A cellular signal tower or a windmill? Photograph by Flickr user crowt59 (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: Tajikistan’s President Rahmon is seeking to ban mobile phones from the country. The government claims it’s for reasons of health and taxes, but neweurasia’s Dushanbe is suspicious.  But whatever the truth, he wonders whether Rahmon will be successful or become “a Don Quixote trying to fight cellular signal towers”.

Tajikistan’s quiet cultural revolution just made a very loud collect call to mobile phones. All mobile phone ads have suddenly disappeared from the streets in the space of a single night.  There are also no advertisements on television; instead, the channels are broadcasting infomercials about the dangers posted by mobile phones.

This sudden and surreal metamorphosis was sparked when Rahmon recently decided that the people Tajikistan should stop using mobile phones.  Voila!  Now Tajikistan has declared war on them — but I wonder whether he’s Don Quixote trying to fight cellular signal towers.

The “Year of Technology”?

Saifiddin a 21-year-old student, says he can’t imagine his life without his beloved mobile phone. He needs it to call his mother, who lives in a remote village, as well as his brother, who is a migrant worker in Russia twice a month, and his girlfriend.  He remarks,

“How will the people  live, study, and work in a country where land line phones are rare since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the mobile phone is the only communication means for them?”

We watch together as Dushanbe municipal workers taking down mobile phone advertisement banners, Saifiddin worries whether Rahmon will eventually order the outright confiscation of all mobile phones.  On the one hand, he sees Rahmon as a caring father who does not want his kids to squander their hard earned cash or independence. On the other hand, he also thinks that Rahmon too often oversteps the bounds of appropriateness for a president.  He remarks sarcastically,

“Seems to me [Rahmon] has solved all our society’s other problems, so people’s phones are the only irritating problem remaining to be personally solved by him.”

Paradoxically, Rahmon had declared 2010 the “Year of Technology”.  But the Tajik people are well-acquainted with their president’s passion for campaigns of cultural reform.  Highlights  include regulating weddings, funerals, and other parties, banning Slavic endings on names (his own included), banning head scarves and miniskirts at schools, banning Soviet style holidays at schools, and banning gold teeth.

The only super-modern sphere

The telecommunications sector in the country is the only area that made huge success after the civil war.  In 2004, Sayed Zubaidov, the minister of telecommunication at the time, swung open the gates of Tajikistan’s untapped telecom market, whereupon 24 companies flooded us with cheap prices.  That year saw the number of mobile phone users explode from a mere 8000 to 4 million.  According to Rahmon himself, there are now 6 million mobile phone accounts in the country and the average revenue of the remaining 19 telecoms is $318 million total.

There have been two previous attempts by the Tajik authorities to harness the freedom of mobile phones.  In 2008 the government proposed to build a single telecommunication gateway that would have brought all the mobile phone and internet companies under one controlling umbrella; they tried again in 2009.  Both times the companies united and successfully resisted the plan.  Today, the Tax Committee complains that the companies are out of control and there is no way to verify their revenue.  In particular it would like to see governmental oversight on the amount and duration of calls.

Saifiddin thinks that there’s more than meets the eye. He feels that the recent uprising in Kyrgyzstan might be the real culprit because of the role played by online social media and mobile phones.  Indeed, in January 2009, when rumors of a deadly earthquake swept through Dushanbe, tens of thousands of Tajiks flooded the streets with their ears plugged to their mobile phones.  If modern telecommunication technology can give such power to rumor, imagine what it could do for politics.  Saifiddin remarks,

“The authorities do not want the Year of Technology to turn into the Year of Revolution.”