Tajikistan

The lack of assurance by the authorities of Tajikistan that international observers will be accredited has regrettably made it necessary to cancel the observation of the country’s forthcoming parliamentary elections, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) said today.

Dushanbe has done nothing to promote healing of wounds left by civil war.

Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have inaugurated a pair of upgraded flow-monitoring stations on transboundary canals in a measure designed to lay the ground for improved collective water resource management in the region. … Successful dialogue in this kind of format is increasingly seen as indispensable to ensure that Central Asia is spared the gravest consequences of a looming water shortage crisis.

The media landscape in Tajikistan is in its "worst state” since the Central Asian nation’s civil war in the 1990s as the country’s authoritarian president, Emomali Rahmon, establishes himself as an “absolute power with no tolerance for dissent,” a media watchdog said.

The administration of Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan region on September 2 said border cooperation with Afghanistan has resumed in several districts on the orders of Tajik President Emomali Rahmon after three years of closures, a sign of a potential normalization of relations between two countries. 

Rahmon’s unannounced visit from August 15-18 marked his first to the region since at least 34 people were killed in Dushanbe’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in Khorugh and the nearby Rushon district in May 2022, with several activists also being arrested and sentenced to long prison terms.

Authorities in Tajikistan said two “criminal leaders” have been killed in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO), the latest in a series of arrests and killings in the Central Asian republic’s restive east following recent anti-government protests.

Tajikistan has launched an “anti-terror operation” in a restive region that borders Afghanistan and China and has long been a flashpoint of tensions, police said on Wednesday.

Tajikistan said Friday that two of its citizens were killed and 10 injured during overnight clashes at its contested border with Kyrgyzstan, where a ceasefire is now in place.

Tajikistan has begun releasing the first group of prisoners under a mass amnesty affecting some 16,000 people. Tajik lawmakers earlier this month approved an amnesty law proposed by President Emomali Rahmon to mark the former Soviet republic's 30th anniversary of independence on September 9.