We need your help. For the last three years, we at MRG have run projects promoting freedom of religion and belief across Asia. In Afghanistan we have fostered strong partnerships with amazing local organizations representing ethnic and religious minorities. They were doing outstanding work, educating minority community members about their rights, collecting evidence of discrimination and human rights abuses, and carrying out advocacy.
Not all have been able to flee. Many had no option but to go into hiding. Some did not have a valid passport. Activists can no longer carry out the work they had embarked on. They can no longer draw a salary, which means they cannot feed their families.
With a season of failed crops and a cold winter ahead, the future is bleak for too many. We refuse to leave Afghanistan behind. We are asking you today to stand by us as we stand by them. We will also use your donations to support our Afghan partners to pay their staff until they can regroup and make new plans, to use their networks to gather and send out information when it is safe to do so, and to seek passports and travel options for those who are most vulnerable and who have no option but to flee to safety.
Azadeh worked for a global organization offering family planning services. Standing for everything the Taliban systematically reject, Azadeh had no option but to flee to Pakistan. MRG is working with our partners in Pakistan to support many brave Afghans who have escaped Afghanistan because of their humanitarian or human rights work or their faith.
They are now in various secure locations established by our local partners on the ground in Pakistan. Although they are safer in Pakistan than Afghanistan, Hazara Shia and other religious minorities are also persecuted there. We need your help, to support those who put their lives on the line for basic human rights principles we all believe in: equality, mutual respect, and freedom of belief and expression. The situation on the ground changes daily as more people arrive and some leave.
Aluminium mining in Baphlimali, India, has caused environment devastation and has wrecked the lifestyle of thousands of Adivasis. For centuries, Adivasi communities like the Paraja, Jhodia, Penga and Kondh have been living amidst the Baphlimali foothills. For generations they have lived in harmony with nature. They lived through rain fed subsistence agriculture of millet, cereals, pulses, rice and collection of non-timber forest produce, e.
With widespread mining activities and linked deforestation, they have lost access to forest products and to the much needed pasture land in the vicinity of their villages. Your help will mean that MRG can support communities like these to help decision makers listen better to get priorities right for local people and help them to protect their environment and restore what has been damaged.
The above picture is of a tribal woman forcibly displaced from her home and land by District Forest Officers in the district of Ganjam, Odisha. Her cashew plantation burned in the name of protection of forests. Please note that the picture is to illustrate the story and is not from Baphlimali. Esther is a member of the indigenous Ogiek community living in the Mau Forest in Kenya. Her family lives in one of the most isolated and inaccessible parts of the forest, with no roads, no health facilities and no government social infrastructure.
The Ogiek were evicted from some forest areas, which have since been logged. The Ogiek consider it essential to preserve their forest home; others are content to use it to make money in the short term.
Esther has a year-old daughter living with a physical disability who has never attended basic school, as it is over 12 kilometres away. Young children living in these areas face challenges such as long distances to school, fears of assault by wild animals and dangers from people they may encounter on the journey.
Because the Ogiek have no legally recognised land rights, despite hundreds of years of residence in this forest, the government is refusing to provide social services or public facilities in the area. Ensuring that the Ogiek can access health services and education is essential and will mean that they can continue living on their land, protecting and conserving the environment there. We are also advocating for equity in access to education and health by supporting OPDP to ensure that budgets for services are allocated fairly and are used well.
The consequence of this wealth is that successive governments — colonial and post-colonial — have seen greater value in the land than the people. This has led to extensive open cast mining which is doubly damaging to the climate, despite the opposition of the Khadia tribe. Archana is a rare example of an indigenous activist who is involved in UN debates; we need to support many more indigenous peoples and acknowledge their expertise.
Minority Rights Group acts as a bridge between excluded communities and decision makers, telling indigenous peoples about opportunities to contribute and reminding decision makers that they need to listen to and involve all, particularly those with proven strategies of living in harmony with nature.
