Dropping the Curtain: How Tajik President Took Over the Country

Tajikistan – Central Asia’s poorest country – is ruled by an authoritarian president who completely disregards the country’s constitution.

Despite the majority of the population living at the edge of poverty, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and his family enjoy all the benefits of wealthy living. A recent investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP, has discovered that all the instances of corruption are in one way or another linked to Rahmon’s family.

Ilya Lozovsky, the managing editor at the OCCRP, explained to Hromadske how political power without responsibility can lead to business success (however questionable), and whether Tajikistan is turning into North Korea.

Tajikistan is one of the poorest Central Asian countries, and it is under the dictatorship of President Emomali Rahmon. The OCCRP has revealed that all the corruption ties go to the family of the president. Can you tell us exactly how bad it is?

Well, it's really bad. It’s generally known that the country of Tajikistan has been under the rule of the president and his family and they take everything. Every business that grows above a certain point, they take it for themselves. I think what our investigation shows is some of the mechanisms behind how some of this works. And basically, it's a very sad situation. It removes any incentives for local people to try and grow their business, to build something big. It makes them want to leave. Some maybe go to Russia, many go to Turkey or other countries because if you remain in the country, the business you build will eventually be seen and swiped by some member of the ruling family. In the case of our story, we focused on the son-in-law of the president, a man named Shamsullo Sakhibov, who married one of the president's daughters and built a business empire. We show how he built this empire step by step with assistance of various kinds from the government. And we also showed the fates of some of the people who either stood in his way or tried to point the way toward a different kind of Tajikistan. It's a story both about corruption and about growing wealth through using the power of the state. It's also a story about foreign involvement in these schemes, and it's a story about the victims of this kind of system. It's also a story about why this system remains the way it is. There is no organized political opposition. We wanted to include that.

In the case of Tajikistan, when most people live under the poverty level, did you see any results of your investigation? When you revealed all this information, was there any reaction from the government or the opposition, or did Tajiks just awaken from the situation?

This came out quite recently, so I think it's probably too early to say. We were careful to put a lot of energy into translating all the stories into Russian at the same time. So when the investigation was published in English, it was published in Russian at the same time because we wanted people to see it. But so far, I think it's too early to say. A lot of people in this country will know to some extent already or feel or will have some personal experience, but we tried to do it systematically with evidence and proof as all our investigations require. So I think in the long term it will show not only Tajiks but people around the world what it looks like in the modern day when a country is ruled like a kleptocracy, like a country which is basically ruled by a single family. And, of course, Tajikistan is not the only country like that.

You just said that there is no kind of opposition in Tajikistan. As far as I know, there is this Islamic Renaissance party of Tajikistan, which was nominally opposing the president over all these years. What has happened to them?

This is a very interesting story because Tajikistan, as you mentioned, is the poorest former Soviet republic, probably the least developed in several metrics, and very authoritarian. It's not an environment where you would expect a strong, robust opposition. But in fact, for a long time, it had an opposition party that was maybe one of the most... I don't want to say effective because they, of course, had no political power, but one of the most legitimate and rooted in the grassroots of any former Soviet republic. Many other former Soviet countries had liberal, elite-based opposition parties in the 1990s through today that had some support in the cities among the educated, but not really among the wide population. This is what makes the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan different because it really is based on a completely different foundation. Its roots are in an Islamic underground movement started way back during the Soviet era. After the civil war in Tajikistan it became a recognized opposition party, and it had representatives in distant villages in every region. It was almost more like a community movement, like a religious organization, more than a traditional Western political party. It really helped people, it tried to show people that a different kind of politics was possible, that's what was interesting about it. It was trying to show Tajikistan that there is another way to govern this country, that the people can help determine their own future. But, in 2015, after several years of gradually tightening repression, when the party opposed some proposed constitutional changes that would make the president above the constitution, it was shut down. And in a matter of months in that year, through arrests, through intimidation, through torture, through exile, the whole structure was dismantled. Today its former activists are across the world, living in different countries, they have political asylum in various European countries. Those that weren't able to escape or remained in the country for whatever reason, most have been imprisoned. So the party's activity has basically been shut down. And the reason we wanted to include that story in this investigation is to show how can a regime that steals from its own people like this and then takes everything over from its own people survive? This is the reason, because it uses repression to crush any effective opposition.

I would like to address one of the most recent and brutal cases with the opposition leaders such as Umarali Kuvvatov, who was brutally murdered, shot in the streets of Istanbul. Why do you think he was so dangerous for Tajikistan that they just approached him abroad, in exile?

