Danghara

Danghara
Данғара

Basic data

State :

Tajikistan

Province :

Chatlon

Coordinates :

38 ° 6 ' N , 69 ° 21' E Coordinates: 38 ° 5 '54 " N , 69 ° 20' 48" E

Height :

666 m

Residents :

24,400 (2014)

Danghara

Danghara ( Tajik Данғара , Russian Дангара ), also Dangara is a city and the capital of the district of the same name ( nohija ) in the province of Khatlon in southwestern Tajikistan . Danghara is best known as the birthplace of President Emomalij Rahmon, who has been in office since 1994 .

location

Silky stream, cotton fields and grazing kitchen four kilometers north of Danghara near the village of Kores .

Danghara is located at an average altitude of 666 meters in the middle of a plain, which in the west by the up to 2113 meter high Sarsarak mountain range (Russian Sanglok), in the north by the approximately 2000 meter high foothills of the Wachsch mountain range and in the east by a hill which reaches a height of around 1200 meters is limited. The mountains and hills are all treeless and are used as grazing land for sheep and goats. Some streams have their source in the northern mountains and flow over the Toirsu River, which passes Danghara six kilometers to the east, through the plain to the south to the Kizilsu. This flows into the Pandsch . The Toirsu is 118 kilometers long and drains an area of 1860 square kilometers. To the west of the Sarsarak mountain range, roughly parallel to the Toirsu, the water-rich Wachsch flows south in a deeply cut valley.

The plain is used intensively for agriculture and is one of the larger areas in the province of Chatlon where cotton is grown, the second most important export product in the country after the aluminum produced by the company TALCO . Numerous irrigation canals ( arik ) run along the driveways and between the fields for the necessary irrigation . Due to inadequate technology and bad seeds, the average yield of 1.5 to 1.8 tons of cotton per hectare is below the typical yield of 2 tons for developing countries. The district, which is around 2000 square kilometers in size, has 30,381 hectares of arable land (data from 2010) on which cereals are grown in addition to cotton.

Since the completion of the Nurek Dam north of Danghara in the 1970s, higher-lying fields can also be irrigated. Water for irrigating 70,000 hectares of arable land is diverted from the over 70 kilometers long reservoir, the area of which is 98 square kilometers, through the 14 kilometers long Danghara tunnel. Another dam on the Wachsch is Sangtuda 1, located in the Danghara district 25 kilometers west of the city, whose hydropower plant went into operation in 2009.

The annual precipitation of 500 millimeters falls mainly in the winter months. The average temperature in January is 0 ° C and in June 28 ° C.

The distance from the state capital Dushanbe to Danghara is 116 kilometers. In Wahdat , east of Dushanbe, the A385 highway runs past Nurek in a southerly direction to Danghara. Its continuation to the south reaches the street village Qurbonshahid with the reconstructed medieval fortress Hulbuk (Хулбук) after almost 60 kilometers and then turns east to the city of Kulob (86 kilometers). In a south-westerly direction on the A384 from Danghara it is 77 kilometers to the small town of Qurghonteppa and another 35 kilometers to Kolkhozobod . This road is the only connection to the extreme southwest of the province. Four kilometers north of Danghara, near the village of Kores, are the remains of the early medieval fortified settlement of Soli-Sard.

History and politics

Main street on the market

The Ogzi-Kichik cave, inhabited in the late Paleolithic , was discovered 20 kilometers north-west of the city at an altitude of 1200 meters, eleven meters above the floor of a ravine . The stone and animal bones finds in front of the cave date according to the radiocarbon method to 30,000 and 15,700 BP . Other small finds in the area are dated to the Moustérien . In the Wachsch Valley there were oases with irrigated agriculture as early as the Bronze Age . Pot shards and bronze objects show a settlement at the end of the 2nd millennium BC. Chr.

The present city emerged in the 20th century as a cotton growing center. In 1932, shortly after the creation of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, the Administrative District ( Rajon ) of Aksu was formed. The name of this district was changed to Danghara in 1936. Until 1993, two years after the end of the Soviet Union and after independence, the ( nohija ) Danghara district belonged to the Kulob Oblast with the capital of the same name. Since the merger of the Kulob and Qurghonteppa oblasts, Danghara has been part of the ( wiloyat ) Chatlon region.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, there were practically no roads in southern Tajikistan. Before the opening of the railway line from Termez to Dushanbe in 1929, only the border river Amu Darya and the lower reaches of the Wachsch could be used as transport routes to a limited extent. From 1932 onwards, goods arriving in Termez were transported up the Amu Darya to Panzi Pojon and on to Qurghanteppa on a narrow-gauge railway line. In 1941 a continuation of this line to Dushanbe and in 1956 another line to Kulob was opened. Danghara was connected to the latter railway line via a short branch line. For travelers from Danghara to Qurghonteppa or Dushanbe, passenger transport with the narrow-gauge railway, if there was one, may not have been attractive, because the average speed of the freight trains was around ten kilometers per hour.

