Tajikistan

Human rights and press freedom advocates are on high alert in Tajikistan following a spate of police beatings, puzzling arrests and deaths in custody – including one in which police say a detainee killed himself by beating his head against a wall.

Can one measure civil society by how people drive? Over the last two months, journalists and human rights activists have called attention to the driving behavior of Tajikistan’s super-wealthy class. Their expressions of concern are an outgrowth of several high-profile incidents involving reckless driving, episodes that are the subject of widespread gossip in Dushanbe.

When the water flows in Batken Province, a hardscrabble patch of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, tempers flare.

As US-led forces gear up to downsize in Afghanistan, Moscow is increasingly worried about the possibility of militants, drugs and instability seeping into Central Asia. This growing concern is pushing the Kremlin to seek a more hands-on role in Central Asian border security.

Officials in Tajikistan have resorted to price controls in an effort to halt a drastic increase in food costs. But inflation’s upward spiral shows no sign of slowing in the Central Asian nation.

Michael Emerson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, which is an independent think-tank focused on probing European Union issues through research, debates and publications.

For many families in Tajikistan, the traditional breakfast consists of bread, tea, and sugar. Now, even putting such modest fare on the table has become prohibitive, with food prices soaring by up to 30 percent in the last month.

Following Russia’s lead, Tajikistan’s main law-enforcement agency will soon drop its Soviet-era moniker, militsia, and refashion itself as the politsia. Beyond the name change, though, real reform is lacking, human rights advocates in Dushanbe say.