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 f
you live in a country than ends with the suffix "stan"
and happen to have Afghans across the border, the aftermath of September
11 undoubtedly carries huge risks but may bring benefits as well.
Not immediately, of course. It takes time to feel the effect of
lifting sanctions, as in Pakistan, or of Washington's promise to
help fight your own local brand of terrorist, as in Uzbekistan.
But, eventually, welcoming American forces to your discreet and
conveniently located airbases should start to pay dividends.
In the case
of Tajikistan, it needs to, and fast. Hardly reported by the international
media, an estimated one million people out of a population of some
six million face famine. The U.N.'s World Food Programme and the
International Federation of the Red Cross have been appealing for
aid for the last three months in vain. Tajikistan has been no one's
concern: too obscure, too unstable, too difficult. Germany is the
only Western country to maintain an embassy there; the only direct
flight to the West is the Tajik Airlines' ancient Tupolev 154 operating
once a week to Munich. Only a handful of international aid organizations
maintain a presence. Most stay away--too often their staff have
been kidnapped.
Yet the cries
of disasters are sincere and well founded. Two years of drought
have accelerated the collapse of an already tiny economy (one recent
estimate suggests that Tajikistan's GDP is no more than $1 billion.)
The only growth industry is the shipping of Afghan drugs to Moscow
and onto Europe, a tragic revival of the ancient Silk Route. A country
that was once part of a superpower is now one of the 30 poorest
in the world. Abject deprivation and lawlessness are the norm. For
years Islamic militants have taken advantage of the untraceable
and easily fortified terrain; bin Laden may be eyeing it even now.
Few places on earth have attracted less international scrutiny.
Tajikistan
is one of those countries that should never have become one. Its
borders twist convulsively through the Pamirs, the mountains that
form the "Roof of the World." Stalin carved up the region's
different ethnic groups into impossibly contorted and ungovernable
territories. In 1991, when the rest of the world rejoiced at the
break-up of the Soviet Union, the Tajik leadership pleaded with
Boris Yeltsin not to be forced out. Uniquely, independence was not
welcomed. With a cautious glance over the shoulder, Tajiks quietly
joke that Vladimir Putin once sent their president, Imamali Rakhmanov,
a limousine as a gift. The car was admired but found to be lacking
in one important respect: It had no steering wheel. When this was
reported to Moscow, there came a swift and patronizing reply: "Don't
worry, we'll control it from here."
Where else
could Russian troops try to relive the swagger of the Wehrmacht
in Paris? In a restaurant in the president's hometown of Kuylab,
I watched boisterous officers amusing themselves by keeping the
boy-waiters scuttling to and fro with contradictory orders. But
this was imperial life at its most dismal. Instead of champagne
and giggling French girls, these last remnants of Peter the Great's
central Asian conquests were making do with homemade beer and lamb
kebabs. Grease ran on their chins. The few light bulbs were bare.
Some 25,000
Russian soldiers are stationed along the 600-mile border with Afghanistan,
achieving little except collecting their due share of the hectic
drugs traffic. In fact guarding the border is the least of Tajikistan's
problems. It's the state of the country itself that needs attention.
Vast, fractious, and violent, there are whole swathes of territory
that the government dares not enter. Warlords control entire valleys.
Between 1992-96 the civil war claimed up to 60,000 lives. Even when
the president visits his mother, he has to make a long detour to
avoid a particularly vicious and well-armed gang. These are the
conditions of a premodern age.
Yet Tajikistan
is also cursed with the worst of the old Soviet system, with leaders
and administrators who are unreformed, blinkered, and unresponsive
to the desperate needs of a hungry people. Officials refuse to believe
the evidence around them. One senior medical official tried to stop
me from visiting the worst-affected areas. "This isn't Africa,
you know," he said, as he tried to get through to the capital
for instructions. "Everything is normal here, and correct."
Old habits die hard.
Year after
year the government tries to boost production of its only export,
cotton, because that's what was always grown in Soviet days. Now
though the international price for cotton has dropped and crude
agricultural practices have poisoned the soil and lowered yields.
The only working irrigation channels serve the cotton even though
the most pressing requirement is to water the wheat crops parched
by drought. On the collective farm of Olimptoy, I learned about
"negative harvests" in which less seed is reaped than
is sown. One farmer, Karim Shapirov, has even sold his tin roof
for food. He is not alone in this; it's common now to see doors
and other household fittings for sale by the roadside. This winter
Karim will sell a window frame. This should pay for a rail ticket
to send the eldest son to Moscow to wash dishes for a few months
to earn enough cash to buy back the family cow; but Karim worries
that the boy may be robbed on the journey home. Meanwhile the children
dig up the rat-holes to search for hoards of grain. One-third of
Olimptoy's grain is collected from the rats. Amid this village's
dust, exhaustion and disease, there could be no starker image of
the utter degradation and failure of the Communist vision.
In the town
of Kurgan-Turbe, the tenth anniversary of Tajikistan's independence
is celebrated by a huge poster showing President Rakhmanov clutching
a bundle of wheat. George Orwell would have delighted in the irony
of this, because only a few blocks away, the international charity
Action Against Hunger operates one of several special feeding programs
for severely malnourished children. During my visit, I saw around
20 frail, bone-thin boys and girls, clinging to life, their fatigued
dull eyes reminiscent of the refugee camps of Angola and Mozambique.
As many as 40 percent of Tajikistan's children suffer some form
of malnourishment.
Victims of
bureaucratic denial, Stalinist indifference, and international ignorance,
ordinary Tajiks face mass starvation. By raising their profile,
the American-led campaign against terrorism may offer their best
hope. Tajikistan has caught the eye of the Pentagon's planners and
remains the best route for the hundreds of journalists travelling
to northern Afghanistan. Aid may follow and with it, ideally, would
come a focused international attempt to assist with structural and
political reform to produce stability and a climate for foreign
investment. Back in August, one international aid worker told me
that Tajikistan needed "a really big crisis like an earthquake"
to attract the attention of donors. Osama bin Laden may have provided
one.
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