The fact that President Rahmon was born in Danghara in 1952 is of more than anecdotal importance to the city. From 1976 to 1988 Rahmon was secretary and one of the heads of the Lenin collective farm in Danghara and, after its renaming as sovkhoz, its director until 1992. During the nationwide civil war that began after independence in 1991, Rahmon became head of the People's Council of Kulob Province in 1992 and elected President in November 1994. Familiar Rahmons from Kulob and Danghara formed the ruling party during the civil war that lasted until 1997, against which the United Tajik Opposition (UTO), led by the Islamic Renewal Party and leaders from the Rasht Valley, faced. Since then, politicians and officials from the Kulob and Danghara regions have belonged to the circle of confidants of the president, although an internal power dispute between the Danghara and Kulob factions began in the late 1990s. These regional elites occupy most of the government, administrative and economic positions and control the country with a corruption-ridden network. The state aluminum producer TALCO and cotton production are at the center of the economic ties . The group of people of the Kulob faction on the one hand and the Danghara faction on the other belong to the system of regional clientelism , which is called mahalgaroi in Tajik . The civil war was ended by a peace agreement, which provided for a 30 percent participation of the opposition groups in positions of political power. Since 2000, however, the president has gradually changed the distribution of power in favor of the Danghara connection, so that today only a few former opposition politicians hold offices. The influence of the Kulob faction is also waning: In 2004, at Rahman's instigation, the influential Ghaffor Mirzoev, head of the President's life guard, who belongs to the Kulob faction, was arrested and imprisoned for life on charges of murder. In doing so, the president focuses power on family members and a patronage network from his native Danghara.

Cityscape

Market stall selling cottonseed oil in five liter plastic bottles

The district of Danghara consists of five subdistricts ( jamoat ) with a total of over 97,000 inhabitants according to data from 2010. According to official censuses, the number of urban residents was 5,761 in 1959, 9,083 in 1970, 12,892 in 1979, 16,898 in 1989 and 22,655 in Year 2010. For 2014, 24,400 inhabitants are estimated.

The A385 trunk road crosses the town, which has grown compactly and is surrounded by the fields of the plain, from northwest to south, the center of which is formed by the market. In the partially covered alleys of the market area, fabrics, household goods, groceries and articles for agriculture are offered. There are also shops along the main street. Other signs of a certain wealth are some teahouses around the city park with a ferris wheel and other entertainment options.

In January 2010 the parliament passed a resolution according to which a special economic zone should be set up in the town of Ishkoshim on the Afghan border and in Danghara in order to attract foreign investors. According to official declarations from July 2013, the assembly of tractors in the Danghara Special Economic Zone (FEZ Danghara) is planned through a joint venture with the Belarusian company MTZ . In October 2014, Parliament ratified an agreement to build an oil refinery in Danghara. The Chinese company Heli Investment and Development is to be involved in this.

literature

Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2010

Individual evidence

^ Republic of Tajikistan. Community Agriculture and Watershed Management Project E880. Volume 1: Environmental Management Framework . World Bank, December 2003

^ The Economics of Land Degradation for the Agriculture Sector in Tajikistan. A scoping study. UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Initiative in Tajikistan, Dushanbe 2012, pp. 21, 23

↑ ^a ^b Danghara Nohiya. In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan, p. 109

↑ Dangarinsky Hydrotechnical tunnel in Tajikistan

↑ Leonid B. Vishnyatsky: The Paleolithic of Central Asia. In: Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 13, No. March 1 , 1999, pp. 69–122, here p. 91

^ Grégoire Frumkin: Archeology in Soviet Central Asia. ( Handbook of Oriental Studies, 7th section: Art and Archeology, Volume 3: Inner Asia, Section 1) EJ Brill, Leiden / Cologne 1970, pp. 58, 62

^ MV Hambly: Road vs. Rail. A Note on Transport Development in Tadzhikistan. In: Soviet Studies, Vol. 19, No. January 3 , 1968, pp. 421-425, here pp. 422f

↑ Rahmon, Emomali (1952-) . In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan , p. 296

↑ Jennifer Mitchell: Civilian Victimization in the Tajik Civil War. How the Popular Front Won the War and Ruined the Nation. (Dissertation) King's College London, 2014, p. 142

^ Corruption . In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan, p. 105

^ John Heathershaw: Seeing like the International Community: How Peacebuilding Failed (and Survived) in Tajikistan. P. 3, Prepub version of Seeing like the International Community: How Peacebuilding Failed (and Survived) in Tajikistan. In: Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 2 (3) . Fall 2008, pp. 329–352

^ Johan Engvall: The State under Siege: The Drug Trade and Organized Crime in Tajikistan . In: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. September 6 , 2006, pp. 827-854, here p. 849