Tajik terrorists and Russian fears

It has emerged that the four gunmen who allegedly murdered 139 spectators and injured 182 others at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall theater on March 22, 2024 were all citizens of the small post-Soviet country of Tajikistan in Central Asia. Does their nationality have anything to do with their terrorism? Many Russians would argue that this is the case.

Richard Foltz

Full professor in the department of religions and cultures at Concordia University*

Tajikistan, a landlocked country of 10 million people sandwiched between Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and China, is the poorest of the former Soviet republics. Known for its corruption and political repression, since 1994 it has suffered from the iron fist of President Emomali Rahmon. More than 3 million Tajiks are estimated to live in Russia, approximately a third of the total Tajik population. Most of them have the precarious status of “guest workers,” working in low-paid jobs in areas such as construction, produce markets or cleaning public toilets.

While the decline of Russia’s population has led to an increasing reliance on foreign workers to meet these needs within its workforce, the attitude of Russians towards the natives of Central and Eastern Asia Caucasian is generally negative, similar to the American stereotype about Mexicans so infamously expressed by Donald Trump in 2015: “They bring drugs. They bring crime. They are rapists. »

Non-Slavs are systematically discriminated against in Russia, and since 2022 they have been disproportionately conscripted and sent to Ukraine to serve as cannon fodder at the front.

Few peoples in history have seen their status collapse as dramatically as the Tajiks have over the past 100 years. For more than a millennium, the Tajiks, Persian-speaking descendants of the ancient Sogdians who dominated the Silk Road, constituted the cultural elite of Central Asia.

From the “New Persian Renaissance” of the 10th century^e century, when their capital, Bukhara, came to rival Baghdad as a center of Islamic learning and high culture, Tajiks served as the leading scholars and bureaucrats in the major cities of Central Asia until the time of the Russian Revolution. The famous medieval mathematician Avicenna was of Tajik origin, as were the hadith collector Bukhari, the Sufi poet Rumi and many others.

Excluded by the Bolsheviks

As the primary purveyors of Islamic civilization in Central Asia, the Tajiks were seen by the Bolsheviks as representing an obsolete legacy that socialism sought to overcome. Tajiks were virtually excluded from the massive social and political restructuring imposed on Central Asia during the early years of the Soviet Union, with most of their historic territory, including the legendary cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, being attributed to Turkish-speaking Uzbeks who were considered more malleable.

It was not until 1929 that the Tajiks established their own republic, composed mainly of marginal and mountainous territories and devoid of any significant urban center.

Throughout the 20th^e century, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was the poorest and underdeveloped region of the former USSR, and it has retained this dismal status since its independence in 1991.

From 1992 to 1997, the country was plunged into a devastating civil war that destroyed almost all infrastructure. Since then, President Rahmon has used the threat of a resumption of civil conflict to justify his absolute power.

The specter of radical Islam emanating from neighboring Afghanistan – where the Tajik population far exceeds that of Tajikistan – provided further justification for Rahmon’s repressive policies.

In today’s Tajikistan, even those with a university education find it almost impossible to earn a salary that would allow them to build a normal family life. Powerless and humiliated by the system, they are easy prey for radical Islamic preachers who give them a sense of worth and a real goal to achieve.

The financial desperation in the background creates an explosive cocktail: one of the suspects in the recent Moscow attacks, who told his Russian interrogators that he had been recruited by an “imam” through the Telegram platform, said he was promised a cash reward of half a million Russian rubles (approximately C$7,300) to carry out his atrocities.

Normal, sane human beings everywhere are horrified by terrorist acts, regardless of how they are justified by their perpetrators, and the long-suffering people of Tajikistan are no exception.

Tragically, the conditions under which a small number of extremists can view the psychopathic murder of innocent civilians for money or ideology as an attractive option show no signs of abating. Russia’s ridiculous attempt to somehow link Moscow’s attacks to Ukraine is a clumsy diversion from the consequences of its relations with Central Asia.

* Richard Foltz is also theauthor of the work Tajiks: Persian speakers from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2023).

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