WED….no, no, no – it’s THURSDAY

Today is the Day of National Unity, a public holiday in Tajikistan. National Unity Day commemorates the signing of the national peace accord in 1997 which ended the civil war.

By the middle of the 19th century, Russian conquests in Central Asia brought most of modern-day Tajikistan under Tsarist control. During the Soviet period, and despite the efforts of the USSR to establish a Soviet collective culture, the Tajiks maintained a fierce sense of nationalism and pride in their own history and culture. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet declared Tajikistan’s independence from the Soviet Union on September 9th 1991.

Almost immediately, Tajikistan descended into civil war. The war was fought on regional lines, with rebels from the Garm and Gorno-Badakhshan regions rising up against the newly-formed government of President Rahmon Nabiyev, which was dominated by people from the Khujand and Kulyab regions. All but about 25,000 of the 400,000 ethnic Russiansin Tajikistan fled to Russia.

In the five years of the conflict, an estimated 100,000 had died in the fighting, with more than a million others being refugees with the country. On June 27th 1997, the “General Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and National Accord in Tajikistan” and the “Moscow Protocol’ were signed, bringing the war to an end.


Found in a Chinese shop

Some…

Some folks are introverts


SIGNZ


I didn’t find any good birthdays today. Here is the amazing Yuja Wang playing ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ (Vol du Bourdon). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8alxBofd_eQ