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PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN TAJIKISTAN
ANDREY GROZIN,
Head of the Central Asia and Kazakhstan Studies Department, Institute of the CIS Countries, Moscow
I do not think that the parliamentary elections in Tajikistan are of crucial importance.
Over 3 million electors voted in more than 3000 polling stations, the turnout was high – 85%. It is clear that here the administrative resource was used in full measure.
On the eve of the elections, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights published a report on conducting of the election campaign and on the preparation for the elections in Tajikistan, which would be unwelcome for the Tajikistani authorities. Thus it was clear even before the elections that the Tajikistani authorities could not achieve their main object from those elections – to improve Tajikistan’s image on the international scene.
That’s why initially it was planned not to use the administrative resource on a large scale. Dushanbe wanted the international community to recognize those elections at last. But the local authorities, khokims, failed to resist the temptation. The plan to elect the ruling party representatives to the Parliament was certainly implemented. So, there were as many mistakes and violations, including the gross ones, in those elections as in the previous elections.
Why do the Tajikistani authorities need the international recognition of the elections? The point is not how many seats the opposition will get in the Parliament and how many representatives of the Communist Party, the Islamic Revival of Tajikistan Party or other parties will be elected to the Parliament. Those questionmarks are of little interest and of little significance. The population is depoliticized and is not concerned about who will be elected to the Parliament.
The reason is that Washington and Brussels said that they would provide financial support for Tajikistan only if the Tajikistani authorities held fair, open and transparent elections. That’s why Tajikistan’s main task was to improve its international image.
However the Tajikistani authorities wanted to kill two birds with one stone – to continue the active campaign on the population’s buying shares, to spend the gain to construct the Roghun hydropower plant and, at the same time, to conduct the election campaign. But they failed to combine those things, the Roghun project overshadowed the elections. They had too little resources and too little knowledge to conduct two campaigns. So, I do not think that the authorities had such a purpose, they just failed to combine the two campaigns. The predominance of the Roghun subject in the mass media is recorded in the report published by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
In addition, the Roghun subject is of more importance to average citizens than the elections are. Khokims, who conducted the Roghun campaign, continued to follow the general line.
All of those events devalued the elections in many respects. But they are not expected to lead to social convulsions in the country. The population is not as active as it was in Kyrgyzstan before 2006 and, as I have said, the population is depoliticized. Apart from that, according to the most conservative estimates, one in four citizens is outside the country.
Nobody has answered an important question yet – how were the elections organized among the Tajikistani migrants, especially in Russia? According to the official data, 650 thousand Tajikistanis live and work abroad. But independent observers confidently mention a different figure – one million.
I believe that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will criticize Tajikistan and the elections will be declared to be undemocratic again. The Tajikistani authorities will not achieve their main end. The imitation of Tajikistan’s politics radically differs from the real politics.
March 5, 2010
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