Akbar Turajonzoda is a Senator in the National Assembly of Tajikistan. He served as the Qazi Qalon, the highest Muslim authority in Tajikistan, from 1988 to 1991. He served as the second-in-command of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan

Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan

The Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan is an Islamist political party in Tajikistan. It is the only legal Islamist party in Central Asia...

 and the United Tajik Opposition

United Tajik Opposition

The United Tajik Opposition was an alliance of democratic, liberal and Islamist forces that fought in the Tajik Civil War from 1992 to 1997 against administration of President Emomali Rahmonov....

 from 1993 until his expulsion from the party in 1999. He served as the Deputy Prime Minister in the Tajik government after the civil war.

Turajonzoda was born in the Kofarnihon region near Dushanbe

Dushanbe

-Economy:Coal, lead, and arsenic are mined nearby in the cities of Nurek and Kulob allowing for the industrialization of Dushanbe. The Nurek Dam, the world's highest as of 2008, generates 95% of Tajikistan's electricity, and another dam, the Roghun Dam, is planned on the Vakhsh River...

 in the Tajik SSR

Tajik SSR

The Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Tajik SSR for short, was one of the 15 republics that made up the Soviet Union. Located in Central Asia, the Tajik SSR was created on 5 December 1929 as a national entity for the Tajik people within the Soviet Union...

. He served in the Department of International Relations in the Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Central Asia in Tashkent

Tashkent

Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan and of the Tashkent Province. The officially registered population of the city in 2008 was about 2.2 million. Unofficial sources estimate the actual population may be as much as 4.45 million.-Early Islamic History:...

, Uzbek SSR

Uzbek SSR

The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Uzbek SSR for short, was one of the republics of the Soviet Union since its creation in 1924...

 from 1985 to 1987. He left Tajikistan in 1992 when the civil war began, visiting Iran

Iran

Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

, the Arab world

Arab world

The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...

, the United States, Europe, Russia, and Uzbekistan. UTO leader Said Abdullah Nuri and Turajonzoda led the UTO from Afghanistan and Iran during the civil war, returning to Tajikistan in February 1998.

Comments on Hizb ut-Tahrir

He has called Hizb ut-Tahrir

Hizb ut-Tahrir

Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international Sunni. pan-Islamic political organisation but keeps it open for all including shias,some of its beliefs are against sunni school of thought, whose goal is for all Muslim countries to unify as an Islamic state or caliphate ruled by Islamic law and with a caliph...

, an international Islamist organization, a threat to Tajikistan's stability. He claimed HT is Western-sponsored and that it wants to "remak[e] Central Asia... A more detailed analysis of HT's programmatic and ideological views and concrete examples of its activities suggests that it was created by anti-Islamic forces. One proof of this is the comfortable existence this organization enjoys in a number of Western countries, where it has large centers and offices that develop its concept of an Islamic caliphate."

Turajonzoda praised Nuri following his death, saying, "Mentor Nuri had a very unique nature. He did a lot of good things during his short life. He was one of those personalities who, firstly, strived to prevent the civil war in 1992, and then tried to return [the country to] peace and stability. After the war was imposed on us and we had not other choice, we tried together with him to reach a fair peace deal so that our refugees could return from Afghanistan to Tajikistan with honor."

Call for amnesty

On 12 March 2007 he called on the Rahmonov administration to grant a general amnesty

Amnesty

Amnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent people, without changing the laws defining the offense. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the...

 for all involved in the civil war on the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. "Originally [the amnesty] was Nuri's idea... The talk was of an amnesty for those people who are still in jail. I proposed to him that there should be a full amnesty and he accepted this wholeheartedly but added that we should also include the liquidation of those criminal cases still pending against all leaders of the opposition." He criticized war-time convictions, saying the evidence often did not prove the charges.

Shodi Shabdolov

Shodi Shabdolov

Shodi Shabdolov is the chairman of the Communist Party of Tajikistan and a member of the Parliament of Tajikistan....

, the leader of the Communist Party, and Abduqayum Yusufov, the chairman of Tajikistan's Independent Lawyers' Association, support the amnesty proposal.