Tajiks Move Grudgingly Toward Reconciliation : Europe: Half a million people who fled a deadly war have come home; a truce holds. But tensions shroud Sunday’s election.

Two years after she was widowed and uprooted by war, Saipocho Kholikova returned here from a refugee camp and stood in the vine-covered portico of her home. Backed by escorts from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, she confronted a warrior of the victorious Kulyabi clan who had moved into the four-room house.

“They opened the gate and told him I am back and I would live here,” Kholikova recalled, sitting cross-legged on the matted floor of her vacant living room. “They said they would come back and check on me.”

The intruder didn’t leave right away. Three of his relatives came around and--in front of her two small children--beat the frail, 45-year-old villager unconscious in her garden. They broke her windows. Confined in silence to one room, she shared the house with the man and his family for 10 weeks before they departed with her furniture, refrigerator, television set and carpets.

In this most devastating but esoteric of blood feuds on former Soviet territory, Kholikova’s ordeal passes for progress toward peace. The harassment has stopped, she wrote recently to her four grown children in Afghanistan: “Come back, please. All is well.”

Deep in Central Asia, Tajikistan is moving haltingly, grudgingly toward reconciliation. Half a million people who fled the war, including three-fourths of the 60,000 who camped in Afghanistan, have come home to partly destroyed towns and farm villages. A temporary cease-fire has been in force since Oct. 20.

A land of poets with little tradition of war or exile, the place might well be Nowhere-istan. In a conflict overshadowed by that in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in some ways harder to fathom, Tajikistan’s snow-capped peaks and cotton-growing valleys erupted with gunfire among ideological enemies and regional clans after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

In late 1992, Communist warriors of the Kulyabi clan, with tank support from the Russian army, drove an alliance of Islamists and democrats, along with their fighters of the Garmi and Pamiri clans, out of power and into Afghanistan. From there, they began low-intensity guerrilla raids. The war at its peak turned a 10th of the population into refugees. It has killed 20,000 people and caused $7 billion in damage to what was already the poorest Soviet spinoff state.

The regime of Emamali S. Rakhmonov, a Kulyabi who once ran a collective cotton farm, has failed to consolidate its victory, the nation or any semblance of an economy, even with 25,000 Russian-led border troops and billions of Russian rubles.

Now, the southern Kulyabis have fallen out with their wartime allies, the northern Khodzhent clan, which ran the republic in Soviet days.

Alarmed that the lingering insurgency could spread guns and drugs its way, Russia has coupled the military buildup in its neediest client state with pressure on Rakhmonov to make peace.

A growing cast of outsiders has reinforced this shift in Moscow’s policy and broken Tajikistan’s isolation. Jeeps emblazoned with the Red Cross and blue U.N. logos fan out on daily humanitarian and observer missions. Human Rights Watch/Helsinki monitors the regime’s police methods. Diplomats from the United States, United Nations and Iran keep contact with warring factions.

The government last spring opened peace talks with the guerrilla-backed opposition. A U.N. observer mission has arrived to oversee the cease-fire and a promised exchange of 27 prisoners from each side.

But the whole process is fragile. In September, the government executed one condemned Islamic mullah on the opposition’s original prisoner list and admitted the unexplained death of another. It has refused to legalize four exiled parties or drop treason charges against their leaders, who in turn refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Sunday’s presidential election. A deputy prime minister died in a mine explosion the first day of the cease-fire.

Refugees have benefited most from the foreign scrutiny, which has obliged Kulyabi warlords to disband their most brutal gangs. Paramilitary thugs have been quietly sent to Russia for training in the army, making it safer for Garmis and Pamiris to come home.

“The government has become more or less civilized,” said Oinikhol Bobonazarova, a leader of the opposition Democratic Party in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital.

Violence that killed 15 returning refugees last year abated after the two most powerful Kulyabi warlords, Sangak Safarov and Faizulli Saidov, shot each other dead. Saidov, so fearsome that southerners still fall silent at the mention of his name, bitterly opposed repatriation.

And the harassment died down further after Pierre-Francois Pirlot, a Frenchman who heads the U.N. refugee mission in Dushanbe, gave a scolding lecture on Tajik television last fall. He visited the camps to coax reluctant refugees to return, hooking them up by field radio to reassuring relatives back home.

Tajik officials at all levels now endorse repatriation as smart counterinsurgency.

“We won’t have quiet lives here as long as one of them is across the river in Afghanistan,” said Safar Khalimov, a former warlord who is deputy mayor of this southern farming region and helps returnees get land and jobs.

But in nearby villages populated by Garmis, young men are scarce. Garmis and Kulyabis live too close for comfort, and many Kulyabis are still armed, so the Garmis who fought them--or might be suspected of having done so--stay away. Still, their mothers and young siblings are coming back.

On a collective farm called Communism, Garmi war widow Guljon Bukhoriyeva had just returned to her mud-brick home. The roof was gone, along with her four cows, but squash grew in the garden. Two years after leaving, she put a borrowed roof over one of her three rooms and moved in.

As she greeted visitors, her three young children pushed dry weeds into a mud-oven fire. Kulyabi neighbors have welcomed her back, she said, but her three grown children are staying “in another part of Tajikistan.”

“It is a true success story,” Pirlot said of the repatriation. “But my fear is, ‘Is it going to last?’ The effort we’ve made to rebuild things wouldn’t stand a chance if the hard-liners decided to go at it again.”

That could happen as long as the welcome mat does not extend to opposition leaders, who speak for 5,000 guerrillas. In the peace talks, the government insists on having the election Sunday without them; the opposition wants a council of neutral statesmen, appointed by both sides, to rule for two years, disarm everyone, then hold elections.

Guerrillas have stepped up attacks in recent months, assassinating a deputy defense minister and seizing or killing 53 government soldiers in a single raid.

“These elections will not help the cause of peace,” exiled Tajik poet-politician Davlat Khudonazarov told a recent U.S. congressional hearing. “They will be held in an environment where tens of thousands of people are running around with guns in their hands.”

Citing the exclusion of opposition parties, the Council for Security and Cooperation in Europe has rejected the government’s invitation to monitor the election.

But American and Russian diplomats support it, and at least some of them pin hope on Rakhmonov’s only rival, his former prime minister, Abdulmalik A. Abdulajanov. A wealthy businessman of the Khodzhent clan, he is viewed as more conciliatory.

Abdulajanov, 45, accuses Rakhmonov of adopting “a totalitarian mentality,” preparing ballot fraud and spreading the threat of armed resistance if the ruling clan is voted out.

In fact, Rakhmonov, 42, is appealing to the hostile and the conciliatory instincts at play. At a recent campaign rally, a local military commander got up and declared that “this is my country and I’ll never give it away to the opposition.”

But when Rakhmonov spoke, he pondered aloud why so many Tajiks had killed each other.

“We are still brothers,” he said.