Workers stage rare strike over pay in Tajikistan

DUSHANBE, March 27 (Reuters) - Hundreds of power plant workers in Tajikistan went on strike on Friday over unpaid wages in a rare public show of protest in a country where the government tolerates little dissent.

The impoverished nation bordering Afghanistan has been hit hard by the global slowdown because remittances from Tajiks working abroad, a mainstay of the economy, have been drying up.

Potential instability in Tajikistan is a worry for the West which sees it as a new supply transit point for U.S. troops fighting resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan across the border.

On Friday, 400 workers of Sangtuda-1 hydro plant, 66 percent controlled by the Russian government and operated by it, declared a two-day strike demanding four month wage arrears.

Sangtuda head Rakhmetulla Alzhanov blamed the Tajik state energy company for failing to pay its power bills on time which he said has severed the company's main source of cash.

"That is the only source of money used to pay out wages," he said. The state energy company could not be reached for comment.

Struggling to make ends meet, Tajikistan secured a $120 million loan from the International Monetary Fund last month to cope with the economic crisis.

The International Crisis Group said in a report last month the country, plagued by poverty, corruption and now the deepening crisis, risked turning into a failed state.

So far there has been no outright discontent in a country which has been tightly ruled by President Imomali Rakhmon for 17 years. No official data on falling remittances was available.

Tajikistan's situation is aggravated by the fact it lies on the main drug trafficking route out of Afghanistan, which adds to corruption and instability in a country still recovering from a bloody civil war in the 1990s. (Writing by Maria Golovnina; Editing by Matthew Jones)