Formerly an Asian Soviet

Usage examples of tajik.

North Africans, English for the gulf protectorates, Russian for all the Tajiks and Kazakhs and Azerbaijanians and so forth.

At the same time they definitely have not supported Muslims advocating Turkish-modeled moderate independence, like the Chechens, the original Tajik opposition or the Azeri government under President Abulfaz Elchibey.

The accustomed eye can spot the turbans of Afridis, Waziris, Ghilzai and Pakistani from nearby, contrasting with the Chitrali caps from farther north and the fur-trimmed winter hats of Tajiks and Uzbeks.

It belonged to Tajik, captain of one the dwarven ferries that plied the estuary.

Last September, for example, Tehran covertly supported a peaceful uprising against a communist power grab in Tajikistan, allegedly paying demonstrators 100 rubles a day to lead Moslem prayers and demand the resignation of the Tajik communist leadership.

A mercenary joined them at the bar and greeted Tajik with a hearty back slap that made the ferry captain's teeth rattle.

It seems the Uzbek police who were charged with the security of the refugees were actually stealing and looting the refugees' possessions piled in open cars at the back of the train as the Tajiks watched helplessly from the passenger cars in front.

The tablet had been found in 1874 by a peasant plowing his field in a mountain village clear across the Tajik lands.

But their ethnic pride, like that of the other Turkic peoples in Central Asia, as well as of the Persianized Tajiks, never conformed with statehood.

For within Turkestan are not only Turkic peoples such as Turkomans, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, and Uighurs, but large pockets of Persian Tajiks and Caucasian tribes, and much smaller islands of Balti Tibetans and mongoloid races.

These scholars also note that post-Soviet Central Asia exhibits more tensions between urban and rural Uzbeks, and between urban and rural Tajiks— not to mention local clan rivalries—than between Uzbeks and Tajiks.

Prince Kropotkin’s remark in the Britannica’s eleventh edition about the “mixed” nature of Central Asia’s population finds expression in the fact that as early as 1925, even before Stalin’s mish-mash of deportations, farmers in Bukhara could not say whether they were Uzbeks or Kazakhs or Tajiks or whatever.

Both Tajiks and Uzbeks wonder if Persian-speaking Tajikistan could be a base for Iranian influence in Central Asia.

Some Uzbeks told me that they fear Iran is promoting a Greater Tajikistan, to include the several million Tajiks in southeastern Uzbekistan and the 4 million indigenous Tajiks in northern Afghanistan.

Perhaps Karimov watches the throngs of bored and restless young people at Birlik rallies, knows that half the population is under sixteen, and sees civil unrest in the future—not necessarily between Uzbeks and Tajiks, but also between Uzbeks and Uzbeks, like the clan-based tussles between various Azeri Turk groups in Azerbaijan.