A leading rights watchdog group has released a report documenting an ongoing government crackdown on the poorest of the poor in Central Asia’s least economically developed state. Persistent repression, the report contends, is destroying the “socioeconomic potential” of hundreds of thousands of citizens living in the remote region of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO).

The report by Amnesty International, titled Tajikistan: Reprisals Against Pamiri Minority, Suppression of Local Identity and Clampdown on all Dissent, asserts that President Emomali Rahmon’s government in Dushanbe has viewed Gorno-Badakhshan as a hotbed of “potential political opposition” since the end of the Tajik civil war in 1998. The crackdown aims to “establish [the Rahmon regime’s] full effective political and economic control over the region and reduce its de facto autonomy,” the report states.

The residents of GBAO, known as Pamiris, are an ethnoreligious minority group, speaking a distinctive dialect and adhering to the Ismaili Shi’a branch of Islam, Amnesty International notes. The large majority of Tajikistan’s population is nominally Sunni Muslims. The Tajik government does not recognise Pamiris as an ethnic minority.

The report focuses on government actions over the past three years, including the “unlawful” use of force against peaceful protesters in 2021 and 2022, resulting in over a dozen deaths. It suggests that eyewitness testimony supports “credible allegations that some influential Pamiri figures were unlawfully killed” by government security forces. The report also documents how “torture and other ill-treatment [of detainees] are commonplace.”

More broadly, the heavy-handed government presence in Gorno-Badakhshan is causing the socioeconomic marginalisation of Pamiris. In addition, “the use of Pamiri languages and expression of Pamiri identity and culture, as well as traditional religious practices, have been suppressed,” the report states.

Amnesty International asserts that the long-term effect of the intensive securitisation of Gorno Badakhshan “amounts to violations of economic, social, and cultural rights insofar as they lead to the impoverishment of the Pamiri minority in Tajikistan and the curtailment of its socioeconomic potential.”

The local economy is now heavily dependent on state employment, giving central government authorities “considerable additional leverage over the local population.”

This article first appeared on Eurasianet here.