ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how superficial and irrelevant this coalition was and is: the IRP has been a compromised party almost from the signing of the Peace Accord in 1997. It has attested to and what careful analysis reveals is an unholy trinity of factors in Tajikistan that all work to radicalize Islamists, the impotence of the IRP, brazen repression from Rakhmonov and relative tolerance by US politicos. Motivational forces informing early Tajik opposition movements were first anti-communist, then democratic and finally Islamic. This puts Tajikistan as a model for secular-Islamic coalition under question: Islam was the poor third cousin in Tajikistani politics. The State Department used spin-control to praise the cessation of assassination in Tajikistan even though it ignored the fact outbreak of assassinations came a full four years after the signing of the Peace Accord and well into the stabilization period.
