The historic fixing of Central Asia’s unfixable borders problem

The hardening of the region's borders may paradoxically make them easier for traders and travellers to cross. That is good news all around.

It is foolhardy to use maps to navigate the more remote borderlands of Central Asia.

Lines on paper do not quite match reality. Even navigation apps are misleading.\

Travellers in parts of southern Kyrgyzstan may while consulting Google Maps find themselves digitally laid down in northern Tajikistan. In most places there are barbed-wire fences, concrete walls or trenches to deter incautious outsiders and, more to the point, local smugglers.

At times, though, physical markers are absent or hard to see.

It is not unknown while driving in Kyrgyzstan along the border with Uzbekistan, for example, to spot a group of Uzbek farmworkers taking a picnic break in the corner of their field just a leap’s distance across a shallow ditch. They know where not to cross because of convention. But until recently, there was no official bilateral agreement designating the course of the entire frontier.

The job of preventing trespassers lies with discreetly positioned border guards. Locals tell stories of herdsmen getting arrested or shot at while chasing after their animals.

But a sustained flurry of diplomatic dialogue over the past few years is now bringing this uncertainty to a close.

The most important breakthrough to date occurred in January 2023, when the presidents of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan met in Bishkek to put their signatures to a border demarcation deal. The agreement formalised the drawing of a 1,400-kilometre-long line between the two countries and ended three decades of low-level hostilities.

The two presidents can legitimately lay personal claim to this achievement. 

Uzbekistan’s late President Islam Karimov was intractable on border issues right until he took his last breath in 2016. In August that year, a mere few days before Karimov died, Uzbek police detained four Kyrgyz telecommunications engineers in a disputed hilltop area called Ungar-Too. The kerfuffle was petty and needless, but typical.

When Karimov’s successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, came to power, he immediately signalled that mending ties with neighbouring nations was a priority. 

Easier said than done. Border deals require compromise and readiness to relinquish claims to land.

Uzbekistan had the advantage, since any domestic grumblers could be intimidated into silence or flung into prison. 

For the leadership in Kyrgyzstan, with its proud tradition of rambunctious political activism, things were trickier. But the rise to power of President Sadyr Japarov in October 2020 changed all that. With a blend of persuasion and heavy-handed Uzbek-style repression, Japarov and his sidekick, security services boss Kamchybek Tashiyev, cowed parliament into going along with a border deal.

Kyrgyzstan relinquished some claims, and Uzbekistan did the same. Kyrgyz naysayers threatening to hold anti-demarcation demonstrations were jailed.

Mirziyoyev hailed the border agreement as a guarantee of “peace and tranquillity.”

In scenes that would have been unimaginable in an earlier time, residents of Barak, a once-Kyrgyz-controlled enclave within Uzbekistan, last month quietly packed up their lives and moved to the mainland of Kyrgyzstan. 

One villager interviewed by RFE/RL, Kuvat Turakulov, mourned having to leave, but said that he accepted it was the price for peace between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. "If you look at it from that side, it is good that the issue was resolved," Turakulov told the broadcaster.

Kyrgyz authorities will now need to sell the public on an even harder proposition: a border deal with Tajikistan.

The countries engaged in two alarming border mini-wars, in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Hundreds were killed. Anticipating future potential clashes, both countries reacted by heavily bolstering their military defences.

And then, entirely against the grain of developments, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan started talking. The first glimmer of possibility materialised in October, when Japarov met in Bishkek with his Tajik counterpart, Emomali Rahmon. Following the talks, both sides issued statements hinting that some kind of deal was being thrashed out.

Until that encounter, only two-thirds of the 980-kilometre border were demarcated. Since then, bilateral border commissions have convened on multiple occasions and almost every time issued updates to indicate that the disputed sections were shrinking. In February, Tajik state news agency Khovar reported that only 10 percent of the border still remained to be demarcated.

In a strong indication that Kyrgyzstan’s government is priming the public for a land giveaway, the secretary of the national security council, Marat Imankulov, argued last week in an interview to the Kabar state news agency about the need to go down the “difficult path of compromise.”

“We need to make concessions. If necessary, the option of exchanging territory [with Tajikistan] can be considered,” Imankulov said.

The upsides to reaching an agreement would be immense. Instead of expending energy and money on militarising their shared border, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan could work on reviving trade relations.

Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region, a literal dead-end down in the bottom southwestern corner of the country, is dismally isolated. The reopening of Kyrgyz-Tajik border crossings precipitated by a demarcation deal would be a shot in the arm for the local economy.

In a future now admittedly difficult to see, a person living in the Batken region town of Razzakov could drive 90 minutes (customs officials allowing) to Khujand in Tajikistan to catch a flight to Moscow, Jeddah, or Kashgar, maybe even Istanbul or Dubai someday, instead of schlepping seven hours to the international airport in Kyrgyzstan’s second city, Osh.

It is not just the messy Ferghana Valley knot that has seen pragmatic Central Asian frontier diplomacy.

Tajikistan and Uzbekistan agreed formally on the delimitation of their 1,300-kilometre border in 2019. Since then, officials have held regular meetings to coordinate efforts on signposting this line. One such six-day session ended this weekend.

A working group of the joint Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan demarcation commission last convened in February. Such is the degree of reciprocal amity between these neighbours that there are plans to set up a free trade zone — a latter-day frontier bazaar in effect — accessible to Turkmens, Uzbeks or any foreigner staying in either of those countries. 

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan concluded a border demarcation agreement in December 2022. Fully $8 billion in commercial agreements were inked on the sidelines of that event, just to ram home what was at stake.

In October 2021, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan jointly determined the location of the line marking who controls which bit of the Caspian Sea. This is ostensibly important as it precludes any future squabbles over claims to offshore energy resources.

The region as a whole has cause to be proud and hopeful.

These outcomes have by and large been reached without outside brokering. And paradoxically, the formalisation and hardening of the borders should in theory lead to them becoming easier for traders and travellers to cross.