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The oasis needed government and protection: the steppe could provide both. The steppe lacked administration and education: the oasis could provide both. Within two or three generations the steppe-dwellers usually gave up their habitual way of life and language. There was a far greater influx of nomadic Turkic peoples during the earlier Qarakhanid era.
This time the newcomers settled in rural areas as well as in towns; they not only retained their tongue but also eventually gave it to lands with ancient Iranian traditions. Even before the Mongols, many Turkic toponyms had appeared in the Zarafshon Valley. The interaction among Tajiks, sedentarised Turks and nomadic Uzbeks remained a highly complex process.
Culturally, only language clearly demarcates the Tajik and Uzbek categories, and the prevalence of bilingualism lessens the importance of this division. In Eastern Bukhara, where Tajiks constituted the majority of the population, large numbers of Uzbeks ultimately lost their native tongue and clan divisions, and adopted the way of life of the indigenous sedentary population.
The lowland Tajiks share more physical characteristics that are stereotyped as Turkic while mountain-dwellers share fewer linguistic and physical features with Turkic peoples. A large number of the Uzbeks in Central Asia have Iranian ancestry while Tajiks who live outside the isolated mountain communities have some Turkic ancestry. In line with this description, it is noted that mixed marriages are common in Tajikistan, with the Ferghana Valley the area where mixed marriages are most common.
The Tajiks were subdivided according to their affiliation with ancient cultural and historical regions: Kulob medieval Khuttal , Panjakent in Zarafshon Valley , Asht Upper Syr-Darya and Qarotegin foothills of the Pamirs ; the Kulobis may have accounted for more than 60 per cent of the Tajik ethnie in Eastern Bukhara. Asht was a locality in North-Western Ferghana that consisted of a number of qishloqs villages —with very different histories and ethnic composition—that could be divided into three groups.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Tajiks had retained the notion of sameness by maintaining cultural boundaries that kept them separate from Turkic ethnic groups in Central Asia—with some localised exceptions as in the case of the Uzbeks. The weak solidarity component of their ethnie, however, the inability to overcome dissonances within those boundaries, reflected in competing cultural elements on the sub-ethnic level, diminished their chances to seek national status in the modern era.
Cultural differences between people living to the north and to the south of the Hisor Range, or Valley Tajiks and Mountain Tajiks, were aggravated by administrative borders established by tsarist officials. The revolution in Russia brought the promise of change to this stalemated pattern.
The invasions of Alexander the Great, the Turks, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Uzbeks were the major landmarks in these processes. The latest cultural dislocation in Tajikistan was associated with the establishment of communist rule after It initiated a new adaptation cycle, which formed the broader historical context for political occurrences in modern Tajikistan.
Henceforth, the political system in Tajikistan is analysed from positions of instrumentalism—that is, its efficiency in regulating the competition for resources amongst elites representing various communities. As part of the process of state consolidation in Tajikistan during the Soviet era, state structures did indeed penetrate local society; however, the process was only partially successful.
The government had no choice at times but to accommodate local strongmen and traditional patterns of social organisation, religious belief, identities and loyalties.
The alliance of local networks and actors with the central government gave regional actors a stake in the success or failure of the political arrangements in the national government—thereby tying highly localised issues to national political issues. In the case of the Tajiks, this meant not only differentiating them from the Uzbeks, with whom they had much in common despite their different native languages, but also from fellow Persian-speakers outside the Soviet Union.
Although the labels "Tajik" and "Uzbek" were not Soviet inventions, they had little meaning to many of the people to whom they were suddenly applied. This circumstance led to much confusion when people were required to identify themselves by one of these two national designations. Major Persian-language writers were called Tajiks, even if they had not used that term to describe themselves and had not lived in Central Asia.
