Travellers on a bus in Dushanbe look through the window at a massive portrait of Tajikistan’s president Emomali Rahmon. (c) Sergei Grits / AP / Press Association. All rights reserved.
Emomali Rahmon has ruled Tajikistan for 21 years. This mountainous Central Asian country is one of most repressive states in the post-Soviet space.
This situation is unlikely to change for the better. Amendments to Tajikistan’s constitution passed in a referendum earlier this year have removed the limits to the number of presidential terms. After Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev, Rahmon is the second leader in the region to remove obstacles to lifetime rule.
