The lack of linguistic specificity indicates the very broad-gauge Russian conceptual approach to peacekeeping. Whereas particularly British and French but also to some extent American and Scandinavian military milieux have drawn on years of experience with peacekeeping to conduct a finely grained taxonomic debate about which operations should classify as peacekeeping, peace enforcing etc. in the years following the end of the Cold War, Russia, as a newcomer to the field, has not evolved a similar debate. There exists a haziness about what peacekeeping is generally considered to be in UN English-speaking parlance. The second major problem, then, is to do with the immediate contradiction between evoking Chapter 51 of the UN Charter on the one hand, and calling an operation a peacekeeping one on the other. Chapter 51 is about self defence of vital national interests against an aggressor. Peacekeeping, on the other hand, is in all its varieties about umpiring conflicts. The UN-focussed debate of the last five years has mainly been about how partial and activist the umpire may be before the operation is no longer a peacekeeping one, but rather a case of peace enforcement. Peace enforcement may in turn shade into traditional warfighting, where the umpire gives up all pretense of umpiring and becomes a regular player. It should be clear, therefore, that in UN parlance, the same operation cannot at the same time be seen as a Chapter 51-style operation and a peacekeeping one. Yet, although these are mutually exclusive ways of denoting the conflict, Russia has at no time tried to resolve this contradiction between the broad-guage Russian use of mirotvorchestvo (’peacekeeping’) for all conflicts that are not traditional warfighting on the one hand, and the steadily more specialised UN-based use of ‘peacekeeping’ on the other. In the conclusion, be will argue that Russia could have avoided this contradiction by denoting the border operations of the border guards simply as a case of the use of force under Chapter 51, and the operation in the interior of the 201st division based in Dushanbe and related detachments as a peacekeeping one. If Russia and the CIS had attempted such a procedure, the question of whether the latter operation could have been characterised as a peacekeeping one would have rested squarely on the question of partiality. In that case, it would at least in principle have been possible to refer to it as peacekeeping in UN parlance. However, as Russia and the CIS never attempted to disentangle these two aspects of the situation either in theory or in practice, it is ipso facto impossible to refer to it as a case of UN-style peacekeeping. If only for this reason, whereas Moscow has managed to obtain cooperation from international institutions where questions of negotiations between the warring parties is concerned, it has not received the international endorsement for which it had hoped.
In terms of military activity, the story of the Russian involvement is one of a deferrence of activities from the interior to the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. As the situation in Tajikistan destabilised, in Moscow references were frequently made to the Treaty on Collective Security of May 1992, concluded in Tashkent as a response to the break-up of the Soviet Union but also with an eye on the situation in Tajikistan. This treaty was one of the two pillars of Russian security policy towards Central Asia – the other was bilateral treaties concluded with all the countries save Tajikistan during the same summer (Page 1994: 793). The principle of combining bilateral treaties with an overall multilateral one is well tested, and was, for example, the formal set-up for the Soviet Union’s relations with other members of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation during the cold war. Initially problems of internal stability were delegated to the government in Dushanbe to resolve, yet there were also references to the need for the Tajik authorities to introduce an emergency regime in the border areas.
How Russia and the CIS had themselves involved
On 3 September 1992, the presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kirgisia and Uzbekistan issued a communiqu? where they termed the fighting a danger to the entire Commonwealth of Independent States and stated their intention of intervening if the fighting could not be brought to a halt. As the only former Soviet central Asian state, Turkmenistan kept its distance from the undertaking, ostensibly thinking that its petroleum-based economy gave it enough leeway to stay aloof from the military involvement of the others. Apart from restoring internal order, the reasons given for the resolve of the communiqu? were large-scale smuggling of narcotics and arms from the south (that is, Afghanistan).
The forces at hand for the job were, first, the old Soviet 201st motorized rifle division, which was based in Dushanbe and had never left. Secondly, there was the border guard along the 1200 kilometer long border with Afghanistan, which had in Soviet times been a detachment of the KGB and was now reporting elsewhere to the Interior Ministry. Once the latter was reinforced with an extra 1000 troops a few days later, this brought a protest from Iran. On 19 September, acting Supreme Soviet chairman and head of state Akbarsho Iskanderov, a Gorno-Badakhshani, called on the CIS troops to assist his interior ministry troops in guarding key public installations. This they duly did. He also wanted them to put down the fighting in Kurgan-Tyube, but the CIS high command did not respond to these calls. On the contrary, there are reports that the 201st motorised rifle division may have equipped Kulyabi forces loyal to Nabiev with four tanks and six armoured personnel carriers, which were immediately used in the decisive subjugation of Kurgan-Tyube. The commander of the division insisted that they had been stolen at gunpoint – an interesting assertion coming from a responsible soldier. Be that as it may, Russia certainly rebuffed Iskanderov’s attempts to buy heavy arms. At the end of the month, 1500 additional troops were sent from Moscow to assist those already there, and CIS troops took over the guarding of the Dushanbe airport. The CIS troops were put in abeyance for a few days in early October as the CIS discussed the situation at a summit meeting in Bishkek. It was then agreed that defending the common external border of the CIS was a common concern, that a CIS peacekeeping force should be sent as soon as a ‘legitimate authority’ in Tajikistan requested one, and that CIS troops already there should remain until further notice. With direct backing from the Uzbekistan military, an attempt was made to remove Iskanderov from power. He held out until 16 November, when he was ousted and the Kulyabi Emomali Rakhmonov, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, was installed. However, heavy fighting continued throughout 1992, with Uzbekistan’s military high command intermittently involved in Kulyabi fighting activities (Hiro 1995: 213-218).
