Yearbook 2007
Tajikistan. At the beginning of the year, President Imomali Rachmonov declared that Tajikistanis would cope with the old crackdown on family names in the country. The president decided to delete the ending -ov in his own name and urged the people to follow and abolish all Slavonic names. However, the name change was said to be voluntary.
- According to abbreviationfinder: TJ is the 2-letter acronym for the country of Tajikistan.
In April, the president announced a plan to make Tajikistan the world’s leading hydropower producer. He hoped that the country would attract foreign investors for the construction of 80 new hydropower plants. According to CountryAAH, Dushanbe is the capital city of Tajikistan. The regime in Tajikistan expects the export of electricity from hydropower to lift the economy of the poor country. According to experts, the mountainous Tajikistan with its many rivers has one of the world’s greatest potential for hydroelectric power plants, estimated at over 500 billion kilowatt-hours a year. Only a small part of this has been used so far.
At the government’s request, the UN peacekeeping operation in Tajikistan ended in July, a decade after the peace agreement that ended the devastating civil war in 1997 between the regime and the Islamic opposition.
In August, a new border bridge between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was opened in the hope of increased trade between the two poor Central Asian states.
In November, a bomb was fired in a conference center in Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe. A security guard was killed. According to the prosecutor, it was a terrorist act planned in connection with President Rachmon celebrating the 15th anniversary of his power takeover. The president has since used the civil war hard methods to hold down the Islamic opposition.
At the end of the year, the Communist Party applied to retain the last Lenin statue in the capital Dushanbe and place it outside its party headquarters, when it would be moved from its old location and replaced by a statue of a historical Tajik poet. The Lenin statue had been standing in the city’s central park since 1926, when it was brought there from St. Petersburg.
History
The new deputy prime minister immediately declared that in the Tajikistan an Islamic regime would not be imposed by force. However, despite the optimistic statements of the members of the new government, the armed clashes between the Islamic fundamentalist forces opposed to the agreement, militarily supported by the Afghan Ṭālibān, and the government forces continued in various areas of the country and especially in the Kofernihan region, since 1991. wholly owned by the opposition and home of Turajonzoda. On 21 July 1998 in a mountainous area at 170km from the capital, four UN observers in charge of monitoring the implementation of the peace agreements were killed, causing, while the UN withdrew its observers from the country for some time, a further weakening of the coalition government. At the end of 1998, however, it was clear that the agreement of June 27, 1997 could only be said to be partially realized: a few hundred OTO fighters, along with an even greater number of Tajik civilian refugees, were still in Afghānistān, and within the country only 50% of the irregular forces were integrated into the regular Tajik army. To cope with the situation, Rahmonov stepped up calls for support from Russia. A multi-year political agreement – which included among other things the strengthening of the Russian military presence in the country on the border with Afghānistān – was signed in Moscow in April 1999. Subsequently Rahmonov, who in September 1999 thanks to an amendment to the Constitution had paved the way for the legalization of Islamic parties and was reconfirmed president in November with a plebiscitary vote (97 %), called the political elections, the first after the civil war. The elections (February 27, 2000) ended with the victory of the Democratic People’s Party, loyal to the president, while the Communists got 12 %. The Islamic Renaissance Party, which had led the struggle of the OTO, denouncing that it had been the victim of fraud and abuse, took third place. According to OSCE observers, who partially confirmed the complaints of the Islamic opposition, the elections represented an important step forward in the achievement of peace.