Tajikistan
Tajikistan descended into civil war soon after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The five-year conflict between the Moscow-backed government and the Islamist-led opposition claimed the lives of between 50,000 and 100,000 people and caused at least 10 percent of the country’s eight million people to leave Tajikistan.
A report on its visit to Tajikistan submitted by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to the 45th session of the UN Human Rights Council and published in August 2020, found that “in Tajikistan the number of cases reported to the Working Group is not representative of the real extent of the problem; it is only a small sample.
In particular, the serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, including enforced disappearances, which were committed during the civil war remain essentially unaddressed in the country and there is an apparent reluctance at both the political and administration levels to address them. The Working Group did not obtain official figures, despite requesting them, on the number of missing, including forcibly disappeared, from the conflict and the figures are not obtainable from publicly available sources. Although it is difficult to assess the real scale of the problem and to have exact figures on enforced disappearances, it is estimated that thousands of individuals from the different factions may still be unaccounted for.”
