Tajikistan’s forbidden question: Why China is off-limits
Rukhshona Hakimova, a journalist and researcher, asked about Beijing’s influence – and paid the price with her freedom.
All too often in Tajikistan, the cruelty is the point.
Until early last year, Rukhshona Hakimova, 31, was eking out a living as one of a dwindling community of unaffiliated, independent journalists. Her thoughts were mainly on her two small children, the youngest of which was less than one year old.
In February, she took on a routine research assignment for a Kyrgyzstan-headquartered research agency, Central Asia Barometer. Her brief was to interview a couple dozen talking heads – journalists, political analysts, and the like – on an admittedly tricky topic: the influence of China in Tajikistan.
That decision has ended up costing her eight years of her freedom.
The details are scanty, which is normal in Tajikistan. Hakimova was arrested and then later charged with treason, accused of conducting espionage for an unidentified foreign state.
As far as can be discerned, the core item of evidence against the journalist was the list of questions provided by Central Asia Barometer. This list, which has been obtained by Havli, included such queries as “What is your general attitude towards the Chinese presence in our country?”, “Why do you think China provides aid to our country?”, and “Do you think China is a good partner for our country?”
Hakimova’s trial was held behind closed doors. There was no opportunity for public scrutiny. She received no real legal defence.
Conviction was a foregone conclusion. Only the penalty was uncertain. Prosecutors asked for a 16-year prison sentence. The Supreme Court ruled to put her away for eight years.
Hakimova’s children have been placed in the care of relatives and will not see their mother again for years unless the state chooses to bestow clemency.
In one minor concession, Hakimova was permitted to remain free on bail during the trial so that she could tend to her infant child.
Most of Tajikistan’s political prisoners are male. But the Tajik justice system has a fondness for crushing women under its wheels too.
And the uncrossable red line, it appears, is anything touching on the country’s relations with China.
Another recent victim of the Tajik justice system was the journalist and activist, Ulfathonim Mamadshoeva.
In May 2022, Mamadshoeva, then 65, was arrested on charges of supposedly inciting unrest in Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, or GBAO, a mountainous territory that is home to ethnically and religiously distinct Pamiri minorities.
Prosecutors maintain she did this in collusion with an unidentified foreign state. This is another hallmark of the Tajik repression machine. Dushanbe maintains relations of varying cordiality with all-comers – China, Russia, the West, and even Iran, depending on the year – so it never feels sufficiently emboldened to explicitly identify which outside force is purportedly plotting against it. The other reason is that the plots in question are typically, as far as one can tell, pure figments of the imagination.
In that instance, though, investigators did drop a major hint by releasing covertly filmed footage of an encounter between Mamadshoeva and a pair of U.S. Embassy officials at Segafredo, a popular café in downtown Dushanbe.
Mamadshoeva was induced to reveal, in a filmed, struggle session-style confession, that the pair were curious to learn about China’s military presence in her native GBAO region. What they were particularly curious about was a Beijing-operated military outpost that appeared in the late 2010s near a section of border where Afghanistan, China and Tajikistan intersect.
China and Tajikistan alike deny the existence of this facility, so nosiness from outsiders is not welcomed.
The U.S. Embassy made no public efforts to intervene on Mamadshoeva’s behalf. Quite the opposite. One day after a particularly vicious smear attack on Mamadshoeva aired on state television, then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu paid a visit to Dushanbe.
The trip was hailed as a success for U.S.-Tajik relations.
“It was a pleasure for the senior U.S. delegation to … discuss priorities and opportunities to strengthen [U.S.-Tajikistan] cooperation on shared security, economic, and human rights goals,” the Embassy in Dushanbe tweeted at the time.
To deal with Mamadshoeva, prosecutors exploited a bout of public turmoil in the Pamirs that had occurred earlier that year as a legal cudgel. At least 40 demonstrators are understood to have died during that unrest when security services with live firearms crushed protests against plans to further dilute the GBAO’s threadbare autonomy.
Prosecutors claimed Mamadshoeva had been scheming behind the scenes to somehow instigate this bloodshed. No evidence was produced. It was not needed. Tajikistan’s courts always find the defendant guilty in such trials, which are also conducted in secret.
At the end of 2022, the Supreme Court, the same court in which Hakimova was tried along with several other former officials and politicians accused of planning a coup, sentenced Mamadshoeva to 21 years in prison.
But why is it that China’s presence in Tajikistan such a sensitive topic? The answer likely lies in the deep asymmetry of the relationship.
China’s economic influence in Tajikistan is vast. At last count, Tajikistan’s debt to China stood at around $1 billion. That is almost one-third of the overall $3.25 billion worth of external debt that Tajikistan held as of late last year.
The debt is being paid off in less-than-transparent ways. Military cooperation may be part of the equation. But Tajikistan has to all intents and purposes also essentially given away several mineral mining sites to Chinese companies and dispensed with open bidding processes.
It is that final point – and its admittedly minimal potential to inspire active indignation among a heavily cowed population – that added a potentially toxic sting to the questions posed by Hakimova for Central Asia Barometer.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the company that commissioned the survey conducted by Hakimova.