last week the NED hosted a presentation by Nigina Bakhrieva, director of the Republican Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a Dushanbe-based nongovernmental organization. She talked about the challenges to her line of work during the country’s turbulent history since independence in 1991 in the context of the brutal 1992-1997 civil war, in which over 50,000 people died and 800,000 were displaced. But her remarks made me think about a broader topic: the implications of armed conflict for the post-conflict political and economic reform.

Needless to say, war is always a great tragedy on a humanitarian level, where in the end the body count and destruction may be all that’s left. Once the guns are silent, though, a new chapter starts for the survivors, who need to carry on but are not necessarily given a fresh start. Instead, they have to work within the constraints of the war’s outcome, or – as a Nobel Prize winning poet Wisława Szymborska put it bluntly – clean up the mess:

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Not every conflict outcome is a catalyst for positive political and economic change the way, say, the end of World War II was for Germany and Japan. Far more frequently, conflicts (especially civil wars) end with uneasy stalemates, create more chaos, or reinforce the pre-war status quo. The latter seems to be the case in Tajikistan, where in spite of the bloodshed there hasn’t really been a chance to fundamentally redefine the institutions of the state. The country’s post-Soviet government — and governance — has remained virtually untouched by the war: authoritarian president Emomali Rahmon has been in power since 1992, one-party rule system persists, and the opposition is suppressed. Hence, the ruling elite in charge of the post-conflict “tidying up” efforts only strengthened its grip on power as a result of the conflict and has little incentive to reform.

It comes as no surprise that Tajikistan disappointingly resembles many other post-conflict countries, where foreign aid earmarked for reconstruction has been significant and yet the results leave a lot to wish for as far as meaningful democratic and market reforms. As the new generation enters adulthood (35% of Tajikistan’s population is under the age of 15), one of the key questions it will have to answer is how to transition from relying on humanitarian relief to broad-based development anchored domestically. In the light of experiences of other post-conflict countries (see CIPE’s Feature Service article), the way forward needs to include improving business environment through increasing the private sector’s dialogue with the government on the necessary economic policies. The problem remains, however, how to accomplish that in a country which is less then democratic and where the idea of activism is associated with the memories of anti-government demonstrations and rallies that sparked the civil war.

A small-step approach based on cooperation rather than confrontation between the private sector and the government on specific policy areas seems to be a place to start. After all, wide-spread poverty breeds discontent and that is something any government mindful of the threat of more civil unrest would want to avoid. Therefore, there is a chance that at least some progress can be made on policies meant to reduce informal sector, empower entrepreneurs, and so on, helping to create the mechanisms allowing the population to lift itself out of poverty.

Back to Ms. Bakhrieva’s talk: although her work focuses on human rights NGOs, she had a few valuable recommendations for foreign donors which can be applied to other reform areas, including international organizations working with the private sector. First, there is the need for flexibility for the local organizations to design their own programs and strategies. This on-the-ground leadership provides the sense of ownership and helps to incorporate unique local knowledge of the country’s circumstances to design the most impactful solutions. Second, the sense of partnership between the donor and recipient organizations is necessary, so that the latter does not act as a proxy blindly implementing top-down approaches. Finally, emphasis on working with the young people, for whom the memory of the divisive bloody conflict will become more and more distant as time goes by, is crucial, since (to quote Szymborska again) the war-torn generation of…

those who knew what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

And that new generation may be the country’s best chance for progress.

This entry was posted on June 12, 2007 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Eurasia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.