BALANCE SHEET OF FIGHTING IN LENINABAD.

The Prosecutor’s Office of Tajikistan’s Leninabad region has made public some devastating results of its investigation into last November’s fighting in that region. At least thirty-eight officials and law enforcement officers are being prosecuted on criminal charges ranging from active support of to passive cooperation with the rebels. Approximately 270 local civilians are being prosecuted on charges of having joined the rebel forces of ex-Colonel Mahmud Hudoberdiev. Some seventy captive rebels are also on trial. According to the regional prosecutor’s report, the rebels killed 114 government soldiers and wounded 431. Government forces in turn killed 220 of Hudoberdiev’s fighters, wounded 215 and captured seventy-five. These results are interim ones, because the completed investigation is not due until March (Russian agencies, January 29). The low number of prisoners taken seems to suggest either good morale on the rebel side, or a government decision to not take prisoners.

Meanwhile, the authorities do not feel safe in the region. On January 27, the deputy mayor of Leninabad’s regional capital Hujand–Tajikistan’s second-largest city–was assassinated in the city center. On January 28, a parliamentary deputy’s brother and bodyguard were killed in an attack which barely missed the deputy. Recently a senior prosecutor on the staff of the Prosecutor General’s Office in Dushanbe was assassinated during the course of the investigation in Chkalov, one of the main battlefields during the November fighting in Leninabad (Itar-Tass, January 27, 28; see also the Monitor, November 4-10, 1998).

JOINT MILITARY EXERCISE PLANNED UNDER AMERICAN AUSPICES.