a crossroads of global commerce.»

«Progress is happening. Since 2009, intraregional trade in Central Asia has increased by 49 percent, and since 2011 the cost of moving goods across regional borders has decreased by 15 percent,» Hoagland said, adding that «still much remains to be done.»

Experts on Central Asia say Washington’s New Silk Road strategy is being trumped by China’s aggressive push to build its own «Silk Road» trade routes through Central Asia, details of which Beijing is expected to releasethis month.

U.S. officials say U.S. and Chinese efforts in the region are not mutually exclusive and can complement one another.

Russia, meanwhile, has secured oil-rich Kazakhstan, the region’s largest economy, as a member of the Kremlin-led Eurasian Economic Union, which another Central Asian republic, Kyrgyzstan, is set to join in May.

Kremlin Intentions

While the Central Asia policy review was not «strictly» prompted by Russia’s military incursion into Ukraine and subsequent annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Russia’s role in the conflict «certainly was on the minds of people who were putting that policy together,» says Paul Stronski, a former director for Russia and Central Asia on Obama’s National Security Council staff.

Senior U.S. officials discussing Central Asia in recent months have repeatedly said that Moscow has no right to force its agenda on governments in the region.

«We recognize that the countries of Central Asia have close political, economic, security, and people-to-people ties with Russia,» Hoagland said on March 18. «But we also maintain that no country has the right to unilaterally determine the political and economic orientation of another country.»

He added that «what Russia is doing in Ukraine is cause for concern for the countries of Central Asia» and accused Moscow of «blanketing» the region with «propaganda» that presents «a skewed and anti-American/anti-European interpretation of events.»

Russia has defended the annexation by claiming that Crimeans faced a threat of violent repression after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv amid street protests in February 2014, an argument Kremlin critics and Western governments dismiss as false.

Russia has also denied accusations by Kyiv and the West that it has provided arms and personnel to pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine.

John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan, says the events in Ukraine present a «specific twist» to the larger issue facing Central Asian states, namely how to «get along» surrounded by large powers who may not have «their best interests at heart.»

He noted comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said in August that «the Kazakhs never had any statehood» and that it would be beneficial for the Kazakh people to «remain in the greater Russian world.»

«Putin basically threw down a marker…when he called Kazakhstan an artificial country,» Herbst told RFE/RL.

Aging Autocrats

Both Stronski and Herbst say security threats, including the potential for Islamic extremism, remain serious in Central Asia as U.S. and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan. But while earlier U.S. policy in the region was focused largely on security issues, the updated U.S. policy needs to address «economic issues and some of the political modernization issues» in the region, Stronski told RFE/RL.

Central Asian governments have been hit hard by Russian financial troubles stemming from plummeting oil prices and Western sanctions. The falling ruble has dented remittances from millions of Central Asian migrants working in Russia and pressured local producers forced to compete against cheaper Russian goods.

Furthermore, the governments in the region — most notably in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan — face uncertain political futures. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev and Uzbek President Islam Karimov, both in their 70s, have announced plans to seek reelection this year in ballots almost certain to see them remain in power.

«We have countries that are very much still based on sort of personality-based politics and not institutional-based politics, and so this does create problems in the long term, particularly as you get some very old leaders,» Stronski said.

Financial industry players have voiced similar concerns as well. «Future policy choices are difficult to predict in the medium term because of uncertainty surrounding the eventual succession of Mr. Nazarbaev, who is 74 years old,» the Standard & Poor’s ratings agency noted this month.

Emomali Rahmon and Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, the respective strongmen presidents of Tajikistan and gas-rich Turkmenistan, are comparably entrenched atop their respective states with no clear successors.

Each of these leaders’ governments has faced criticism from rights watchdogs and Western officials for alleged rights abuses.

Senior U.S. officials insist they are raising these issues with Central Asian governments while saying a balanced approach is needed, a position some rights advocates criticize as a Faustian bargain to secure cooperation on counterterrorism and other security matters.

Fielding a question about a «new» U.S. strategy in Central Asia, Daniel Rosenblum, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, told Voice of America’s Uzbek Service in January that the strategy addressed«political reforms» and «respect for human rights.»

«We have robust engagement with Uzbekistan on those issues, on issues of democracy and human rights, and on security, and we think it is possible to pursue both and try to maintain that balance in the relationship,» Rosenblum said.

http://www.rferl.org/content/central-asia-us-reassess-strategy/26911854.html

DUSHANBE — Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has called on prominent citizens in the Central Asian nation to outline a long-term «national development concept» that would establish a «democratic and secular country based on the rule of law.»

Speaking at an annual meeting with leading scholars, writers, artists and other figures on March 19, the long-ruling Rahmon said the development concept would guide the Central Asian country through the year 2050 and must be based firmly on its national interests.

He said it must «be mainly focused on the development of secularism and national and secular thinking.»

The emphasis on secularism follows an upsurge in arrests of alleged Islamist extremists and an election that pushed the poor, predominantly Muslim country’s only registered religious party out of parliament for the first time since the 1990s.

The Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT) had come under increasing pressure from the authorities before failing to win enough votes to secure a place in parliament in a March 1 election marred by fraud allegations and criticized by international observers.

Rahmon’s speech coincided with a report that the trial of five alleged members of a banned Islamic group, Jamaat Ansarullah, had started in Tajikistan’s northern Sughd region on March 19.

