Tajikistan, along with other former Soviet republics, declared its independence in August 1991. With a weak state structure, independence led to a struggle for power and national identity resulting in civil war and installation of an authoritarian regime run by former members of the Communist Party of Tajikistan. In a country of 5.5 million people, this war resulted in thousands of deaths, with estimates ranging upwards of 25,000. In addition, thousands of refugees fled to neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Russia.

 

In late 1992, the Dartmouth Conference Regional Conflicts Task Force (RCTF) decided to try to apply the process of Dialogue they had learned together—which later came to be called Sustained Dialogue—to one of the conflicts that had broken out on the territory of the former Soviet Union. They chose Tajikistan, the poorest of the former Soviet republics.

 

In early 1993, two Russian RCTF members spoke in Tajikistan with more than 100 individuals from the main factions in the civil war to explain the work of the RCTF and to ascertain their interest in coming into a space for dialogue created by the task force. The story can be told briefly as a story in four phases.

 

Phase One: From March 1993 through March 1994, the group met six times, during which participants moved from being barely able to look at each other to playing a significant role together in paving the way for government and opposition decisions in early 1994 to engage in formal peace negotiations under a U.N. mediator. In March 1994, just before negotiations began, they produced their first joint memorandum, “Memorandum on the Negotiating Process of Tajikistan.”

 

Phase Two: From April 1994 through June 1997, three dialogue participants served as members of the two negotiating teams in the U.N.-mediated Inter-Tajik Negotiations. One of them served throughout that period and later became the Deputy Foreign Minister of Tajikistan. Another became Minister of Industry. A third, a vice-chair of the Uzbek Association in Tajikistan, served on the government team. Several ideas presented in the Dialogue’s joint memoranda found their way into the peace treaty, which was signed in June 1977.

 

Phase Three: From July 1997 through February 2000, five participants in the dialogue served on the Commission on National Reconciliation, which was established in the peace agreement to oversee implementation of the provisions of that agreement. The Commission worked through four sub-commissions. Other commission members joined the Dialogue when the Commission’s work ended. This was a time when many of the institutions and practices of the new democracy were being worked out, including a new constitution and political system.

 

Phase Four: In April 2000, members of the Dialogue and other Tajikistani citizens formally registered their own nongovernmental organization, the Public Committee for Democratic Processes in Tajikistan. [For a summary of its programs click on Public Committee]

 

Early in each of the four phases, participants in the Dialogue stated and then restated their 9objectives, thereby establishing goals against which to judge their progress. In August 1993, they said, “what we need to work on is starting a negotiation between the government and the opposition on creating conditions so refugees can go home.” After negotiations began in April 1994, they asked themselves whether they should continue the Dialogue. Their answer was emphatic: “Yes. We helped get negotiations started. Now we have to assure that they succeed. Our objective now is to design an political process of national reconciliation in Tajikistan.”

 

At this point, participants assured the government of Tajikistan that the Dialogue would not interfere with the work of the negotiators but would rather think beyond the negotiations and concentrate on preparing the citizens of Tajikistan to implement whatever agreements came from the negotiations. After the peace agreement was signed in June 1997, they stated their purpose as establishing the elements of democracy in a “united, democratic, secular, peaceful Tajikistan. After the end in February 2000 of the formal transition period defined by the peace agreement, their further-refined objective is captured in the four-track program of the Public Committee.