Agreement is close on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border
Kyrgyz and Tajik officials said this week that more than 90 percent of their mutual border has been agreed upon. Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov is hopeful for a full resolution by the spring. It’s big news for a border that has been among the most difficult in the region, flaring into deadly violence in 2021 and 2022, according to The Diplomat.
Agreement is close on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border
Geurasia

Agreement is close on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border

Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov welcomes Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon prior to a meeting of the heads of state of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)  in October (Photo: AFP/Nazir Aliyev Tayfur)
Eurasia 17/12/2023 06:00

Kyrgyz and Tajik officials said this week that more than 90 percent of their mutual border has been agreed upon. Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov is hopeful for a full resolution by the spring. It’s big news for a border that has been among the most difficult in the region, flaring into deadly violence in 2021 and 2022, according to The Diplomat.

Despite occasional sharp remarks, the two sides have pursued a consistent calendar of negotiations that began yielding results in October, with the signing of the mysterious “Protocol No. 44.” The contents of the protocol remained secret, but it was cast as a critical pathway forward. “We will soon make a final decision on defining state borders,” Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security chief Kamchybek Tashiev said at the time, the news site reminded.

This week Tashiev and his Tajik counterpart, Saimumin Yatimov, had similarly rosy words to offer following negotiations in Batken, The Diplomat recalled.

As reported by Asia Plus, a Tajik news outlet, on December 13 Yatimov remarked, “Quite a huge amount of work has been done today, we have advanced more than 120 km, and we have agreed on these issues in principle. If we take the total length of the state border… [we] can confirm that more than 90 percent of the state border has already been described.”

The Kyrgyz-Tajik border is about 975 kilometers long (sometimes it is reported as 972 km, sometimes 980 km). As of 2020, according to an RFE/RL report, 519 km of the border had been defined; Kloop cites a 2022 figure of 664 km having been agreed upon. That would leave around 300 km to go, give or take a few dozen, as of the start of the year.


#Central Asia #tajikistan #Kyrgyzstan
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