Hope and Fear on the Kyrgyz-Tajik Border

On January 28, the president of Kyrgyzstan, Sadyr Japarov, took questions from reporters on the evolving negotiations delimiting the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. As a problem that has plagued both countries since independence in 1991 – and was a bone of contention even before that – Japarov was keen to play down expectations that the process will be resolved rapidly.

“Bilateral work on the document is currently underway,” the president said. “After this is completed, the intergovernmental commissions will sign it, then the foreign ministers. After all these procedures, the agreement will be ratified by the parliaments of the two countries. Then we, the presidents of the two countries, will sign the document … And only then, for another 1-2 years, will demarcation work be carried out.”

Despite the long road ahead, both sides claim that a border has been substantially agreed, although they remain tight-lipped on the details. The Diplomat talked to locals and experts on both sides of the border in the Fergana Valley in order to try and gauge expectations ahead of a prospective agreement.

A History of Conflict

Frontier feuding in the Fergana Valley, Central Asia’s most fertile and populous region, goes back decades. “The central problem is the way the borders were established under Soviet rule,” said Muslimbek Buriev, a Tajik analyst based in Dushanbe. He accused the Soviets of drawing these borders with a disregard for local settlement patterns. “This resulted in the emergence of multiple mutual enclaves of territories of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, with connecting roads becoming a key point of dispute,” he said. “Collective use of resources also became problematic as residents that used to access certain territories for their needs could not do that.”

A particularly thorny issue was that of pastureland. While Tajik and Uzbek rural culture is traditionally more settled, Kyrgyz were historically nomadic, settling in the lowlands during the winter and the highlands in summer. That said, although there were disputes between villagers during the Soviet period, they didn’t tend to be as violent as today.

“The intensity of border conflicts grew exponentially after independence,” said Buriev. The absence of border checks and military personnel in the Soviet period have now been replaced by disputes that involve “soldiers, rocket launchers and drones.”

In September 2022, the most serious of these conflicts broke out, which led to the displacement of around 130,000 people on the Kyrgyz side of the border. The numbers of displaced Tajiks are unconfirmed. According to a Human Rights Watch report, the conflict also led to the deaths of 50 civilians, while 121 were injured.

Enclaves and Access

Two areas in particular are the most hotly-contested. The first is an area of Tajikistan called Vorukh, with a population of around 40,000. No one disputes that Vorukh is a part of Tajikistan; what is hotly debated is whether Vorukh is an enclave entirely surrounded by Kyrgyz territory (this is Kyrgyzstan’s position), or more like a geopolitical peninsula, connected to Tajikistan by a slither of territory, 20 kilometers long and approximately 200 meters wide at its thinnest point. Both sides cite their own maps from the Soviet period supporting their position; Tajikistan’s dates from the 1920s, while Kyrgyzstan’s comes from the late 1950s.

On the ground, the numbers are in Tajikistan’s favor. On either side of this corridor are around 100,000 Tajiks, living in the settlements of Vorukh, Surkh, and Chorku. The local Kyrgyz population is around a third of that.