Tursunsoda

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Tursunsoda
Tursunzoda
Basic data
State : TajikistanTajikistan Tajikistan
Administrative unit : Nohijahoi tobei Jumhuriy
Coordinates : 38 ° 31 '  N , 68 ° 14'  E Coordinates: 38 ° 30 '39 "  N , 68 ° 13' 49"  E
Height : 705  m
Residents : 44,200 (2007)
Tursunsoda (Tajikistan)
Tursunsoda
Tursunsoda

Tursunsoda ( Tajik Турсунзода ), also Tursunzoda, Tursunsade, Tursunzade , until 1978 Regar , is the capital of the district of the same name ( Nohija ) in the Nohijahoi tobei dschumhurij ("Districts subordinate to the Republic") in the west of Tajikistan . Located in the fertile Hisortal near the Uzbek border, the city has a busy market for the surrounding villages.

Tursunsoda is known for the aluminum factory that went into operation in 1975, today the Tajikistan Aluminum Company (TALCO), the largest industrial company in the country, which generates around 60 percent of exports and 20 percent of the gross domestic product and, when fully operational, an average of 40 percent of the nation's electricity demand consumed. Corruption allegations surrounding TALCO and the government, which were heard in one of the most expensive international court cases in London from 2005 to 2008, have called Tajikistan's creditworthiness with international donors into question.

location

TALCO aluminum factory

Tursunsoda is located at an altitude of 705 meters in the wide Hisortal, which extends in an east-west direction from the state capital Dushanbe to the Uzbek border and in the north from the Hissar Mountains (Fanberge) with peaks between 3000 and 4000 meters and in the south from hills to is limited to 1500 meters altitude. The latter separate the plain from the valley of the Kofarnihon in the southeast. In Uzbekistan, the Hisortal continues in the valley of Surxondaryo . The Hisortal, with the Ferghanatal in the north and the lowlands in the province of Chatlon in the south, is one of the largest arable areas in the country. Rice and cotton are mainly grown in the district, albeit to a much lesser extent than in the other regions mentioned. Both must be watered intensively through a system of canals ( arik ). Irrigation comes from tributaries of the Surxondaryo, including the Karatag River , which flows south of the city from a valley in the Hissar Mountains from the northeast and joins the Schirkent, which rises in the mountains in the north and touches the western outskirts of the city. Furthermore, grapes, pomegranates and lemons thrive in the area .

Tursunsoda can be reached from Dushanbe after about 54 kilometers on the well-developed M41 highway, which passes Hisor north and reaches the Uzbek border at Uzun ten kilometers west of Tursunsoda. The nearest major city in Uzbekistan, Denov , is 35 kilometers from the border. Its location at one of only three generally open border crossings between the two countries, the common border of which is around 1,330 kilometers long, and the direct connection to the capital Dushanbe makes Tursunsoda an important transit station for goods and people.

An alternative southern route of the Silk Road ran through the Hisortal parallel to the crossing of the Ferghana Valley . This "Karotegin route" led from Termiz via Denov and Tursunsoda, through the Hisortal further east through the Rasht valley (formerly Karotegin valley) along the river Wachsch towards China.

Tursunsoda is also on the Dushanbe - Moscow railway line, which is the cheapest travel option for Tajik migrant workers. From the Turkmen port city of Turkmenbaşy , petroleum coke is transported by rail to TALCO, where the carbon is used in aluminum production.

The inhabitants of Tursunsoda and in the entire western part of the Hisortal are mostly Uzbeks , the Tajik population here is in the minority. A special feature is the small minority of the Parya, an ethno-linguistic group of no more than 7500 members, which was first noticed by science in the 1950s. The Parya speak an as yet unclassified Indo-Aryan language , possibly close to Rajasthani , and live mainly in small villages in the Tursunsoda district, in the eastern neighboring district of Shahrinaw and across the border in the Uzbek province of Surxondaryo .

