Tajikistan

Moscow. -- Just a year ago, the huge statue of Lenin that stood in silent rebuke over the main square of Dushanbe in Tajikistan crashed to the ground. As the stony-faced head snapped off at the neck and amputated arms were carted off, Tajik society began a dismemberment that led last week to the routing of the president.The president, an old-line Communist party boss who was accused of being a drunk, had held out for a year against a reform-minded coalition of nationalists, democrats and Muslims.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan -- The U.S. government faces extremely difficult questions as the wars it wages in Iraq and Afghanistan become more costly in lives, material and time. While political pundits debate the nature of the wars' causes and consequences, the positives and negatives of abandoning the fight, or the strain the conflicts pose for the U.S. economy, two questions remain conspicuously absent. First, what is the U.S. fighting for? Ostensibly, everyone knows the answer: The U.S. is fighting for democracy and its corollary, freedom.

MOSCOW -- Fighting in the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan intensified yesterday after one of the warring sides seized four tanks and two armored vehicles from a Russian regiment stationed in the southern part of the republic and took as hostages three Russian servicemen, it was reported.The armed men, who also seized 12 anti-aircraft rockets, demanded that the regiment destroy all its remaining tanks, saying that the hostages would be killed otherwise, the Russian Interfax news service said.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - Laylo Karimova readily agrees that life has gotten much better the past two years. After all, she has a roof over her head, and even if there's no glass in the windows she can get her hands on plastic sheeting. She works at the local bazaar and can sometimes make 40 cents or 80 cents a day. What more could a poor woman from the countryside, living in a small room here with her four children, ask for? Mauvjida Khikmatova feels the same. She left the drought-stricken Kulyab region three months ago, and now, living in a dormitory settlement with other migrants, she even has running water from a spigot in the courtyard, to wash her clothes and those of her five children.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan -- When the Soviet Union disintegrated into chaos, and the republics of Central Asia began changing governments and patterns of trade, one of the small, seemingly commonplace items that disappeared from the markets of Tajikistan was iodized salt.It has not reappeared. And the lack of it is threatening to damage one of the last treasures of Tajikistan -- its children.Iodine is an essential part of the human diet and contributes to the normal mental development of children before they are born, their learning ability as they grow up and, later in life, the regulation of metabolism.

MOSCOW -- The last unrepentant Communist boss in the former Soviet Union was forced out of power yesterday in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan.Rakhmon Nabiyev, who was named president of Tajikistan a year ago this month as the Communist Party stubbornly fought to keep its power, resigned after he was confronted by armed opponents at the airport in Dushanbe, the nation's capital.The conflict in Tajikistan has produced unlikely antagonists: Mr. Nabiyev, a relic of the fast-receding past, opposed the future in an Islamic party headed by a scholarly Muslim cleric who insists he wants a secular society.

Dushanbe, Tajikistan. -- Communism, which Russia imposed on an unwilling Central Asia, has taken on a brutal and bloody afterlife of its own here well after Moscow pronounced the system dead.The collapse of the Soviet Union brought independence to the Muslim countries on the politically sensitive perimeter of the collapsed Soviet empire, bordering Iran, Afghanistan and China. But independence hasn't brought freedom. It has brought repression, fear and death.Here in Tajikistan, statehood was greeted with a civil war that is deadly and vicious enough to threaten all of Central Asia.

Kubshevko, Tajikistan. -- In this Tajik village, the male members of the Kurban family gather on a warm September evening as the men of Tajikistan have gathered for generations. They are poor, but resplendent somehow in their long blue, black or purple quilted coats sparkling with bright gold threads.Waiting for the women to send out the food, they sit atop platform about 3 feet off the ground, settled cross-legged on colorful cushions. The platform has a roof, supported by four carved columns.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - The faint rumble of an approaching war is transforming this run-down capital of a hitherto forgotten part of Central Asia. Dushanbe has suddenly awakened from years of isolation to find itself nearly the center of the world's attention. Vans stuffed with foreign diplomats tour the city's Soviet-era monuments. Black Mercedes with flags flapping on fenders fly down the streets, passing jitney vans and rattletrap taxis. And there are the rumors - that American troops are on their way. Or that they are already here.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - The Tajik people went at each other for five years in a civil war that killed 60,000, and then they came up for air and decided they would prefer not to create another Afghanistan. So the fighting stopped. That is the story of post-Soviet Tajikistan, of a Central Asian country that borders Afghanistan, suffers from many of the same ills, and fears it may share the fate of its neighbor. A coalition government that encompassed all the contending enemies was formed in the mid-1990s.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - The Tajik people went at each other for five years in a civil war that killed 60,000, and then they came up for air and decided they would prefer not to create another Afghanistan. So the fighting stopped. That is the story of post-Soviet Tajikistan, of a Central Asian country that borders Afghanistan, suffers from many of the same ills, and fears it may share the fate of its neighbor. A coalition government that encompassed all the contending enemies was formed in the mid-1990s.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - The faint rumble of an approaching war is transforming this run-down capital of a hitherto forgotten part of Central Asia. Dushanbe has suddenly awakened from years of isolation to find itself nearly the center of the world's attention. Vans stuffed with foreign diplomats tour the city's Soviet-era monuments. Black Mercedes with flags flapping on fenders fly down the streets, passing jitney vans and rattletrap taxis. And there are the rumors - that American troops are on their way. Or that they are already here.

