Attack in Moscow: who’re the Tajiks? | EUROtoday
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LMontesquieu’s query concerning the Persians – “How can one be Persian?” » – additionally applies to the smallest nation in Central Asia. A fifth of France, a largely unknown nation wedged between China, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, which has emerged on the world stage… in Moscow. The Tajiks are additionally Persian audio system, the one ones within the midst of overwhelmingly Turkish-speaking nations, even when bilingualism, even trilingualism, is commonplace in these territories.
To perceive the origin of the alleged perpetrators of the assault dedicated in Moscow on Friday March 22, we should return to Moscow. Even in Saint Petersburg, when Tsarist Russia, within the Great Game opposing England within the nineteenthe century, seized the north of present-day Tajikistan in 1864, the good emirate of Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan, with its jap half which represents the south of Tajikistan) passing shortly after underneath its protectorate, on the border with Afghanistan. But there was no query of Tajikistan but.
Tajikistan, a creation of Stalin
This nation solely arises with a “nationalities commissioner”, who’s none apart from Stalin. “The systematic policy of the USSR consisted of breaking up the old empires, the old spaces of solidarity and civilization, by inventing the principle of nationality,” explains Islamologist Olivier Roy, creator of The New Central Asia or the Making of Nations (Threshold). The emirates in addition to the previous Russian Turkestan have been dismantled. This is how the supposed language of the folks, Tajik, near Persian, was established as a nationwide language, transcribed into Cyrillic, after it was decreed that it was by no means Persian, the language of Iran, the enemy. of the USSR.
Moscow didn’t act in any other case with Moldavian (which was thought-about to don’t have anything to do with Romanian), Estonian artificially distinguished from Finnish, Uzbek, Turkmen, Turkophone languages, standardized into nationwide languages . Language made it doable to forge a nation with forceps, tabula rasa conducive to the institution of the brand new Soviet structure.
Orphan of Persian identification
But within the division of the borders of the USSR in 1924, Tajikistan was seen as a negligible amount. Not solely is it solely an autonomous republic throughout the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, however it’s disadvantaged of its two main cities of Persian tradition, Samarkand and Bukhara, devolved to its Uzbek neighbor, which might be Uzbekized. It was not till 1929 that it achieved the identical standing as its Central Asian neighbors. “The USSR created Tajikistan ex nihilo, which was nothing but a heterogeneous collection of mountains and valleys. » From the village Dushanbe – which means “Tuesday” in Tajik as a result of a market was held there that day – a capital was made, renamed Stalinabad; the second metropolis of the nation, within the north, was renamed Leninabad, as a result of Lenin was now second to Stalin.
READ ALSO Vladimir Putin shunned by the brother nations of the previous USSRMore within the help of Ankara than in that of Tehran, Moscow subsequently most popular to pamper the Turkic audio system relatively than the Persian audio system, even when the Red Army, for nearly ten years, needed to put down the revolt of the Basmatchis, Turkish-speaking Muslims, all through Central Asia. From there, a Tajikistan with a weak identification whose elites didn’t come from the folks themselves.
“These elites,” explains Olivier Roy, “were communists returning from Samarkand and Bukhara, or Ismailis from the Pamirs persecuted by the Sunni Tajiks, who embraced communism. » A 1968 Soviet atlas map shows nineteen ethnic groups for Tajikistan as well as eleven linguistic groups, including five Turkic and six Indo-European (among these, Tajik).
Emergence of Islamists after 1989
A mosaic that will explode after independence in 1991. “Local, regional identities emerge from the valleys. » We then find the Islamic Renaissance Party, which does not preach the Islamic revolution, as in Iran, but all the same a radicalization with a return to tradition, to sharia. “They are inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Afghan mujahideen, read Arabic, speak Iranian Persian, but they are not Salafists, just traditionalists. Today, women wear the veil in Tajikistan. »
They mainly come from the Gharm valley, north of the Pamirs, while the neo-communist conservatives come from the Kulob valley, like Emomali Rahmon, who has ruled the country for almost thirty years. The alliance between Islamists and democrats, which came up against clan and even mafia divisions, failed in the civil war of 1992 which opposed them to the neo-communist power, discreetly supported by Russia.
From 1992, the Islamists, definitively banned in 2015 and now qualified as terrorists by the Tajik state, moved south, to Afghanistan, where strong Tajik minorities have lived for a long time, in the northeast. “In Afghanistan, they are divided into two groups, one part joins in the east regions heavily populated by Tajiks, Badakhshan, Panshir, and the troops of Commander Massoud; another goes further, towards Kunduz, and falls under the control of the Taliban. At the beginning, it is not an ideological choice, but more an ethnic choice. » Bin Laden, to whom the Taliban entrusted the leadership of the Foreign Volunteers in 1995, thus had several thousand Tajik and Uzbek militants under his command.
These Tajiks have lived in Afghanistan for more than twenty-five years. For Olivier Roy, the perpetrators of the attack are the children of this first wave of Tajiks – some no longer speak the Russian still practiced in Tajikistan – or many other militant Tajiks who later left their country and passed through Syria where they fought the Russians.
According to the historian, Tajik specificity is therefore defined by a weak state and strong deculturation. “It’s the opposite of the Uzbeks, who were not backed by a great Persian culture, like the Tajiks. In Uzbekistan, the nation-state took shape, based on the Soviet model, consolidated by a real sense of statehood. » On the other hand, the Tajiks show all the signs of destructuring. Nearly 20% of Tajiks live in Moscow and bring in 40% of GDP, notably through female immigration, an extremely rare case. “It is a people who are experiencing a strong identity crisis, with a young floating population caught between immigration, civil war, radicalization. » Some, because of their ability to speak Persian, are sent to Iran to carry out attacks.
A Russian big brother under threat
And the Russians? Their main base abroad is precisely in Tajikistan, where they are the economic lifeline, threatened however by the Chinese who have become the main economic partner. “When the Americans landed in Afghanistan, Russia was afraid of losing its leadership in Central Asia. When it asked these countries to be able to set up a base, only Tajikistan accepted, delighted to benefit from its sponsorship, while its relations with its neighbors are execrable, given an aberrant border drawing in 1895 and 1924. .”
Since the First Congress of the Peoples of the Orient in 1920, the USSR has all the time posed itself because the protector of Muslim peoples. Contrary to what the conservative French proper claims, Putin will not be the defender of Christianity. He declared warfare on the Orthodox, the Ukrainians, and depends on a Muslim card, Kadyrov, in Chechnya, trustworthy to the Russian methodology, which goals to delegate the upkeep of order. But enjoying this card doesn’t in any manner assure the loyalty or friendship of Muslim topics, because the Moscow snub demonstrated.
https://www.lepoint.fr/monde/attentat-a-moscou-qui-sont-les-tadjiks-01-04-2024-2556428_24.php