A few kilometers north of Tursunsoda begins the Schirkent valley, the upper part of which was declared a natural historical landscape park in 1991. Fossil footprints of dinosaurs have been preserved in three hard-to-reach places .

history

Statue of Mirso Tursunsoda in the central square

Tursunsoda was a village until the first half of the 20th century. Until 1952 the place was called Stantsija-Regar , after which the name was shortened to Regar ("city made of sand"). At the end of the 19th century the area belonged to the Emirate of Bukhara . When Central Asia was divided into partial Soviet republics, Tajikistan was added to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic as the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in October 1924 . The demarcation of this republic took place without taking into account the ethnic distribution of the population, so that the Tajiks with Bukhara and Samarqand lost their historical cultural centers and large settlement areas with Uzbek population were within the Tajik republic. These included the border regions around Tursunsoda, around Punjakent and areas in the southwest; 1929, when Tajikistan became an autonomous Soviet republic , supplemented by the Uzbek-populated region of Khujand in the Ferghana Valley.

In the same year 1929, the direct rail link between Moscow and Dushanbe was opened through the Regar station. The station has kept its old name to this day. The city of Regar was renamed in 1978 in honor of the poet and politician Mirso Tursunsoda (1911–1977), who became one of the first Tajik playwrights during the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic and is honored as a national poet to this day. According to Sadriddin Aini, Tursunsoda was one of the leading representatives of socialist realism with Tajik characteristics. He is featured on the one- somoni banknote from 1999 and his gold-colored statue stands in the central square of the city.

At the end of the 1950s, plans arose to dam the river Wachsch in several places. In the mid-1970s, the Nurek Dam was completed and electricity production had started. At 300 meters high, it is the world's highest dam and provides almost three quarters of Tajik’s electricity needs. Parallel to the construction of the dam, the largest aluminum factory in Central Asia was built in Tursunsoda from 1972 to 1975 as the main consumer of the electricity generated.

Industrial and workers' settlement south of the railway line

In 1991 Tajikistan became independent. In the same year a front made up of various opposition groups began a civil war against the new Tajik government, which only took control of the whole country in 1997. In 1994, in the middle of the civil war, the warlord and mayor of Tursunsoda, Ibodullo Boimatov, rebelled against the government and later refused to have his fighters disarmed. Instead, he fled to Uzbekistan, from where he returned in early 1996 in two Uzbek military vehicles and took control of the city with around 1,000 men. After two weeks he handed over the heavy weapons to his allied rebel Makhmoud Khudoberdiyev, an Uzbek colonel who was staying with his troops in Qurghonteppa . After their demand for some members of the government to resign was partially met, they ended the uprising.

The end of the civil war in 1997 provided for a peace agreement with the opposition groups and for the first time in post-Soviet Central Asia included an Islamic opposition party in the government, which was rejected in Uzbekistan. In response to this, the Uzbek government began supporting Mahmud Khudoiberdiyev as an opponent of the Tajik government. After clashes with government units in August 1997, Khudoiberdiyev withdrew from Qurghonteppa to southern Uzbekistan and later to Afghanistan. The uprisings and skirmishes in the Tursunsoda region during the civil war are related to the economic importance of the aluminum factory, whose operation could only be maintained with difficulty during this period.

In 2006 the government started a volunteer program to settle families from other regions of the country in the area around Tursunsoda, where better job opportunities in industry and agriculture should await them. 1000 families from the underdeveloped Kulob region , where there is neither work nor farmland, but the number of emigrants is high, were relocated with this program. The land made available is close to the Uzbek border. Since all resettlers are Tajiks from President Rahmon's home region , who received land in an area inhabited by the majority of Uzbeks, critics note that it was probably also a matter of resettling a population group that was particularly loyal to the government. The border area is considered to be sensitive because relations between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been tense since the civil war, among other things because of disputes over the amount of water and the exact course of the border in certain areas.

