“Here, we are being killed! » This testimony collected by a foreign traveler passing through the Pamir region a few weeks ago, the western Himalayan “roof of the world” partially located in the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan, seems to sum up the feeling of many inhabitants of this mountain range. . Representing 40% of the area of the country, the region is poor and populated mainly by a population of Ismaili Muslim faith, a branch of Shiism of which the Aga Khan is the spiritual leader. The rest of the ten million Tajiks are predominantly Sunni.
Around mid-May, for about a week, several dozen Pamiri demonstrators were killed by the Tajik regime’s special forces, say dissident and journalistic sources in exile from this nation with banned political speech. And where the information remains under strict control of the authorities.
Walking back
The Pamiris, who enjoy a high level of education and whose civil society is highly developed, feel discredited compared to the rest of their fellow citizens. “People have told me that, especially since 2018, the situation is increasingly tense, that the police and military presence is increasingly visible and that, for a yes and a no, the inhabitants are checked by police officers come from the plains, civil servants unhappy to have been transferred to this remote region”told the World this tourist returning from the Pamirs. Where the regime still curiously lets foreign travelers go for walks, despite the troubles.
Tajikistan is a sort of “satrapy” placed for a long time under the boot of the former Soviet kolkhoz leader Emomali Rahmon, 69, in power since 1992. He has remained very close to his former Muscovite suzerain, as evidenced by the frequent visits of Vladimir Putin and the presence on its territory of the largest Russian military establishment abroad, the 201e motorized infantry base, located near the capital Dushanbe.
Since the brutal repression carried out on May 16 and in the days that followed by the Tajik security forces against several thousand anti-regime demonstrators in the “Autonomous Region of Gorno-Badakhshan” (230,000 inhabitants), the official name of this border area of Afghanistan, the reorganization continues in legal forms: on June 24 and July 5, two opponents, Khoudjamri Pirmamadov and Shaftolou Bekdavlatov, were sentenced to eighteen years in prison and the radio operator and poet Mouïassar Sadonchoïev, nicknamed Mouïassari Kouxistoni, to eleven years of imprisonment for high treason.
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