Dushanbe opponents on trial

On trial behind closed doors are the leaders of the opposition movement Group 24, Sukhrob Zafare and Nasimdžon Šarifov. Having disappeared from Istanbul where they had been living in exile for ten years, the Prosecutor General announced last August that they were in a prison in the capital of Tajikistan. Banned as an ‘extremist association’ the organisation is not allowed to participate in any way in the political and social life of the country.

Dushanbe (AsiaNews) - In the maximum security prison of Dushanbe, the trial of the leader of the opposition movement Group 24, Sukhrob Zafar, together with his companion Nasimdžon Šarifov, is underway behind closed doors.

According to information from Radio Ozody, not even relatives of the accused were admitted to the courtroom, and the authorities make no comment on this, so it is not even known whether lawyers were present. The relatives themselves avoided answering calls, and had previously assured that they had no information to share about the trial and the detention conditions of the two opponents.

Another activist of Group 24, Mukhammadsobir Abdukakkhor, reports that the relatives of the two detainees had gone to the first session of the court on 18 September, but were prevented from entering, wondering ‘what transparency can we talk about, if the trial is being held in great secrecy like those in the early Soviet days?’ The members of the group issued a statement, saying that the trial against Zafar and Šarifov represents ‘a serious violation of people's rights, typical of the widespread injustice in Tajikistan’.

In the text they accuse that ‘not a fair trial is taking place, but an act of great political pressure with threats that confirm the authoritarian and corrupt character of the Emomali Rakhmon regime, which uses all means to defend its power’. Both opponents had lived a few years in Istanbul, from which they had disappeared at some point in an unexplained manner, one in February and the other in March this year.

Only six months later, on 9 August, the country's Prosecutor General, Jusuf Rakhmon, announced at a press conference that the two leaders of the movement were in a prison in the capital, and an investigation was underway against them, without giving any other details about the affair, nor about the charges against them, let alone their arrival in Tajikistan, which their comrades described as ‘a kidnapping’.

At trial now the official charge is ‘incitement to change the constitutional order with the use of violence and internet communications’, what Group 24 considers ‘totally without foundation’.

Zafar had been in Turkey since 2014, and during these ten years he regularly received threats with messages promising him death or kidnapping. Since 2018 he has been detained a few times by Turkish law enforcement, allegedly at the request of Tajikistan, but has always been released without consequence.

Šarifov had also been in Turkey since 2015 and was arrested three times, only to be released, and in 2018 he had been in prison for two months. Group 24 had been created by businessman and opposition politician Umarali Kuvvatov, who was killed in Istanbul in 2015, and the movement had been outlawed by the Supreme Court of Tajikistan in 2014 as an ‘extremist association’.

Dozens of people had been arrested in the country, in Russia and abroad, left in prison for a long time just for participating in activities of the organisation, which was in fact not allowed in any way to participate in the political and social life of Tajikistan.