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From hero worship to organized oblivion: representations of the People's Front in Tajikistan's national memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Kirill Nourzhanov
Kirill Nourzhanov*
Affiliation:
Center for Arab and Islamic Studies (The Middle East and Central Asia), Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
*
∗Email: kirill.nourzhanov@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

The People's Front of Tajikistan (PFT), one of the parties to the country's civil war, was instrumental in bringing the government of President Emomali Rahmon to power. The article examines the official strategies of memorialization of the PFT from the early 1990s to the present. It discusses the emergence of a canon of the PFT heroes and martyrs and locates it within the nascent national mythology after independence. It argues that the maintenance of this canon was rendered impossible by the imperatives of consolidating presidential authority and securing national reconciliation following the 1997 peace deal. It concludes with an examination of the growing tension between the official line of historical amnesia on the one hand and resurgent social memory on the other. People in Tajikistan are increasingly interested in revisiting the events and protagonists of the war to develop a sense of the past, and remembering the PFT forms an essential part of their search for shared history and a sense of identity.

Keywords

Tajikistancivil warhistorical memorynational identity
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 140 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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