A follow-up report issued recently by the UN General Assembly’s Human Rights Council assails Tajikistan’s government for failing to implement recommendations contained in an earlier survey concerning atrocities committed during the country’s civil war in the mid-1990s.

The follow-up report relates to a mission conducted in 2019 by UN researchers intent on promoting the closure of old societal wounds left by the civil war. Among that mission’s recommendations was the establishment of a “a truth-seeking State policy” and the development of “specific mechanisms, supported by dedicated resources, for dealing with disappearances caused by and related to the civil war.” 

The Tajik civil war ended in 1998 with the signing of a power-sharing agreement between forces loyal to President Emomali Rahmon and an opposition coalition. Over the subsequent decades, Rahmon assiduously consolidated his power to the point that the leading opposition force during the war, the Islamic Renaissance Party, is now officially banned.

The UN council’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which prepared the follow-up assessment and presented it in late September, judged the Tajik government’s lack of commitment to implementing the UN Human Rights Council’s recommendations in unusually harsh terms.

“Based on the information provided, the Working Group finds that Tajikistan has not taken any significant steps to ensure the enjoyment of the right to know the truth and to ensure accountability for enforced disappearances that began during the civil war,” the report states. “No steps have seemingly been taken either to grant measures of reparation for the harm suffered by victims of gross human rights violations.”

“In 2019, the Working Group observed with concern that the wounds left by the violations perpetrated during the civil war remained deep 20 years later, but were intentionally ignored,” the report added. “The Working Group observes with dismay that, five years later, the situation has not changed.”