“The Dortmund conference has shown that there has been a breakup between the Islamic Renascence Party (IRPT) and other opposition organizations,” Khudoberdi Kholiqnazar, Director of the Center for Strategic Studies under the President of Tajikistan, told reporters in Dushanbe on July 30.
According to him, all secular opposition organizations have stopped communicating with the IRPT. “This split is to Tajikistan’s good, of course,” Khudoberdi noted.
The deputy head of the Center for Strategic Studies, Saifullo Safarov, for his part, noted that the Dortmund conference had demonstrated “weakening of IRPT’s positions in the international arena.”
“These pickets and meetings organized by the IRPT cannot pose threat to Tajikistan any more. Lasting peace and stability have been established in Tajikistan and the IRPT and other external forces cannot influence the minds and hearts of Tajikistan’s population anymore,” Safarov said.
He further added that the Dortmund conference had been supposed to bring together more than 300 supporters of Tajik opposition, “but only 60 persons participated in that conference.”
According to him, persons like “Hafiz Boboyorov and Dodojon Atovulloyev, who have secular views, will not cooperate with Kabiri.”
Recall, a number of opposition activists, including IRPT leader Muhiddin Kabiri and representatives of Group 24, participated in a conference that took place in Dortmund, Germany on July 9, 2017, marking the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords that formally ended Tajikistan’s 1992-1997 civil war.
On July 10, 2017, Saifullo Safarov condemned the opposition activists who attended the Dortmund conference. He stated that their attempts to unite into a coordinated opposition movement posed a “serious threat” to Tajikistan’s national security.
The IRPT was designated a “terrorist organization” by the Supreme Court of Tajikistan in 2015 and dozens of IRPT officials and members have been imprisoned since 2015.
Before the 2015 ban, the IRPT had been the only legal Islamic party in any of the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
