DUSHANBE, July 27, 2012, Asia-Plus — The board of the Communist Party of Tajikistan (CPT) met on July 26 to discuss the situation in Khorog, the capital of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (Gorno Badakhshan or GBAO).
“Communists condemn the murder of the chief of the State Committee for National Security (SCNS)’s office in Gorno Badakhshan and call on the relevant bodies of the country to conduct a thorough investigation into the incident,” CPT leader Shodi Shabdolov, who is also deputy of Tajikistan’s lower house (Majlisi Namoyandagon) of parliament, told Asia-Plus in an interview Friday afternoon.
“Meanwhile, the CPT board considers that use of the country’s armed forces in the operation in Khorog is unjustified, because the army should used only to repel an external aggression, but not for breaking up crime groups. For this, the country has other forces and means such as the Ministry of Interior (MoI) and SCNS,” Shabdolov noted.
According to him, the use of armed forces in the operations in the immediate vicinity of the national border may serve as a pretext for interference of terrorist groups and superpowers fighting for influence in the Central Asian region. “These forces may use the situation in their own interest,” CPT leader said.
“The Communist Party calls on the Government to withdraw the armed forces from the region [Gorno Badakhshan] as soon as possible because nothing could justify civilian casualties,” Shabdolov stressed.
He noted that if the special operation carried out by the government forces in Gorno Badakhshan was aimed to shut down drug trafficking routes, “the CIS nations should not stand aside.”
According to him, the CIS nations must realize that drug trafficking from Afghanistan into Tajikistan poses threat to peace and stability not only in Tajikistan, it poses threat to all the CIS nations, and therefore, they must be involved in seeking solution to this problem.
