Is Tajikistan reshuffle a prelude?
Long-familiar faces in the government have been pushed aside. The official explanation for the shakeup is that there is a need for fresh blood. But is there more to this than meets the eye?
To serve in the government of Tajikistan, competence and suitability are not absolute requirements.
What matters is loyalty and, ideally, personal connections.
For that reason, sudden shakeups in the upper echelons of power inevitably raise eyebrows. The past few days have borne witness to an especially wide-ranging reshuffle.
Rahmon Yusuf Ahmadzoda has dutifully served as the point of the authoritarian repression spear in his guise as General Prosecutor since 2015. His position within the elite was solidified in 2022, when his son, Safarhon, married the youngest daughter of President Emomali Rahmon, Farzon.
This week he was fired.
Evil tongues in Dushanbe have put it about that Safarhon, his son, might have been partly to blame for this turn of events by engaging in infidelity.
Yusuf Ahmadzoda is to be replaced by Habibullo Vohidzoda, who is currently the Deputy Prosecutor General and Chief Military Prosecutor.
Vohidzoda, who used to go by the Russified surname Vohidov, is quite the survivor. He was fired as a deputy Prosecutor General back in 2015 under a cloud of disgrace when President Rahmon strongly implied that he was embroiled in corruption. He quickly overcame that career hiccup, however, and resumed his career climb.
Another casualty from this week’s shakeup was Sherali Mirzo, who has lost his job as Defence Minister, a post he took up in 2013. He has been shunted off to a nebulously defined role as head of the Main Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets.
Further noteworthy casualties of a reshuffle that has been ongoing since the start of this month include Supreme Court chairman Shermukhammad Shohiyon, who is being replaced by the outgoing chair of the Supreme Economic Court, Rustam Mirzozoda Pirakhmad; Rustam Nazarzoda, who cedes leadership of the Emergency Services Ministry to the severe and uncommunicative outgoing border services chief, Rajabali Rahmonali; and Karahon Chillazoda, now the ex-head of the Audit Chamber. The Labour Ministry and the state broadcaster are getting new bosses too.
This is a largely indistinct cohort of personalities.
But one fairly well-known inductee to the ranks of the freshly unemployed is Beg Sabur, the widely derided now-former head of the telecoms regulator. That body confoundingly doubles as the de facto owner of the state telecommunications company, which has been run as a lucrative cash cow by Sabur and his immediate family. Like his colleague in the General Prosecutor’s Office, Sabur probably owed his ability to hold onto his job to his family ties, by marriage, to President Rahmon.
It certainly was not because he was good at this job. Tajikistan’s once-promising telecoms sector has wilted under his venal watch. Internet speeds are notoriously dismal. Mobile telecommunications companies have regularly been stung with large fines by the cash-strapped government on spurious grounds.
Sabur’s replacement is a 34-year-old, Ukraine-educated telecoms specialist, so there is muted optimism things could improve.
Special attention has been paid during this personnel bloodletting to the prosecutorial and security bloc. Earlier in January, city prosecutors across the country were replaced. Official statements attributed this to a desire to bring in younger faces. A similar process has been underway in the Defence Ministry and the National Guard.
The State Committee for National Security (or GKNB, the latter-day KGB) and the Interior Ministry have so far been spared these convulsions.
Rumours have swirled for years about rivalries between GKNB chief Saimumin Yatimov, who has been in situ since 2010, and other powerful figures within the elite. When these stories surface, they are accompanied by speculation that Yatimov may be about to depart the scene. But he has defied the Cassandras thus far.
Interior Minister Ramazon Rahimzoda is another figure who looks unremovable until such as time as he is finally removed. His chief commendation to President Rahmon is unshakable loyalty and willingness to engage in extreme flattery. In a peak display of that quality, Rahimzoda, who dabbles in the poetic arts in his free time, put pen to paper around a decade ago to describe Rahmon as, among other things, the “face of God on earth.”
It is a mystery why this reshuffle is happening. Tajik government officials are not required to explain themselves to the press or the public. One strong suspicion is that this may somehow be related to the presidential succession process.
The consensus is that Rahmon, who turns 73 this year, will eventually hand over the reins to his 37-year-old son, Rustam Emomali, who currently occupies a dual role as speaker of the Senate and mayor of the capital, Dushanbe.
What is less evident is when this will happen. Forecasters have repeatedly had their suspicions proven wrong.
In 2016, the government hastily arranged a referendum to lower the age limit for presidential candidates to 30. That move was seen as teeing up Rustam Emomali for a 2020 run.
But the deadline came and went.
Possibly, some suspect, because it was not felt that a young man with limited legitimacy and charisma could have taken on the tricky job of running a poor and instability-prone nation while it was in the grip of COVID-induced tribulations.
Since then, not a year seems to have passed without Tajikistan’s broader neighbourhood contriving anxiety-inducing uncertainties.
First there was the Taliban’s seizure of power in neighbouring Afghanistan, in 2021. The following year, Russia, a country in which hundreds of thousands of Tajik migrant labourers live, invaded Ukraine. Russia’s closest economic partners have been battling to cope with the consequences of that war ever since.
Last year, a mass murder at a concert venue outside Moscow allegedly executed by a group of Tajik nationals apparently motivated by loyalty to the Islamic State precipitated an escalation of anti-migrant sentiment in Russia.
On the domestic front, the Rahmon regime has systematically and ruthlessly picked fights with perceived foes as a pretext of clearing the field of all hypothetical opposition to the ruling order. In one recent development, the authorities last year imprisoned a former foreign minister, a man who briefly served as acting president in the early 1990s, several one-time military commanders, journalists and a slew of others over an alleged (and likely inexistent) plot to mount a coup.
In this optic, the injection of new blood into the highest echelons of government may signal that the time to pull the ripcord on Operation Succession is approaching.
But experience shows, frustratingly, that the exact opposite is as likely to be true.
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