Kyrgyzstan announces deal with Tajikistan on Central Asia’s last disputed border

A Kyrgyz soldier in front of a damaged border post near the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, in the village of Min-Boulak, September 20, 2022. VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO / AFP Kyrgyzstan announced, Wednesday December 4, an agreement to demarcate its border with Tajikistan, the last disputed territorial boundary in Central Asia, ending three decades of sporadic conflict since the fall of the USSR, particularly for water control. The head of the Kyrgyz secret service, Kamchybek Tashiev, and his Tajik counterpart, Saimumin Yatimov, “reached an agreement and completed the definition of the remaining sections of the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan,” writes the Kyrgyz government. According to the same source, this agreement will now allow the “delimitation and demarcation of the border”, closed since the last conflict, in September 2022. Read (2022) | Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan accuse each other of violating the ceasefire announced following “intense clashes” Read later The agreement between Bishkek and Dushanbe comes more than two years after the ceasefire concluded, which has suffered from violations between these two mountainous former Soviet republics, which have regularly clashed since the fall of the USSR over the sharing of water resources in these agricultural areas. The winding border separates two of the most mountainous countries in the world by almost 1,000 kilometers. This announcement comes against a backdrop of general improvement in relations long undermined by dissension between the five Central Asian states from the former Soviet Union (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan). The last two main Tajik-Kyrgyz conflicts, in spring 2021 and autumn 2022, had officially cost the lives of more than 150 people, including many civilians, and had ravaged villages in the regions of Batken (in Kyrgyzstan) and from Soughd (in Tajikistan). Read the survey (2021) | Article reserved for our subscribers Tajikistan, a pivotal country in the “middle of empires” Read later Le Monde with AFP Reuse this content



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