It would be wrong to put Uzbekistan’s engagement down to offensive pretentions only. The present Uzbekistani president, Islam Karimov, has fought down his own motley opposition of ‘democrats’ and Muslim leaders, and is wary of the possibility that Tajikistani Islamicists may inflict their message onto Uzbekistan from the east. Karimov’s anxiety of ethnic and religious spill-over has made him pursue two different strategies. First, as the war escalated, he tried to seal off Uzbekistan from all contact with Tajikistan. Tajik-language schools were closed, planes were denied landing rights, and overland transport was also severely restricted. However, as it became obvious that Tajikistan was disintegrating, Karimov switched to a strategy of active involvement.
Whereas Uzbekistan has clearly followed its own agenda, it has done so by tailing Russia. The crucial event in the series leading up to Iskanderov’s fall was the meeting of Russian Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev with the Central Asian members of the Collective Defence Treaty, minus Tajikistan, in Alma-Ata on 4 November 1992. Here it was decided that the 201st division should remain in Tajikistan and pursue peace-keeping operations until it could be replaced by a CIS force proper, that a State Council consisting of Tajikistan’s different factions should be formed, that an ‘Alma-Ata Committee’ consisting of representatives of the Presidents of Uzbekistan, Kirgisia, Kazakhstan and Russia to bring about piece should also be formed, and that a corresponding committee consisting of deputy foreign ministers should supervise complementary humanitarian work (Hiro 1995: 219-227). It was decided that battalions from Kazakhstan and Kirgisia as well as a mobile regiment should link up with the 201st division to form the peacekeeping force. These forces took up their positions only in 1994; before that, Russian and Uzbekistani detachments were alone in making up the force. Following a decision reached by another CIS summit in Minsk in January, it was decided to deploy another four motorised infantry battalions. This decision was never implemented, however (Shashenkov 1994:54).
It should be clear, then, that the Russian and the Uzbekistani leaderships as well as the CIS as such found Iskanderov lacking in legitimacy, since he had failed to step down as the result of a no confidence vote in the National Assembly. But this was merely a symptom, and not the reason why Moscow failed to respond to calls which would have propped up Iskanderov’s government, and ended up supporting the Leninabadis and Kulyabis instead. As it was taken less than a year after the break-up of the Soviet Union, in an atmosphere of deep divisions about Russia’s place in the world, this choice was an important part of the overall debate about the nature of Russian foreign policy (Neumann 1994a).6 Those who argued that Russia should assert itself and give priority to what later came to be known as the ‘near abroad’ could point to a number of reasons why it was better to support Moscow’s traditional partners in Tajikistan, that is, the Leninabadis and Kulyabis. First, the need to take a strong stance against what was perceived as the Islamicism of Iskanderov and his followers. If Islam were allowed to further encroach on the territory of the Soviet Union, it would have a knock-on effect not only in the rest of Central Asia and in Transcaucasia, but also inside the Russian Federation, in the North Caucasus and the Volga-Ural area (Neumann & Kryukov 1995). This argument was attempted reinforced by pointing out that, lest the thrust from the south be stopped along the mountainous border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan, the next line that could be easily held militarily would be in Northern Kazakhstan, leaving a lot of ethnic Russians stranded to the south. Secondly, and also to do with the ethnic Russian minority, it was seen as politically and economically costly if large parts of the 300.000 strong Russian minority in Tajikistan should decamp and descend on Russia in a situation where housing and jobs were already extremely scarce due among other things to the withdrawal of troops from Central Europe. (In the event, hovever, a large number of there left anyway.) Thirdly, there was the issue of maintaining a reputation for standing by Moscow’s traditional supporters in a time of need.
Against this barrage of arguments for lending continued support to the Leninabadis and Kulyabis, the case for supporting Iskanderov rested on him having the support not only of Islamic, but also of democratic forces, and on a general orientation towards Russian non-interference in the affairs of other former Soviet republics in order not to strain resources and lose out on the goodwill of ‘the West’. These considerations were brushed aside. Thus, Moscow’s decision to support the Leninabadis and the Kulyabis was also an important nail in the coffin of the romantic Westernising interlude in Russian foreign policy.
In search of legitimacy: from the interior to the border
The importance of the Tajikistan involvement received a further impetus during the summer of 1993. The civil war had reached a less intensive phase, with the opposition save for sniping activity withdrawing to the intractable interior of Gorno-Badakhshan and other regional strongholds. The question arose as to the necessity of perpetuating the CIS peacekeeping campaign. At this crucial period, on 13 July 1993, a border troop post manned by 47 Russian soldiers was overrun. 24 guards were killed and another 18 wounded. About 200 villagers and some 60 attackers were also killed. This has been seen as a decisive moment for the further military involvement of Russia in Tajikistan (Sherr 1993).