Tajikstan on the road to peace, finally

After five years of bloody civil war and a loss of at least 60,000 lives, a strife-torn Tajikstan is finally limping along the road to peace.

On March 8, Tajik President Imamali Rakhmanov and his armed Islamist opponents, led by Sayyid Abdullah Nouri, signed a pact in Moscow for merging their respective armed forces. The merger would be under the terms of an earlier agreement signed in the Iranian city of Mashhad.

A follow-up pact, this one on political power sharing, would be signed at the second round of negotiations in Teheran.

The March 8 agreement was jointly brokered by the United Nations and Russia. All along, Russia has been Tajik President Imamali Rakhmanov's single most important backer. (Nouris's Islamist camp had Iranian support throughout.)

While the long-suffering Tajik people, as well as their neighbouring countries, welcome this move towards peace, it has created a dilemma for the United States policy-makers.

Ever since Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979 (which toppled the pro-American Iranian monarch Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi), the US has presented Iran as a 'destabilising' force in the region, later formally placing it in its list of nations that support international terrorism.

Later, when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 and six Muslim majority independent republics took birth in Central Asia and Azerbaijan, Washington issued dire warnings asking these states not to emulate Iran's example. The US recommended following Turkey's model of rule -- where the constitution guarantees secularism.

Iran's part in the Tajik civil war, however, shows that far from destabilising, Teheran is acting as a stabilising force. It has successfully pressured the Nouri camp into compromising with Rakhmanov, whom the Islamists had routinely denounced as Moscow's puppet.

This convergence of the policies of Iran and Russia has much to do with the rise of the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban movement in Afghanistan -- which borders Tajikstan and Iran. The Taliban is the single most powerful force there, and is now waiting for the snows to melt in the Hindu Kush ranges so that it can move north and conquer the remaining areas of Afghanistan.

The pact, it is expected, would prepare Tajik voters for multi-party parliamentary elections. Nouri's party is still committed to founding an Islamist state in Tajikistan, but wants to achieve it through democratic means -- just like the Welfare Party has in done in Turkey.

So here is Teheran acting as a midwife for a multi-party democracy in Tajikistan -- a fact likely to go down well in Kremlin, but unlikely to please Washington which would rather have it as the villain of the piece.