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muriel_volestrangler

(101,154 posts)
Fri Apr 19, 2013, 08:08 PM Apr 2013

Tajikistan opposition leader beaten as election looms

Source: Guardian

A leader of Tajikistan's largest opposition party, the Islamic Revival party (IRP), was severely beaten on Friday evening in Dushanbe, a colleague said, in a sign of rising tensions before presidential elections due in November.

The IRP is the only opposition party represented in the parliament of mainly Muslim Tajikistan, an impoverished Central Asian country of eight million ruled for 20 years by President Emomali Rakhmon.

Tajikistan, the poorest of the 15 former Soviet republics, lies on a major transit route for Afghan drugs to Europe and Russia and remains volatile after a 1992-97 civil war in which Rakhmon's Moscow-backed secular government clashed with Islamist guerrillas.

"Several people attacked the deputy head of the IRP just outside his house. They beat him and kicked him, he was all covered in blood," another leading IRP member, Khikmatullo Saifullozoda, said.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/19/tajikistan-opposition-leader-beaten



Not a republic involved in the Boston events, but, boy, isn't the ex-Soviet Union a grand place?
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Tajikistan opposition leader beaten as election looms (Original Post) muriel_volestrangler Apr 2013 OP
Yes, it is. (nt) harmonicon Apr 2013 #1
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