I want to say that we don't know exactly who killed him. His supporters, his family, they very strongly insist that it was some representatives of the regime. It's hard to say exactly who may have ordered it. But yes, he was pursued across the world after being chased out of Tajikistan. He was imprisoned several times at the request of the Tajik government. The Tajik government, as you say, came out very strongly against him. I think it's because they really started getting that frightened of a loud opposition voice that tells people the truth. He, while he was abroad, was very vocal and bought time on television while he was in Russia. He tried to put videos on YouTube, he tried to get his opposition to the regime into Tajikistan. There's a great little anecdote that we include in one of the stories, a Western researcher was in Tajikistan, and his cleaning lady was in the apartment. Suddenly on the TV, a program by Umarali Kuvvatov was talking about the authoritarianism of the president and how the president was leading the country in the wrong direction. He remembers that the cleaning lady froze and for her, it was like seeing God criticized on TV for the first time. This is the environment that has been built in Tajikistan. The leader of the Islamic Renaissance party told me that it was like North Korea, people only see that Tajikistan is safe, the president keeps you safe, everywhere else in the world is chaos, everywhere else with religious opposition parties, Islamic parties, is just terrorism and extremism. Here in Tajikistan, everything is different. So to have that little crack into that facade that Umarali tried to provide was very threatening for the regime.

To this day, Tajikistan is part of the OSCE, and it's also in the program of EU partnership. If it's really turning into North Korea, as you said, do you think the Western governments should act somehow to stop this process? How is it possible that a country that is becoming so closed and so authoritarian is still a part of the Western community of values?

Well, this is a great question. I'm not sure that Western governments can do all that much about what happens inside Tajikistan, but certainly, one thing they can do is stop legitimizing the government as a legitimate member of the international community on the same level as other much more democratic countries. The human rights abuses we point to in our stories and the economic crimes, I mean all kinds of crimes that take place there are so blatant and outrageous that it really should be something that Western governments are speaking about when they speak to Tajikistan and when they speak about Tajikistan. As you mentioned though, it's an upstanding member of these Western organizations, and I think often Western governments are reluctant to criticize a "friendly dictator". Tajikistan is small, it's far away, not a lot of people really take up the cause of Tajikistan in the West, people don't know much about it. That's why we have the situation that Western governments feel free to collaborate with the government, to treat it maybe not as an equal but as a legitimate partner, and the people in Tajikistan who suffer under this regime, I think it's hard for them to understand.

During this investigation of yours, how hard was it for you to work in Tajikistan, to obtain information? Did you ever feel you were in danger?

Well, I didn't go there personally, and most of our colleagues were not able to be in the country. We did rely on some reporters in the country who we don't name, but a lot of the reporting for these investigations, unlike many of our investigations which are based on documents, the business registry, files, some kind of leaks, some kind of documentary proof, it's very hard to find those kinds in Tajikistan because it's so closed. Even citizens inside the country who try to access the business registry sometimes find that they're questioned by security services. So, in this case, they relied a lot on interviews of people in this country, people who interacted with this, we interviewed the mining executive who paid a so-called success fee to a company belonging to the son-in-law of the president in order to obtain a mining license. We can see the files of that company because it's registered on the London alternative stock exchange, and it's a Western company, so it has some requirements for publishing things. You kind of have to work around the fact that Tajikistan is one of the most secretive countries and really one of the most difficult countries in the world to report from. This is why this project was such an enormous effort and took such a long time to pull together. But I think it's worth doing because the darkest corners in the world should have light thrown upon them, and that's one of the missions of our organization.

What do you think should happen in Tajikistan? Because the situation in Tajikistan is not a unique one. We have the same thing with the presidential family in Azerbaijan. We had the same situation with kleptocracy in Ukraine, but the Ukrainian people decided to rebel against the corruption and power within the hands of one family. What should happen in Tajikistan to stop all these processes of closing even more corruption?

That's a great question, and I'm not sure I have a good answer to that. I think a few years ago I would've said that maybe the Islamic Renaissance party would have had a chance of starting to build some kind of movement against corruption. But unfortunately they were very brutally repressed, so right now it's hard to imagine what could change the country. The president will not live forever, even though he evidently wants to, judging by his titles. It looks like he's grooming his son to succeed him. So it looks like he's trying to make sure the leadership of the country stays in the family. The country is undergoing a lot of challenges in its economy because it's so poorly managed and because its people are not encouraged to grow the economy in the same way that they can in other countries. Perhaps if there's some kind of serious economic crisis, if there's some kind of other unrest, it could trigger something. But as we mentioned, the country is very poor and has very low levels of democratic development, and in such cases, it's really hard to imagine how anything could change drastically. Some of the people I've interviewed who have fled the country are now busy in Europe trying to build networks with other activists, trying to get the word out through social media, through YouTube, and trying to get the message in those countries as well. Maybe in the long term, the advances of social media, technological advances, could make a difference in public consciousness. But the propaganda is so strong there, the government is so powerful and, as I've said, the organized opposition is basically scattered. I'm afraid it's hard to imagine any positive changes in the near future. But that's exactly why we want to keep writing about it because it deserves attention.

/By Mariia Ulianovska