Both the beard and the gun of a Mujahid are gone and a suit and tie have taken their place, along with a post in the government as Minister for Customs. And he is happy that he is no longer fighting. ‘I never wanted to fight’, says the former Mujahid, ‘but sometimes if you don’t fight you will be killed’. 

A frail peace has descended over Tajikistan since 1997, when an agreement was signed between the Russian-backed government and the Islamic opposition ending five years of civil war. Now Kozmov Mirzokhuzha and the other commanders who so vehemently battled against President Emomali Rachmonov sit side by side in his cabinet. 

But for many others the scars of the war remain unhealed. In the south, the villages populated by the mountain people of Garm - who in Soviet times were brought to pick cotton in the plains - rest largely in ruins without any money to help rebuild them. Many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have returned from Afghanistan are living in deep poverty, a fact made worse by a yearlong drought. 

The chaos of the war, as well as the deaths of 50,000 people from a population of less than six million, has similarly devastated the economy. The carcasses of factories stand idle under the sun across the country. Almost nothing remains except a large aluminum plant, a gold mine and the cotton fields, which are slowly shrinking from the breakdown of the Soviet-installed irrigation system. Even with the peace agreement, the political power of the government barely reaches beyond the capital, Dushanbe. In fact, only 30km to the east of the city one finds a group of armed and irregular troops at a checkpoint on the road who answer not to the President but to a local warlord called Umar. 

Even more serious than Umar is the mysterious rebel leader Juma Namangani, a former Tajik opposition commander who has started an organization known as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. His main aim is supposedly to establish an Islamic state in the deeply Muslim area of the Ferghana valley in Uzbekistan, which contains up to a quarter of the republic’s population of 25 million. Throughout last summer Namangani repeatedly attacked both Uzbek and Kyrgyz territory, causing serious disturbances, and on one occasion even causing Uzbek authorities to drain a large dam for fear of sabotage. Inside Tajikistan the cause that Namangani and his 1,000 followers represent is far from clear. Tura Jumaev, a doctor in Dushanbe, says that ‘for the handful of people who know Namangani there are thousands who understand nothing about him at all.’ But his movement’s name has reached as far as Washington and in the autumn of last year the US State Department placed him on their international terrorist list because of his alleged links to the Saudi militant Osama Bin Laden, and the IMU kidnapping of American mountain climbers. 

But for the Russians, he represents - along with the Taliban - a far more frightening specter, that of a second Islamic front along with the one in Chechnya. The Russians, who still guard the Tajik border with Afghanistan, have 25,000 troops stationed in the republic, and were unofficially helping the government during the civil war, though the conflict is now seen as being more politically than religiously motivated. Even Kozmov Mirzokhuzha admitted that, ‘as for Islam, I probably know more about Marxism and Leninism, so no-one could call me an Islamic fundamentalist’. But Islamic fundamentalism remains for Moscow the bugbear that communism was for Washington during the Cold War. Russian and Taliban troops are already face-to-face across the river Pyanzh, which separates Tajikistan from Afghanistan. It is a thought that brings back the painful memories of the ill-fated Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1980. 

Added to the fear of Islamic militants is the problem caused by the routing of enormous amounts of heroin and opium from Afghanistan through Tajikistan to the markets in Eastern and Western Europe. Last year’s United Nations estimates put the Afghan opium crop at a record 7,000 tons, almost double that of 1999. Even Amirku Azimov, head of the Tajik Security Council, openly admits that ‘only ten percent of what comes through is seized.’ The problem in Tajikistan is accentuated by its poverty. Very few people make a wage of more than $10 per month; the drug trade offers a source of instant riches. According to local officials there is not a part of life that drugs no longer touch, from providing arms to Juma Namangani to the large Mercedes cars seen driving through the streets of Dushanbe.

By Makhmud Yusupov