Watchdog

A leading member of a banned opposition party in Tajikistan jailed for purportedly showing support for the extremist Islamic State (IS) group in his town has reportedly died in jail.

The Ozodagon website reported on August 16 that Qurbon Mannonov, 73, died in a detention facility in Dushanbe overnight. The site quoted Mannonov's relatives as reporting the death. No official confirmation has been made.

Mannonov was the head of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan's (IRPT) branch in the city of Nurak, 70 kilometers southeast of the capital, Dushanbe.

He and 12 others were arrested in August 2015 in the wake of the government's crackdown on the IRPT, which was banned shortly afterwards.

Mannonov was accused of masterminding the raising of an Islamic State flag in Nurak. He rejected the charges as being politically motivated.

In February, the detained party members were sentenced to prison terms of between 10 and 25 years.

In June, a court in Dushanbe sentenced the IRPT's deputy heads to life imprisonment and 12 other leading members of the party to prison terms of between two and 28 years on charges of conspiring with former Defense Minister Abduhalim Nazarzoda in a supposed armed bid to seize power in September 2015.

Party leader Muhiddin Kabiri, who now lives in exile, rejected the accusations.

With reporting by Ozodagon

A public commission in Kyrgyzstan has concluded that Tsarist Russia's mass crackdown on an uprising by Kyrgyz in 1916 was genocide.

The commission's head, Azimbek Beknazarov, told reporters that his commission's conclusion on August 15 was based on data retrieved from archives provided by Russian and Chinese authorities.

During World War I, Russia decided to draft indigenous peoples of Central Asia into the army as unarmed workers who would build trenches and fortifications.

Many Kyrgyz and Kazakhs refused to go and openly rebelled against Russian authorities.

It is believed that between 100,000 and 270,000 ethnic Kyrgyz were killed by Tsarist Russia's punitive battalions, as hundreds of thousands of others fled to the neighboring Chinese province of Xinjiang.

The deadly events in Kyrgyzstan in 1916 were not mentioned in Soviet textbooks, while a similar uprising in Kazakhstan was described as a revolt against local feudal overlords and the Russian tsar that contributed to the victory of Russian communists in 1917.

In April, Russian State Duma chairman Sergei Naryshkin rejected the genocide allegations in regard to the uprisings, saying that "all nations suffered 100 years ago."