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Guner Ozkan
USAK Center for Eurasian Studies |
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Friday, 12 March 2010
Regardless of the fact that it has remained the poorest of all newly independent states (NIS), Tajikistan maintains its strategic importance for many states for many reasons. The bloodiest internal conflict in the first half of the 1990s was contributed to the active involvement of Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan via the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to curb possible radical Islamic prevalence throughout the entire region. Tajikistan accepted to accommodate the opposition, including the Islamists, within the system with the end of the civil war in 1997, but has failed to successfully embrace them thus far. The state itself under President Emomali Rahmon has become more exclusivist. So, can the results of the parliamentary election held on the 28th of February be interpreted as a promise of more democracy and transparency in the country or not?
Domestic Political Environment
In order to provide some answers to the above question, one needs to first have a closer look at the current political situation in Tajikistan and the recent election results there. As known from the recent history of post-Soviet Central Asia, the current political structure was set up after the end of internal conflict in 1997 in which over 50 thousand people lost their lives.
The internal war between the People’s Front (a pro-government coalition) and the United Tajik Opposition (UTO) (a union of democratic and Islamic parties) ended with the help of the UN, Russia and Iran, and the achievement of a reconciliation process under the auspices of the UN was announced in 2002. But, the UTO, comprised of democrats and Islamists, could not get what they were promised. According to the reconciliation deal, the UTO agreed to obtain 30% of political positions in the government, local administration and the police and security bodies. On the other hand, however, in time, prominent opposition figures were all sidelined or imprisoned. The main priority of President Rahmon became consolidation of his power rather than promoting democracy in Tajikistan. For instance, a constitutional referendum held in 2003 led to a further increase in his power and allowed him to be re-elected to two more terms. Under Rahmon, new laws passed on the media, NGOs, freedom of religion and state language have been described by many as restrictive. Additionally, in order to give the impression of Tajikistan having a pluralistic political environment, Rahmon is believed to have been the main figure behind the establishment of two political parties in 2006, the Agrarian Party and the Party of Economic Reforms.
During the election observation mission, many people talked to, either in Dushanbe or Khojand or Istaravshan, stressed that they did not want to experience the same situation again. These feelings and views are not only limited to the ordinary Tajik individuals; the political party leaders, especially the Islamic Revival Party (IRP), which is the successor of the main Islamist group fighting within the United Tajik Opposition against the Communists between 1992 and 1997, seem to have the same understanding for the sake of stability in the country. Already, before the election, the leader of the IRP, Mukhiddin Kabiri, acknowledged that they have had many problems, all of which have occurred during peacetime. He no longer believes in fighting another bloody war by expressing that "the war and bloodshed are over and that is what matters most.”
Results of the Election
The recent parliamentary election is in fact not very much different from those of the previous ones in terms of overall outcomes.
Eight political parties contested for 63 seats in the lower house of the parliament. In the election, in which the turnout was 85% of 3.5 million registered voters, the ruling People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan (PDPT) won 72% of the votes with 54 seats out of 63 in the lower house of the parliament. For the first time, even with a slight margin, the IRP received more votes than the Communist Party, with 7.7 % and 7.2 %, respectively, while the rest of the parties garnered fewer votes.
Obviously, the IRP is the political party that was disappointed most because they expected before the election that they would collect around 30% of the popular votes. As far as the results are considered, the dominance of Rahmon’s PDPT will continue in the parliament while the rest of the political parties inside or outside of the parliament seem to remain sidelined in the political and governmental affairs of the country. Although IRP leader Kabiri announced that they would appeal to the results and stage street protests, it is unlikely that the outcome will change or that there will be a popular unrest against the government since the memories of internal fighting and the death of tens of thousands are still fresh among the majority of people in the camps of the government and opposition alike. External conditions in the region and the wider world, too, are far from being convenient for the IRP to further their claims and causes. Accordingly, the composition of the Tajik parliament and domestic politics itself in the country are not going to be much different from that of the pre-election picture.
A Democratic and Transparent Election or Not?
Whether the election was democratic and transparent can be best told by results that observers provided. There were about 500 international observers in Tajikistan to monitor the parliamentary elections. The OSCE/ODIHR deployed over 150 observers; the rest were stationed by the CIS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Though they all observed the same election in a similar condition, the views of the OSCE/ODIHR and the others differed considerably on whether the election was democratic and transparent or not.