MOSCOW -- President Vladimir V. Putin announced last night that Russia would open its airspace to what he called "humanitarian" aid to U.S. forces pursuing terrorists blamed for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He also pledged to send arms and military equipment to the Northern Alliance, the rebel forces who helped defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and who have been battling the ruling Taliban regime since the mid-1990s. And he noted, without criticism, that several former Soviet republics had offered the United States the use of airfields.

They have been camped for nearly a year on bits of island in the river that separates Afghanistan and Tajikistan, 14,000 Afghan men, women and children who oppose the Taliban. They are homeless, almost starving and largely forgotten, even as the rest of the world has become preoccupied with a possible attack on the Taliban. Tajikistan has repeatedly refused entry to the refugees, and Thursday, President Emomali Rakhmonov reiterated that he would not change his mind even if the United States begins military strikes in Afghanistan.

MOSCOW -- The placemat was big as Siberia, the matching linen napkin crisp as the ever-falling snow. The smile on the face of the flight attendant was as effervescent as the champagne in his outstretched hand.It was first-class all the way, from the deep leather seat to the free pair of slippers. Could this really be Aeroflot?Was this the same airline that once resembled a bus station in the sky? Was this the airline where the carpets were soiled and the seat belts sometimes broken? Everyone who has ever flown it has his own Aeroflot story, and they are never pretty.

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan -- His worst fears have been realized, President Islam Karimov darkly informed his nation: The violent religious fanaticism of Afghanistan's Taliban and the Iranian-supported Hezbollah have indeed spread to this former Soviet state in Central Asia.The assertion was made soon after six bombs blew up near government buildings in downtown Tashkent last month, killing 16 people and injuring 130, and changing all the calculations in tightly policed Uzbekistan. Karimov quickly announced the arrest of 30 people, pronouncing them radical Islamists who had been trained in neighboring Afghanistan and Tajikistan -- as well as Chechnya.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - Laylo Karimova readily agrees that life has gotten much better the past two years. After all, she has a roof over her head, and even if there's no glass in the windows she can get her hands on plastic sheeting. She works at the local bazaar and can sometimes make 40 cents or 80 cents a day. What more could a poor woman from the countryside, living in a small room here with her four children, ask for? Mauvjida Khikmatova feels the same. She left the drought-stricken Kulyab region three months ago, and now, living in a dormitory settlement with other migrants, she even has running water from a spigot in the courtyard, to wash her clothes and those of her five children.

Mujahedeen victory in Afghanistan has given a boost to the disparate factions eager to dislodge unreconstructed communists from power in Soviet Central Asia. The president of Tajikistan has already been deposed and a coalition of Islamic and secular opposition groups is in power. If unrest sweeps the region, old-line communist leaderships in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan also may experience a challenge by Islamic groups.It may be a long time before the Central Asian situation is sorted out. We are now witnessing the undoing of an empire Russian czars forged in the 19th century.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan -- When the Soviet Union disintegrated into chaos, and the republics of Central Asia began changing governments and patterns of trade, one of the small, seemingly commonplace items that disappeared from the markets of Tajikistan was iodized salt.It has not reappeared. And the lack of it is threatening to damage one of the last treasures of Tajikistan -- its children.Iodine is an essential part of the human diet and contributes to the normal mental development of children before they are born, their learning ability as they grow up and, later in life, the regulation of metabolism.

PORSHINYOV, Tajikistan -- Midnight, and the people of the Pamirs are waiting, their dark shapes dimly lit against the flames of 450 bubbling caldrons in this narrow valley on the Afghan border.A steady rain falls as they stir their caldrons and wait. There is no hurry. They have been waiting 1,000 years.The Aga Khan is coming here, to the vaulting, nearly unreachable Pamir Mountains. Since early evening his followers have been arriving on foot, by car, by tractor or packed like bolts of brightly colored cloth onto the backs of trucks.