Tajikistan

The Soviet Union’s collapse 32 years ago led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence. In Tajikistan, that violence slid rapidly into civil war.

Tajikistan is the strongest critic of the Taliban in Central Asia and continues to host dialogues featuring a diversity of Afghan voices.

On December 9, 2022, after a closed-door trial, the lawyer and human rights defender was sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment. 

The foreign ministers of the CSTO, of which Russia is a member, without apparent irony put out a statement that says “no state should ensure its security at the expense of the security of other states.”

After a December 1 meeting in Tajikistan, security officials on both sides are proclaiming success and promising progress.

As a generation of Central Asian adoptees enter adulthood in the United States, their personal quests for identity sit side-by-side with discussions of decolonization.

Over the course of two days, six people were indicted in New York for a pair of sanctions evasion schemes, including one Tajik-Russian resident of Brooklyn.

USAID Administrator Samantha Power announced an additional $14.3 million in regional programing, plus $18.7 million to boost collaboration in Uzbekistan, specifically.

When a government captures, imprisons, or kills a detainee and refuses to acknowledge the person’s whereabouts, it generates a very specific kind of terror for other dissidents and their families. 

The details of “Protocol No. 44” are unknown, but both sides clearly want to portray some kind of progress in their drawn-out border negotiations.

The drama around the Madumarov matter obscures the lack of tangible progress by the Japarov administration in coming to an agreement on the border with Tajikistan. 

“Every arrest, case of torture, extrajudicial killing and kidnapping sends a signal to journalists, activists, community leaders and lawyers about the cost of challenging the regime.”