The trial is the latest of several court proceedings across the poor, predominantly Muslim, country targeting alleged members of banned Islamic groups in recent months.

Tajik officials have also said recently that hundreds of Tajik citizens are fighting alongside Islamist militants in Syria and Iraq.

In December, Rahmon publicly branded the Islamic State militant group in the Middle East a «modern plague» that poses a «threat to global security.»

Rahmon has called young Tajiks who have left to fight in the Middle East «a potential threat to Tajikistan,» saying they could spread radical Islam in the country after returning home from Syria and Iraq.

Last month, Tajikistan’s newly appointed prosecutor-general, Yusuf Rahmonov, said that 41 criminal cases, mainly in absentia, had been launched against 85 Tajik nationals suspected of fighting or having fought in the Middle East.

Rahmonov also said that a special center tasked with investigating recruitment cases would begin operating soon.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said on March 5 that Moscow plans to bolster Russia’s military bases in Tajikistan and neighboring Kyrgyzstan due to an increase of activity by what he called «units» of the militant group Islamic State in Central Asia.

http://www.rferl.org/content/tajik-leader-call-for-national-concpet-for-development/26909599.html

Tajik President Emomali Rahmon has appointed his eldest son, Rustam Emomali, to head the Central Asian nation’s anticorruption agency.

Emomali, 27, was appointed on March 16 as director of the State Agency For Financial Control and Measures Against Corruption.

Emomali had been running Tajikistan’s Customs Service since late 2013.

His predcessor at the anticorruption agency, Abdufattoh Ghoib, was named as the Customs Service’s new chief.

Corruption is a major problem in Tajikistan and other former Soviet republics.

In other appointments, the chief of the government’s Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting, Asadullo Rahmon, became a presidential adviser.

Rahmon, who is not related t the president, replaced Abdujabbor Azizi, who was elected to parliament on March 1.

Deputy Culture Minister Mahmadsaid Pirov was appointed as the new chief of the government’s Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting.

http://www.rferl.org/content/tajik-prsident-appoints-son-to-head-anticorruption-agency/26903683.html

DUSHANBE — Two Tajik activists have each been sentenced to 16 1/2 years in prison for being members of a banned political opposition movement.

A Dushanbe court on March 13 found Firdavs Muhiddinov and Farhod Karimov guilty of insulting President Emomali Rahmon, being members of the banned opposition movement Group 24, and plotting to overthrow the government before handing them their sentences.

Karimov was arrested last year after police searched his computer and found photos they said «insulted» Rahmon.

Muhiddinov was detained for appearing online at a gathering of Tajik migrants in Russia and calling for Rahmon’s resignation.

Both men pleaded «partially guilty» and denied any association with Group 24, which was founded by fugitive tycoon Umarali Quvatov, who was shot dead in Istanbul on March 5.

The group was banned in October after being labelled an extremist group.

Activist Umedjon Solehov was sentenced last week to 17 1/2 years in prison on the same charges.

http://www.rferl.org/content/tajik-acrtivists-sentenced-for-association-with-quvatov/26899417.html

Media advocacy watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it is unblocking access to nine news websites in an effort to combat online censorship by governments that violate human rights.

RSF said the move, dubbed Operation Collateral Freedom and launched on March 12 to mark the World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, will make the sites available in the 11 countries where they are currently banned.

The group said in a statement that it will unblock websites banned in countries designated as «Enemies of the Internet» by setting up mirrors, or copies, of the websites, allowing people there to access them.

The 11 countries are Russia, China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Cuba, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

The websites include Grani.ru, which is blocked in Russia; Fergananews.com, which is blocked in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; Gooya News, blocked in Iran; and the Tibet Post, which is blocked in China.

The group said it is using the technique known as “mirroring” to duplicate the banned websites and post the copies on the Internet servers of corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

RSF said the economic and political cost of blocking the servers of these Internet giants to render the mirror sites inaccessible would be too high.

«Our nine sites are therefore protected against censorship,» it said.

The Paris-based group said it is renting bandwidth for Operation Collateral Freedom, which will «gradually be used up as more and more people visit the mirror sites.»

RSF said it would maintain the sites at its own expense for several months and appealed to Internet users to donate money to help pay for additional bandwidth afterwards, «so that the mirror sites will be available for as long as possible.»

http://www.rferl.org/content/media-freedom-reporters-without-borders/26896537.html

Tajik opposition Group 24 movement has elected its new leadership after its founding leader Umarali Quvatov was shot dead in Istanbul, Turkey last week.

Quvatov’s cousin and business associate, 29-year-old Sharofiddin Gadoev, who has been living in self-imposed exile in Spain since 2013, told RFE/RL that the leading council of the Group 24 held its gathering on March 12 and elected him the movement’s new leader.

A Tajik businessman, Sobir Valiev, 26, was elected Gadoev’s deputy.

Gadoev declined to say where exactly the gathering was held. The majority of the movement’s members are living outside Tajikistan.

Gadoev also said that the Group 24 will continue its political activities opposing Tajik President Emomali Rahmon.

Tajik authorities banned Group 24 branding it extremist after the group called on Tajik citizens for anti-government protests in Dushanbe in October.

Two alleged members of the group are currently on trial. Last week, one activist was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in jail for being a member of Group 24.