Tajik, like the other Central Asian languages, underwent a two-stage alphabet reform by order of the Soviet regime. First, the Arabic alphabet was abandoned in in favor of the Latin. Then, in Moscow declared Cyrillic the official alphabet of the Tajik language.
In this period, the accusation of "bourgeois nationalism" could destroy a member of the intelligentsia or a political figure. In the renewed wave of Stalinist repression after World War II, Tajik intellectuals were purged for being nationalists, a loosely defined offense that could be applied to any form of opposition to central government policies. Previously nationalism was officially viewed as a stage in the evolution towards a class-based socialist society.
As a result, it is possible to find clearly separate discourses on nationalism, identity and ethnic origins in the Soviet-era scholarship. All governments use historical symbols and historiography to cultivate patriotism, explain and justify policies, and secure the acquiescence and cooperation of the people in times of crises. Symbolic encapsulation of the themes of regime legitimacy, common identity and cultural revival through historical references is particularly crucial for emerging nations.
The newly independent Central Asian countries present no exception to this pattern. Driven from above and confined to the highly visible public domain in big cities, Soviet modernisation was limited in its success in excoriating the parochial, sub-ethnic identities. Ethnic Tajiks dominated in all spheres of human activities in the republic, except for industry, construction and science. There was practically no occupational competition between Tajiks on the one hand, and Russians and other Europeans on the other.
In contrast, Uzbeks, who lived predominantly in rural areas of Tajikistan and were involved mostly in agriculture, presented a potential target for ethnic antagonism. Negative developments in the field of Uzbek—Tajik interlingual and interethnic relations have created perceptible social strain. Old values derived vitality from traditional identities, of which regionalism was the highest form.
For decades the communist authorities suppressed and, to an extent, utilised regionalism in Tajikistan, but ultimately failed to overcome it. At the same time, the elite was highly compartmentalised along regional lines. As for translations, of course I would be delighted but I have no control over that. Your book starts with an attempt to answer a question of who is a Tajik.
Did you find it a challenging question? How do we define the ethnicity — based on language, culture, geopolitical area of living, or what? It is a challenging question mainly because it is so politically loaded today. Historically it is not any great mystery, since for most of the past years it simply meant an Iranian-speaking Muslim.
But its meaning today is the result of social engineering from the early Soviet period, and that has resulted in a lot of confusion. Identities today are defined in all the ways you mention, usually in ever-changing combinations. Having this in mind, who are more direct ancestors of Tajiks — Sogdians and Bactrians or Persians of time, who came from Iran? Yes to your first two questions. There are no pure races in the world, and DNA studies show no genetic differences between urban Tajiks and urban Uzbeks, for example, though they differ from peoples living in rural and mountain areas.
In opposite of popular narrative in the country regarding the role of Zoroastrianism among Tajiks ancestors before Islam, you downplay it saying it was behind other religions observed in the region, as well as the form of Zoroastrianism observed in Central Asia differed from its birthplace — modern Iran.
Also, in religiously highly diverse Bactria, early Sassanids came to destroy all other religious cults to clean the way for the Zoroastrianism. Shall we consider this as the first known religious intolerance in the region? Yes, the Sasanians—exemplified by the Zoroastrian chief priest Kardir—prided themselves on the violent repression of other religions. The Sogdians appear to have had a very open-minded approach to religion, though unfortunately we cannot say the same today for many Tajiks.
By the way the birthplace of Zoroastrianism was not Iran, but Central Asia, although it was in Iran that it became a state religion. My impression from the book is that that Sogdians of pre-Arab invasion had more connection with China rather than with Sassanids, though formally being under rule of Sassanids. They traded more with China, culturally expanded into China, owned neighborhoods in Chinese cities.
What did happen, by the way, with Sogdians remained in China after their home fell to Arabs? Yes, the Sogdians generally had better relations with China because the Persians saw them as competitors for control of trans-Asian trade.
With the coming of Islam Tajiks continued to play an important role in trade with China, and also as purveyors of Islam there.
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