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Crime & Corruption in Tajikistan

  • Writer: Morgan McBride
    Morgan McBride
  • Apr 4
  • 6 min read

Tajikistan, as a nation facing state capture, has a political-criminal nexus that allows its political elites to be the primary beneficiaries of the country's crime and corruption activity.



Transnational crimes like money laundering, drug trafficking, smuggling, and other cross-border crimes have seemingly been exacerbated in Central Asia due to globalization, state and non-state actors, and the criminal structures that remain active in the region.


In many ways, the region’s post-Soviet state-building period had to navigate weak states and unregulated political economies. Hence, as this emerged during the early stages of globalization, the region’s illicit markets formed.



Tajikistan


Photo/Map by Britannica
Photo/Map by Britannica

Tajikistan is a landlocked nation in the heart of Central Asia. It shares borders with Kyrgyzstan to the north, China to the East, Afghanistan to the south, and Uzbekistan to the west. As the smallest of the five Central Asian nations, Tajikistan has been wracked by conflict among the government, the Islamic opposition, and its allies since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.


The Tajik people came under Russian imperial rule beginning in the 1860s and 1870s; however, Russia’s control over Central Asia weakened after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Subsequently, Tajikistan became an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan in 1924, yet the USSR designated it a separate republic in 1929.


Although its early decades as an autonomous republic were affected by regional dynamics, most of the politics in the Tajik Republic depended on the Soviet political and economic system remaining consolidated. So, beginning in the mid-1980s, when the Soviet Union began to destabilize, political liberalization and economic collapse significantly undermined Tajikistan’s stability.


The emergence of opposition parties and movements in the late 1980s centered on Tajik nationalism and the formation of a government and state representative of all Tajik peoples.


However, shortly after their independence in 1991, Tajikistan endured a civil war between political, regional, and religious factions from 1992 to 1997.


President Emomali Rahmon in 2025
President Emomali Rahmon in 2025

Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon became the chief of state in November 1992 and has maintained that position ever since, a tenure of nearly 34 years. Then, in December 2015, President Emomali Rahmon solidified his position as the leader of Tajikistan by having himself declared “Founder of Peace and National Unity, Leader of the Nation.” This new positioning permits him to hold limitless terms and lifelong immunity through constitutional amendments ratified in a referendum.


President Emomali Rahmon’s authoritarian regime consistently restricts political rights and civil liberties. Furthermore, the corruption and cronyism present in Rahmon’s regime help perpetuate the persistence of transnational criminal activity in Tajikistan and the broader Central Asian region.



Transnational Crime in Central Asia

The illicit world’s economy operates through unauthorized flows of people, money, goods, and information across countries worldwide.


In the Central Asian region, a period of economic recession beginning in 1991 led to a mushrooming of illicit activities that developed into a more organized criminal sector.


At the same time, the process of opaque privatization and new divisions of property in the post-Soviet political economy created fertile ground for the emergence of criminal enterprises in which government officials, business professionals, and criminals collaborated in the illicit market.


Criminal groups ultimately exploited opportunities to operate locally in places where state control and the rule of law remained weak. Often collaborating with political actors and security officers, criminal groups provided protection (krysha, or a “roof”) to nascent businesses, helped settle familial and business scores, or pressured young entrepreneurs to engage their “services” through threats and extortion.


The capital generated through the region’s illicit drug trade flows into legitimate businesses, which ultimately mangles the economy and increases the job market’s reliance on employment within the drug trade.


Now, the Central Asian criminal market consists of sophisticated criminal groups participating in drug and human trafficking, smuggling, tax and tariff evasion, trade-based fraud, money laundering, and other crimes, often involving public officials.

The five Central Asian regimes have also been utilized as a transit route for trafficking and smuggling activity between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. For instance, approximately 80% of Afghanistan’s heroin exports to Russia and Europe passed through Tajikistan as of 2014.


Tajikistan’s persistent intersections of organized crime and violence remain fluid, as shifts occur in the state’s involvement in illicit economic activity and levels of mobilization.



Transnational Crime & Corruption in Tajikistan

Drug trafficking in and through Tajikistan likely had its roots in the country starting in the 1980s, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Yet, the Tajik Civil War in the early 1990s led to criminal actors wielding the existing instability to gain political and economic advantage, typically through alliances with insurgents, militias, and other mobilized groups.




