Tajikistan

The Trials of Independence

Shirin Akiner, Mohammad-Reza Djalili, Frederic Grare

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138996694
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136104985
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since its independence in 1991 Tajikistan has suffered a painful series of political crises followed by a civil war, still continuing, whose repercussions extend far beyond its borders. This work examines the causes of the turmoil, and analyses, through the case of Tajikistan, social and political dynamics at work throughout Central Asia. The book is the work of eleven Central Asian experts from different disciplinary backgrounds, and provides new insight into questions as varied as clan and local identity, the political construction of ethnicity and the role of peacekeeping forces.

PEACE-MAKING AND PEACE-KEEPING

Chapter 9

The Russian Army and the War in Tajikistan

Michael Orr

‘Intervention’ is too strong a word to describe the process by which the Russian army found itself involved in the war in Tajikistan. The former Soviet Army garrison force has gradually changed its role from bystander via kingmaker to main combatant largely in response to the developments within Tajikistan and without any clear plan on the part of Russia's political leadership. Just as it is difficult to define the start of Russia's involvement in the Tajik war, it is almost impossible to forecast how this involvement might be brought to an end.

When Tajikistan declared its independence from the crumbling USSR in September 1991 the Soviet armed forces in the country were composed of three elements: 201st Motor Rifle Division (MRD), a regiment of the Air Defence Forces (PVO) and KGB Border Guards along the Afghan and Chinese borders. In addition the traditional military commissariat system existed throughout the country, to mobilise conscripts and reserves. The 201st MRD formed part of the 40th Army in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention; it was deployed in the Kunduz area, just south of the Tajik border. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989 the division returned to its pre-war garrison area in the Tajik Republic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union some of the constituent republics took the armed forces stationed on their territory under their own jurisdiction; this was the case in most of the Central Asian republics. Tajikistan was one of those who were unable to do this, leaving the armed forces there in limbo, from which they passed under CIS and eventually Russian control. Thus the Russian General Staff in Moscow never had to make a strategic assessment of the positive reasons for stationing troops in Tajikistan. The strategic justifications for their presence there were basically negative. Russia was happy to retain responsibility for guarding Tajik (and other former Soviet) borders rather than pay for a new system of frontier protection along its own national boundaries. If Russian border troops were to be left on the border with so unstable a state as Afghanistan they might require support from heavily-equipped combined-arms units. In any case, Russia was already swamped by the burden of relocating forces from Eastern Europe and did not want to increase the number of homeless military families. 201st MRD, therefore, remained in Tajikistan, recruiting its conscript soldiers largely from Tajikistan, but with an overwhelmingly Russian professional cadre of officers and warrant officers. The newly independent Republic of Tajikistan had no armed forces of its own, other than a Presidential Guard of about 1,000 men and some weak Interior Ministry forces.

Without a national army the Tajik government had no means of controlling the growing political instability within the country. When Dushanbe was blocked by rival demonstrations in April 1992, President Nabiev tried to compensate for his lack of an army by supplying weapons to his supporters among the demonstrators. This, however, led to the commander of the Presidential Guard, Major-General Rakhmonov, declaring his support for the anti-Nabiev group. Serious bloodshed was averted by the appearance of armoured vehicles from 201st MRD to separate the two factions. The divisional commander, Colonel Vyacheslav Zabolotnyy, then brought Nabiev and other government and opposition leaders together in his office in a barracks in Dushanbe on 10 May. He is reported to have said, ‘There's enough blood-letting. Authorised as garrison commander, I will arrest all of you and no one will leave this office until you finally resolve all the disputes between you’.¹ It is remarkable that all parties accepted his authority and did work out an agreement by which a coalition government was formed. Zabolotnyy, a Belorussian by birth, seems to have acted on his own initiative, without instructions from his superiors in CIS headquarters or elsewhere in Moscow, but backed by a resolution of the 201st MRD's officers’ assembly.

The truce arranged in Dushanbe did not last long outside the capital. In June fighting broke out in the southern provinces of Kulyab and Kurgan-Tyube in which current political disputes cloaked the settling of long-standing ethnic grievances. Tajikistan still had no armed forces to check the outbreak of civil war. Although 201st MRD had regiments in Kurgan-Tyube and Kulyab they took no official action other than protecting refugees (mostly Russian) and guarding key sites and communications at the Tajik government's request. The summer of 1992 was the time when a peace-keeping force was most urgently required in Tajikistan and could have prevented the loss of thousands of lives and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees. The 201st MRD declared its neutrality and an attempt to create a peace-keeping force under the CIS aegis was still-born when Marshal Shaposhnikov, Commander-in-Chief of the CIS Armed Forces, cut short a visit to Tajikistan at the end of August.

