Bordering Kyrgyzstan

[A Ferghana Valley dispatch from serial guest-blogger Dorzhiev. — YH]

Driving through the Tajik portion of the Ferghana Valley at dusk our taxi comes to halt. The man riding shotgun hops out to orient himself towards Mecca and perform his Namuz. While we wait a newly wedded man holding a bouquet of flowers for his wife asks the driver to take a detour to his village.

“How many kilometers is it?”
“Only twelve. I live at the border.”

After some grumbling our driver agrees and we turn down a side road. Ten minutes later we arrive in a small village.

“This is it,” the passenger indicates.
“Which side of the border do you live on. Tajik or Uzbek?” the driver asks.
“This is the Kyrgyz border, and I live on the Tajik side.”

To my foreign ears this conversation sounds the sort of Vaudevillian act that leaves you asking “Who’s on first.”

The confusion, however, is understandable in a region famous for it’s bizarre borders. From our point on the highway roughly 20 kilometers in either direction would put you in a different country. A holdover from Soviet times, today the borders of the Ferghana Valley resemble a jigsaw puzzle that has been cut out without consideration to geographic or ethnic realities. The post-Soviet division of the valley has been a bone of contention between the three states that share it. Arguments over water rights, resources, and enclaves continue to stir the ire of the governments of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The borders also present a challenge to security forces hunting insurgents.

On October 14th a group of armed men reportedly forced their way across the Tajik-Kyrgyz border. The group of roughly a dozen crossed from the Isfara district of Tajikistan to Batken province in Kyrgyzstan. It is currently believed that they are held up in the area around the Tajik enclave of Vorukh surrounded by Kyrgyzstan’s Batken Province. Batken consists of the southern most portion of Kyrgyzstan’s slice of the Ferghana Valley and has a history of unrest. Most notably in 1999 when a large contingent of insurgents linked to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were responsible for shootings and a spate of kidnappings including the abduction of three American mountain climbers.

Last month another border crossing in the Batken region was the scene of another shootout prompting the Kyrgyz to tighten their borders. Additionally last month Saidumar Saidov, chief of police of Isfara district in Tajikistan was assassinated, however no one has yet been implicated in the killing. As of yet there is no evidence to suggest that these incidents are related, but their proximity and timing fuel the fears relating to the repatriation of insurgents feeling the heat in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In August Tahir Yuldashev the leader of IMU was killed in Waziristan by a US drone although the implications of his death for his followers is not yet clear.

The governments of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are understandably concerned about the flow of militants across their porous borders. The governments of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan especially lack the resources to adequately patrol them. This summer at a Tajik-Kyrgyz check point consisting only of a card table I watched as a lone soldier waived bus after bus through without bothering to stop them. Tonight as we return to the main road I take a glance down the dusty track that continues into Kyrgyzstan. There are no card tables and no soldiers. Only a herd of goats.