Furthermore, in the years following the civil war, organized criminal actors gained entry into public office, further entangling the relationship between crime and politics in Tajikistan. The postwar consolidation of power led existing criminal groups to engage in violence either through collaboration with the political regime or through direct confrontation with the state’s continued involvement with illicit activity.


“If you put epaulettes on a criminal, you will get a Tajik cop.” — a popular saying in Tajikistan

Yaqubjon Salimov, the founder of the first large-scale Tajik drug trafficking group, began as a racketeer in the capital of Dushanbe in the 1980s. Becoming a powerful warlord and founder of the Popular Front of Tajikistan (a paramilitary movement that fought for the government during the civil war), Salimov held the position of Minister of Interior in December 1992. Despite his role within the Tajik government, Salimov organized opiate smuggling from Afghanistan, through Tajikistan, and on to the Russian Federation. Salimov continued to maintain government positions until he sided with an opponent of President Rakhmonov in 1997, which led to Salimov’s criminal sentence for state treason, banditry, and abuse of office in 2005.


According to the Secretary of the Tajik Security Council, admitted in early 1997, “Against the background of weak law enforcement activities, crime has continued to grow, especially in its organized form, drug trafficking is flourishing, corruption sneaking into all levels of bodies of power and management.” Such a direct statement further emphasizes the gravity of Tajikistan’s crime and corruption problem that has developed over the last three decades.


Transparency International — a global movement working to fight corruption — deems Tajikistan one of the world’s most corrupt countries, ranking 166 out of 182 countries in its report. Tajikistan has mafia-style criminal groups and well-established criminal networks, which operate both domestically and internationally. Their illicit activity is strengthened by systemic corruption among top-level government officials in Tajikistan.


For instance, in April 1998, a former Tajik deputy defense minister served prison time for using a military helicopter to smuggle eighty-nine kilograms of opium from Dushanbe (the capital of Tajikistan) to Penjakent (a city in northwestern Tajikistan). Several officers of Tajik law enforcement agencies and diplomats have also been arrested and charged in Russia and neighboring Kyrgyzstan for wholesale opiate smuggling.


According to the United Nations’ drug office in 2000, an estimated one hundred tons of heroin may be smuggled annually from Afghanistan into Tajikistan, from which they either go west towards Europe or east to Russia and Southeast Asia.


Estimates in 2011 showed that drug trafficking through Tajikistan generated approximately 2.7 billion dollars per year, which is a highly lucrative sum for a very poor nation.


“… Drug trafficking is perceived as a source of political power and economic gain, leading to complex relationships between state actors and drug traffickers.” — Paulina Cortez Licona

Multiple sources state that President Rahmon’s family has worked to centralize control over drug trafficking throughout the 2010s, and more intensely in the 2020s. The president’s family and top-level intelligence officials within his circle reportedly have had involvement in illegal businesses, namely with the president’s three sons-in-law controlling the western trafficking route in Tajikistan.


President Emomali Rahmon (right) and his son Rustam Emomali (left)
President Emomali Rahmon (right) and his son Rustam Emomali (left)

President Emomali Rahmon’s eldest son, Rustam Emomali, has been suspected of taking bribes to facilitate illicit cross-border traffic while serving as head of the customs service.


In order to maintain some degree of legitimacy, Tajik law enforcement occasionally arrests small traffickers, as these arrests allow authorities to inflate law enforcement statistics and distance themselves from any suspicions of complicity.


According to a leaked US diplomatic dispatch from February 16, 2020 leaked by Wikileaks expressed that, “From the president down to the policeman on the street, government is characterized by cronyism and corruption.”


Shamsullo Skhibov, President Rahmon’s son-in-law, leads a private company named Faroz, which the Tajikistan government has afford numerous oppurtunities and insulated it from potential competitors. Its primary business ventures of importing liquified gas and the oil trade supplies Faroz with its monetary and power-based value. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported that the Tajik government supported Faroz’s needs through passing favorable laws, applying pressure on its competitors, and selling Faroz public assets at bargain prices.


With the amalgamation of new post-Soviet political elites, a consistent presence along the drug trade transit routes, and a government centralized around one individual, Tajikistan developed into a system of private goods and resources only accessible for the nation’s political elites. Such circumstances allows for the state to be captured, and removed from the grasps of its citizens, since the nation’s political elites continue to be the primary beneficiaries of the country’s illicit economy and drug trafficking industry.



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