Cityscape

Busy market

In 1974, 21,000 people lived in the city. In 2007 the population was estimated at 44,200. This makes Tursunsoda the eighth largest city in the country. The place, which was converted into a city in the 1970s as the living space of the workers in the aluminum factory, is largely laid out in a modern rectangular street grid. Center is a large open space 100 meters from the train station. The railway line passes the city center in an east-west direction on the southern edge. A three kilometer long road to the south branches off from the M41 expressway near the aluminum factory. The central square with a roundabout is the stop for minibuses to Dushanbe and for shared taxis to the surrounding villages. In the alleys to the east there is a bustling market district with agricultural products from the region, raw materials for agriculture and household goods. On the other side of the square is a small tree-lined park.

The outskirts south of the railway line consists of some partially dilapidated industrial buildings from the Soviet era and a workers' settlement. In addition to the aluminum factory, a brick factory and a cotton processing company are among the employers.

There are two television stations, TV-Regar and TV-TadAz , the two newspapers Tojikiston and Regar, and a radio station. The local football club is called Regar TadAZ .

TALCO

TALCO from the south

The Tursunsoda aluminum factory was opened in 1975 with the name TadAz, abbreviated in Russian, and renamed TALCO ( Tajikistan Aluminum Company ) in April 2007 . It is the largest aluminum electrolysis facility in the country and has long been the fourth largest in the world. TALCO is the largest export company and generates around 60 percent of Tajikistan's export revenues and has a 20 percent share of the gross domestic product . Before 2013 the number of employees was over 12,000 and at the beginning of 2014 it was 10,800. The required bauxite was obtained from other countries of the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc before independence and is now purchased on the world market. Tajikistan has no bauxite, the country was chosen as the location because electricity can be generated here from hydropower. The Nurek dam was built at the same time as the factory.

Depending on the workload, TALCO needs 36 to 45 percent of the total electricity consumed in the country in different years. Generally, 10–17 kWh are required for the electrolysis of one kilogram of aluminum , depending on the energy efficiency of the method used and the age of the system. With 17 kWh, TALCO is at the upper end of the energy requirement. Electrical energy accounts for over 50 percent of production costs. The production costs therefore depend heavily on the fluctuating electricity price. In 2011, the cost of electricity was $ 92 million and natural gas was $ 16 million, despite a low tariff. Since April 2012, the electricity tariff that TALCO has to pay has been staggered according to the season, it is 1.3 cents / kWh in summer and 2.2 cents / kWh in winter (corresponds to an annual average of 1.8 cents / kWh).

TALCO is the country's largest single air polluter. The gaseous escaping hydrogen fluoride has led to health problems in the population of Tursunsoda and in neighboring areas in Uzbekistan. TALCO air pollution is a point of contention in the political dispute between the two neighboring countries. According to Uzbek environmentalists, TALCO releases 300 to 400 tons of hydrogen fluoride into the atmosphere every year, but a TALCO manager believes this figure is far exaggerated, and Tajik political analyst and newspaper editor Saimiddin Dustov suspected in early 2010 that the environmentalists were one of the Uzbek President Islom Karimov staged front organization.

Although many industrial companies from the Soviet era have been privatized or closed since 1991, TALCO is still fully state-owned. Barqi Tojik, which is linked to TALCO and is responsible for the production and distribution of electricity , is also wholly state-owned. The operation of TALCO is not managed by a board of directors, but by a director who reports to the president once a month. From 1994 to 2004 the director was Abdulkadir Ermatov, and from 1996 he was assisted by Avaz Nazarov. Since then, Sherali Kabirov has been Finance Director at TALCO.

