DUSHANBE: Tajikistan's President Emomali Rakhmonov, a Western-friendly leader in Central Asia, looks sure to prolong his 14-year rule in an election Monday that monitors doubt will be free or fair.
Rakhmonov has not overtly campaigned ahead of the election in this ex-Soviet republic that lies between Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
His four opponents are virtual unknowns and none has directly criticised his policies, fuelling claims that a number of the candidates are actually hand-picked by the authorities. None of the three main opposition parties are being represented.
Despite criticism that Tajikistan has been slow to democratise, it has been courted by the West as an ally in the making, particularly since the US-led military intervention in neighbouring Afghanistan in 2001.
The country is a link in Western efforts to stabilise Afghanistan, providing over-flight rights to Western military aircraft.
More broadly the United States sees Tajikistan as part of a potential “corridor of reform” extending from oil-rich Kazakhstan through Kyrgyzstan, which hosts a US air base, into Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, a Western diplomat here said.Doubts about the likelihood of Monday's election being fair have been raised by the Western-led election monitoring body the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
“No signs of a competitive campaign have been observed,” the OSCE said in a report issued on Wednesday.But any Western criticism is likely to be muted.
Fostering good ties with Tajikistan has become particularly important to the West since neighbouring Uzbekistan ejected US forces from a military base there last year and shut down hundreds of Western-funded non-governmental organisations.
“The Americans are very concerned about being seen as a threat. There's been a certain retreat on the democratisation front” in Central Asia, said a Central Asia analyst at the International Crisis Group, Michael Hall.
A former Communist party apparatchik, Rakhmonov, 54, was first elected president in 1994 and helped push a 1997 peace accord that ended a civil war that tore the country apart after the Soviet Union's collapse.
Government estimates put the number of dead in that conflict at 150,000.
Rakhmonov has barely spoken in public about the election, although he trumpeted his achievements Tuesday at a bridge-opening on the Afghan border alongside the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the world's Ismaili Shia Muslims, who predominate in Tajikistan's Pamir mountains.
Developing democracy features at the top of Rakhmonov's electoral programme -- set out in newspapers this week -- along with strengthening ties with neighbours on all sides and reforming the country's puny economy.
The Tajik president is to be elected for a seven-year term as a result of controversial constitutional changes in 2003 that also allowed Rakhmonov to stand for another two terms in office.
None of the three main opposition parties is participating -- the two secular opposition parties have declared a boycott in protest at the election conditions, while an Islamic opposition party has said it lacks public support after being unfairly tarred as extremist.—AFP