There were accusations that 201st MRD supported the Kulyabis and supplied them with arms. This was strongly denied by the divisional command, although it is possible that some Tajik nationals within its ranks did try to help fellow-members of Kulyabi clans. This was clearly without official sanction and when some armoured vehicles were stolen from the barracks in Kulyab and moved towards Kurgan-Tyube, they were destroyed by helicopters on the divisional commander's orders. No doubt there was a great deal of political confusion in Moscow as to whether their forces in Tajikistan should intervene, but it is likely that there were also practical reasons for the division's inaction. In June, when fighting started in the southern provinces, most of the Tajik conscripts deserted and returned home. The Kurgan-Tyube regiment was reduced to a strength of about fifty men, in effect its Russian officers. In these circumstances units of 201st MRD could do little more than try to defend their own barracks, in which they were effectively besieged. Colonel Merkulov, commander of the Kurgan-Tyube regiment, was told by a mob trying to break into his barracks, ‘You are no more than fifty and there are thousands of us’. ‘We're professionals,’ he replied. ‘Start something and you'll only find my men under mountains of your own dead. Any one of my subordinates is worth a hundred of your fighters.’²

While 201st MRD was just managing to protect its own barracks and the Russian refugees who fled to them, it could not stop the war itself. Much of Kurgan-Tyube Province was destroyed in bitter inter-clan fighting. Neither side had the military expertise or the equipment to win a clear victory. Instead, using small arms and armoured vehicles improvised out of tractors and lorries they ground their way through collective farms, villages and towns. Civilians fled from their ruined homes across the border to Afghanistan; many men, having seen their families into refugee camps, acquired arms and began infiltrating back into Tajikistan. The Russian Border Guards were too weak to stop them.

In early October 1,200 troops were sent from the Siberian and Volga-Urals Military Districts to reinforce 201st MRD and in the same month some of its troops helped to defend Dushanbe against a force of irregulars from Hissar, calling themselves the ‘Popular Front of Tajikistan’. Meanwhile, the idea of a CIS peace-keeping force was again being discussed. On 30 November the Russian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Tajik Defence Ministers, meeting in Termez, agreed to create a peace-keeping force from units of the first four states. It may be that they came to a further, unpublicised, understanding about the situation in Tajikistan. It has been suggested that the other Central Asian states persuaded Russia that order must be restored and the incipient Islamic fundamentalist threat in the region, the supposed cause of the disorders in Tajikistan, defeated. It can hardly be coincidence that within days a force loyal to Safarali Kenjayev, a former Communist leader and a Nabiev supporter, began a new attack on Dushanbe. It was led by a ‘special forces battalion’ of the Ministry of Internal Security, which had been trained and equipped in Uzbekistan and was provided with air support from Uzbekistan. This time 201st MRD did not intervene and Kenjayev's troops occupied Dushanbe, followed by much of Kurgan-Tyube Province. However, the fighting continued in the east of the country, where the Pamiris were able to check the new government's poorly-trained troops.³

The Popular Front drove the opposition's representatives out of government and their military forces were responsible for a harsh campaign against opposition supporters and rival ethnic groups in the countryside. The exodus of refugees to Afghanistan grew. By the early summer of 1993 most of the country was under some form of Popular Front control, though resistance continued, particularly in Gorny Badakhshan. The nature of the conflict changed from a civil war to a guerrilla war, with anti-government forces concentrated in the refugee camps across the Afghan border. With help from various Afghan groups they launched hit-and-run attacks across the border, particularly in the Pyanj and Moskovskiy areas. Inevitably, the Border Guards, under Russian jurisdiction, were often the target for these raids.

The culmination of this phase of the war came on 13 July 1993, when Border Post No. 12 in the Moskovskiy sector was attacked by mortar fire from across the Afghan border and assaulted by guerrillas. The post's defences were totally inadequate; the garrison was armed only with small arms, had no reliable communications or effective fortifications and its ammunition dump was destroyed at the start of the attack. Twenty-five men, about half the garrison, were killed and several others wounded. The shock of this attack was immediately felt in Russia. First the commander of the border troops, V. I. Shlyakhtin, and then the Security Minister, Viktor Barannikov, were relieved of their posts. The Defence Minister, General Pavel Grachev, was ordered to coordinate measures to secure the Tajik-Afghan border. Grachev, an experienced Afghan War field commander, was angered by the tactical slackness of the Border Guards, and brought in students from the Kuybyshev Military Engineering Academy to plan border defences. Over 43,000 mines had been laid by the beginning of September, obstacles built and border posts fortified. Mortars and heavy artillery covered the fortifications and coordination between the border posts and 201st MRD's quick-reaction forces was improved. These measures could not prevent attacks on the border posts completely but they have ensured that the 13 July debacle was not repeated.

More significantly, that incident ensured that action was finally taken on the deployment of a CIS force to Tajikistan. On 24 August, at a meeting of CIS Foreign and Defence Ministers in Moscow, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan agreed to set up a Joint Peace-Keeping Force with the mission of ‘stabilising the situation in Tajikistan and supporting peace’. Its commander was Russian Colonel-General Boris Pyankov⁴ and its total strength 25,000 men. Deployment began in October. Since then the force's mandate from the CIS has been renewed every six months and it can claim that the situation has become stable enough for peace talks to begin.

However, there is still no sign of an effective agreement and Russian servicemen continue to be the target of guerrilla attacks, both along the border and in the interior of the country. To follow the detailed history of these attacks would try the reader's patience unnecessarily but it is worth describing the general character of operations in Tajikistan and assessing the effectiveness of the CIS force there. The CIS Joint Peace-Keeping Force has always been a basically Russian organisation. The battalions or companies sent by the three Central Asian partners have varied in strength and effectiveness. At one time the Kyrgyz contingent refused duty when its pay fell into arrears and the Kazakh battalion was withdrawn when the Kazakh Parliament refused to approve its deployment. The Joint Force has never approached its declared strength of 25,000 men, unless by sleight of hand the Russian Border Guards are included in the figures. The 201st MRD, even after reinforcement, had a total strength of about 6,000 men.⁵ Two of its regiments were stationed c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Construction of a National Identity
• Division and Conflict
• The Tajik Conflict and the Wider World
• Peace-Making and Peace-Keeping
• Humanitarian Dimensions
• Selected Bibliography
• Maps