Poster of President Rahmons with green fields and a chimney from the company TALCO on the road from the city to there

Sherali Nazarov managed the variety of trade relations of TALCO own companies abroad, since 1998, primarily by the company's own Ansol, one on the British Channel Island of Guernsey registered offshore - Holding . A significant part of the profit went to Nazarov and the Ansol company . In 2004 there was a change in the management of TALCO at the instigation of the Rahmon government and Oriyonbank , which is headed by Rahmon's son-in-law Hasan Sadulloev. After his involuntary resignation, TALCO blamed Nazarov for the loss of 500 million US dollars, which had disappeared through his company Ansol . In return, Nazarov demanded an additional payment of 130 million US dollars from TALCO. The legal dispute before a court in London between May 2005 and November 2008 could not be resolved and led international observers to speak of a lack of transparency in TALCO's business practices. With an estimated cost of 150 to 200 million US dollars, most of which had to be raised by the Tajik state, this was one of the most expensive litigation ever. During the negotiations, TALCO's international economic ties became public. The forced change at the top of TALCO was due to the redistribution of some positions of power in the area around Rahmons. Ghaffor Mirzoev, head of the President's bodyguard, who is said to have been financially involved in TALCO, was removed from office and imprisoned for life after being charged with, among other things, murder. Mirzoev belongs to the Kulob faction around the president, named after their place of origin , which is in opposition to Rahmon's preferred household power from his place of birth, Danghara .

The Russian company RUSAL appeared as new business partners from 2004 and Norsk Hydro from 2006 . Norsk Hydro , majority owned by the Norwegian government, became TALCO's leading trading partner and pushed RUSAL out of the field. Additional branches of TALCO's business were transferred to offshore companies in 2004 that have no apparent direct relationship with the Tajik government. All are part of a financial transaction system, the advantage of which for the TALCO company is questioned and in which the structures have remained similar even after the change in personnel in 2004 and the exchange of partner companies. To them since 2004 belonging CDH Investments Corporation based in the British Virgin Islands and the Talco Management Ltd . (TML) there. The purchase of raw materials and the sale of finished products is handled internationally by the company TML, which acts as a financial intermediary. The profit made by TALCO on paper is therefore low. TALCO bears all production costs and paid the costs of the London litigation. Between 2005 and 2007, TALCO made only $ 15 million in profits, even though the price of aluminum on the world market increased by about 200 percent during that time .

The organization of the state enterprise TALCO is seen in connection with the centralization of power, resources and capital by the president, as a privatization of the state to the detriment of its people. TALCO's business model is largely responsible for the fact that Tajikistan ranks 154 out of 177 in the 2014 corruption index of Transparency International . In this context, in addition to technical and ecological problems, there are also the declared withdrawal of the World Bank from the planned Rogun Dam project and the ranking of Tajikistan by the World Bank in last place 188 in the Trading Across Borders Index (as of June 2014) Difficulties in the bureaucratic handling of overseas trade in goods for import and export.

Main entrance for the workers

Most of the aluminum produced is sold abroad. In August 2011, one built for 35 million US dollars was company called Talco Cable Industries opened in Dushanbe, concerns have since 10,000 tonnes of aluminum by TALCO and manufactures from power cables. The cables are installed within the country. The operators wish to export the cables to Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of a future World Bank project in order to supply these countries with electricity from the Rogun power plant. This planned major project in Central Asia is called CASA-1000 . Western investors have not yet participated here.

TALCO has not posted a profit since 2010 and, according to the company, closed 2013 with a loss of more than 40 million US dollars. As a result, around 20 percent of the 10,800 workers were laid off at the beginning of 2014, while the remaining workers receive 30 percent less wages. Aside from the structural problems, the drop in the price of aluminum is believed to be one of the causes. The price on the world market fell from 2,800 US dollars per ton in 2011 to 1700 to 1800 US dollars in early 2014. In the first three months of 2012 were, according to a company spokesman 74,058 tonnes of primary aluminum and 73,362 tonnes of primary aluminum ( primary aluminum ) with a total market value of 153.1 million US dollars, which was an increase of 8 percent over the last quarter of the previous year. However, between 2007 and 2013 TALCO's aluminum production fell by 48 percent. The crisis at TALCO is having a negative impact on the country's economy and continues to worsen the unfavorable balance of foreign trade.

