With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan, a former republic of the USSR, found itself without the family it had known for seventy years.
Like a young person leaving home, the new nation faced the process of self-discovery without the support of the family. And, just as a young adult might ask for advice and a little help, so does a young nation.
Enter Eshragh Motahar, assistant professor of economics
at the College, who spent a portion of his sabbatical last fall helping to “invent” a new Tajikistan.
Motahar was invited to conduct a series of meetings and seminars with economists and government officials in Dunshabe, the capital of Tajikistan. The Aid Coordination Unit in Tajikistan, which is sponsored by the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the government
of Tajikistan, chose him from a pool of invited applicants.
Motahar says that the small, landlocked nation of Tajikistan, north of Afghanistan, is in a state of disarray, not only turned upside down by the dissolution of the Soviet Union but torn apart by a civil war that began in 1991 and has been in a stalemate (with negotiations ongoing) since 1993. The result, he says, is “all sorts of political problems.”
The civil war involves a coalition of Islamic fundamentalists and secularist democrats fighting against the old Communist regime. With the stalemate, the “old types” remain in power. Currently, there is a formal sense of democracy, with a president, a prime minister, and a parliament (similar to the French government), but problems remain. A major complaint-one that plagues most of the former Soviet republics-is lack of press freedom.
Tajikistan is faced with serious economic hardship as well, especially in the remote areas of the mostly mountainous nation. There is tremendous unemployment (although there is no way to know exact figures since government bureaus, formerly run by the Soviet Union, are merely “skeleton” operations), and public employees, such as teachers, have not been getting paid.
Tajikistan has the fourth largest aluminum plant in the world, but because of lack of spare parts it is operating only at approximately ten percent of capacity. And lack of fertilizer, once provided-like so much else-by the Soviet Union, has brought Tajikistan's cotton production way down. (It once was the tenth largest producer of cotton in the world.)
Other problems, such as poor communications systems, infect the country as well.
Mail, for example, takes weeks, and phone lines are a mess, says Motahar. He sent a postcard from Tajikistan and it took six weeks to arrive in the United States.
Currently, Tajikistan is a total cash economy; no credit cards or checks are accepted anywhere. Since only dollar bills printed in 1991 or later are accepted, fairly routine
tasks such as buying an airline ticket are difficult. Motahar had to go directly to the airport the day before his flight to purchase his ticket-with cash, of
course and then return the next day to catch his flight.
Motahar says Tajikistan officials were eager to learn, but that was combined with some suspicion and
resentment probably to be expected in a country that was once part of a “superpower” but which is now on its knees economically. Some officials, for example, thought Motahar was a U.S. government agent or a member of the CIA.
Motahar says that Tajikistan needs to develop its own set of priorities. “They are a bit passive, in that they expect foreign aid and investment just to flow in, and they assume that it will all be to the good.”
Motahar advised his hosts to be cautious, pointing out that foreign investment requires a large investment by the host country as well, and that multinational corporations have shareholder interests as their primary goal. He also discussed the problems associated with foreign aid, citing the example of Kenya, which had plenty
of foreign aid from eighteen countries for a water project but very little coordination. The result was a water system that used eighteen different technologies and was impossible to maintain.
The people Motahar worked with were educated and intelligent, but there were some “holes in their knowledge.” They often had difficulty grasping the
workings of a market economy and understanding that the priorities of multinational corporations might be different from the priorities of the World Bank or the United Nations.
Since leaving in October, Motahar has been in fairly regular contact with Tajikistan officials through e-mail and Tajikistan's home page on the Web (http://www.soros.org/ tjikistan.html). He says that the country is attempting to put some of his suggestions into effect; in the works, for example, is a two-part foreign investment bill that will streamline the process for foreign corporations wishing to invest in Tajikistan and specify the economic priorities of Tajikistan.
For Motahar, whose main area of research interest is investment economics, his visit was a fascinating opportunity to be involved with the inventing of a new nation. It allowed him to see theories put to work, the consequences of policies, and what the conditions of success and failure might be.
“Economics is not a lab science,” he says, “but this is as close as you can get to experimentation.”
During the winter term, he was able to draw on his experiences for his course in international economics. After students grasped the theories, they began to apply them to real-world situations, especially Tajikistan's.
Motahar says that it would be nice to return to Tajikistan to see what has happened and to gather more data. He says that for other social
scientists, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists the country of six million holds treasures for those interested in the emergence of a nation and of an independent people.