Appendix C - Ninety-Seven Anonymous Warlords

Summary

The purpose of this appendix is to provide details about the data on Tajik warlords who joined the state and to expand on the brief presentation in Chapter 5.

With the aid of research teams based in Bishkek and Dushanbe, I revisited the Small Arms Survey's secondary source materials. My aim was to identify additional characteristics of each field commander's private army and resolve a number of inconsistencies in the application of coding categories. The data collection effort, conceived in the spring of 2006, began as an attempt to systematically collect information on recruitment techniques, control of resources, political connections to groups in the capital, financial support, and characteristics of command and control for each warlord who fought in the Tajik civil war. Additional interviews with area specialists, military and embassy professionals, and journalists filled in the gaps left by interviews with former combatants. All final coding decisions were my own. None of my research assistants retain project materials.

What is a warlord, exactly? The coding rules used admitted an additional field commander to the dataset if (1) it was possible to find at least three secondary or two primary sources that confirmed that an individual actually existed (e.g., that the newly discovered commander was not simply a pseudonym or nom de guerre), and (2) at least one source suggested that the warlord could call on the services of at least twenty-five men through channels other than the official state hierarchy (e.g., being a general or police colonel did not automatically lead to inclusion in the dataset). The dataset likely includes at least one individual who may have had a bigger public presence than he actually commanded in terms of street recruits, but because their names exist in the historical record it was decided at the time that excluding them would have been arbitrary. Individuals who remained completely outside of the political consolidation scramble – apolitical criminals and drug dealers who kept their heads down and never entered militia politics – are also excluded from these data.