In January 2020, the Tajik parliament decided to allow TALCO to be privatized. Chinese companies in particular are traded as possible investors.

literature

Web links

Commons : Tursunsoda  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sunatullo Jonboboev, Sharofat Mamadambarova: The Silk Road of Tajikistan . META (card)
  2. ^ Elisabeth Abbess, Katja Müller, Daniel Paul, Calvin Tiessen, Gabriela Tiessen: Language Maintenance Among the Parya of Tajikistan. SIL Electronic Survey Report, 2010, p. 4
  3. ↑ From Nurek to Rogun . Tajik Mission
  4. ^ Shale Asher Horowitz: From Ethnic Conflict to Stillborn Reform: The Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Lancer, Delhi 2008, p. 136, ISBN 978-8170622734 ; Carlotta Gall: Tajik Warlord-Trader Lowers Guns, for Now . ( Memento of the original from March 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The Moscow Times, February 8, 1996 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.themoscowtimes.com
  5. ↑ Bernd Kuzmits: Borders of orders in Central Asia. Transactions and Attitudes between Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. (World Regions in Transition, Volume 15) Nomos, Baden-Baden 2013, p. 126
  6. ^ Tajik Resettlement Project Aims to Help Poorest . Reporting Central Asia No. 474, Institute for War & Peace, December 11, 2006
  7. ↑ Regar . The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979
  8. ↑ TALCO . In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2002, pp. 346f
  9. ^ John Heathershaw: State transformation, p. 187
  10. ↑ a b c d e David Trilling: Tajikistan's Cash Cow: Enough Milk to Go Around? Eurasia.net, June 10, 2014
  11. ↑ Daryl Fields, Artur Kochnakyan, Gary Stuggins, John Besant-Jones: Tajikistan's Winter Energy Crisis: Electricity Supply and Demand Alternatives . November 2012, p. 13f
  12. ^ Pradyumna Prasad Karan: The Non-Western World: Environment, Development, and Human Rights. Routledge, London 2004, p. 468
  13. ↑ Rukhshona Ibragimova, Shakar Saadi: Uzbekistan and Tajikistan argue over TALCO emissions. Tajik's claim Uzbek objections are linked to Rogun. ( Memento from November 25, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Central Asia Online, April 19, 2010
  14. ^ Industry. In: Kamoludin Abdullaev, Shahram Akbarzadeh: Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2002, p. 170
  15. ^ Tajikistan: Suit Settlement Brings No Resolution . Eurasianet.org, December 1, 2008
  16. ^ Tajikistan: Free Press a Casualty amid Dushanbe's Security Sweep . Eurasianet.org, November 11, 2010
  17. ^ John Heathershaw: State transformation, p. 188
  18. ^ 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
  19. ↑ John Helmer: IMF blows whistle on Tajik corruption . Asia Times, March 26, 2008
  20. ^ John Heathershaw: State transformation, p. 192
  21. ^ Assessment Studies for Proposed Rogun Hydropower Project in Tajikistan. The World Bank, September 1, 2014
  22. ↑ Trading Across Borders. World Bank Group (accessed November 25, 2014)
  23. ↑ Event Calendar . Talco
  24. ↑ Central Asia: South Asia Energy Project a Pipe Dream? Eurasianet.org, June 20, 2013
  25. ↑ TALCO says it produced US $ 153.1 worth of output in Q1 2012 . ( Memento of the original from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Asia Plus, April 9, 2012 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ww.khovar.news.tj
  26. ↑ Robin Roth: Tajikistan allows the privatization of the aluminum company Talco and the Rogun hydropower plant. In: Novastan German. January 26, 2020, accessed on January 27, 2020 (German).