The head of CIS election observation mission, Sergey Lebedev, announced just after the election that it was democratic, transparent and free. He also admitted some minor violations in the election process, such as family voting and filling in ballot papers outside polling booths. Yet, for him, family voting, which he considered as a procedural violation, is not in fact an uncommon behaviour throughout the entire NIS. Lebedev added that the level of such election violations were very limited in number and could no way be considered that they would have changed the election results in which the incumbent party of the President, the PDPT, won with a greater majority.
In a similar way, Mikhail Konarovsky, the head of the SCO election monitoring mission, which consisted of 16 people, expressed their satisfaction with the election. Like Lebedev of the CIS, Konarovsky reiterated that the election had been conducted in a democratic, free and transparent atmosphere, and that the election officials and voters alike had acted in accordance with the rules expressed by the laws of Tajikistan. For Konarovsky, apart from few shortcomings like seing on one occasion two people in a single polling booth at the same time, there was no problem in the election processes that the SCO teams observed.
Unlike the CIS and SCO, the OSCE/ODIHR had a very different view on the election in Tajikistan. It deployed 144 short-term observers (STO) under 8 teams covering the regions of Sughd, Dusanbe, Garm, Kurgan-Tyube and Kulob. STOs from OSCE/ODIHR observed all processes in the election, including opening, voting, closing, counting and tabulation. The OSCE/ODIHR cannot visit all polling stations for obvious reasons during any election observation mission in any country. But, as far as the number of STOs, regions and approximate number of visited polling stations are concerned, the OSCE/ODIHR is able to draw a picture that can, more or less, tell if the parliamentary election in Tajikistan was democratic and transparent or not.
According to the OSCE/ODIHR statistics based on the polling stations visited, 36.6% of voters cast their ballots without showing any identity document. Moreover, it was reported that 50.6% of the signatures on the voters’ lists were identical. Incidents of group voting, proxy voting, improperly sealed ballot boxes and violation of ballot secrecy were observed as 28.8 %, 24.5 %, 16.7 % and 10.4 %, respectively. Also, in 31.4 % of all polling stations visited, there were unauthorised people, 5.1% of whom were seen to be actively interfering in the works of Precinct Election Commissions (PECs). It was also reported that there were inconsistencies between the number of people who already voted and the number of both signatures on voters’ lists and votes in ballot boxes estimated from outside.
It was revealed by the OSCE/ODIHR observation mission that practices of counting and tabulation were in fact much more problematic than those of the voting processes. In almost half of the polling stations (PSs) observed, the counting procedures were not followed properly by the PEC members. For instance, they did not invalidate unused ballots (28 cases), enter the cancelled ballots in the results protocols (30 cases) and record the total number of the ballots in the ballot boxes in the protocols (25 cases). Also, PEC members in almost one-third of the PSs found it difficult to complete the protocols. Indeed, observers marked that in 37.2% of the PSs, PECs’ understanding of counting procedures was "bad” and "very bad”. Nearly half of the PECs did not send the protocols to the District Election Commissions (DECs) straightaway and, in some cases, they were filled with pencil or left blank. In the 22 cases of the observation of the DECs, changes were made to the protocols sent by the PECs. Nevertheless, a positive situation that was observed in the voting processes was that 91.1% of the PSs visited had party or candidate observers, mostly from the IRP and PDPT. Except for a few cases against representatives of the IRP, party observers did not face any obstacles in their monitoring processes.
As a result, Tajikistan has once again lost another opportunity to improve its already too low democracy and transparency records. The only real opposition party in Tajikistan, and perhaps in all of Central Asia, the IRP, was again put aside through an election that was clearly undemocratic and non-transparent. Perhaps, as many experts on the region may also share, Tajikistan under Rahmon would have been a model for the rest of the Central Asian states if it had managed to have a more democratic election and acted more inclusively towards the IRP, a real opposition political party defending a secular system and moderation. Thus, the recent Tajik election seems to have left all those hopes of Tajikistan for another winter in five years’ time.
*Dr. GUNER OZKAN is an expert on the Caucasus Region at the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization (USAK) and a Lecturer at Mugla University
