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

Kyrgyzstan announced, Wednesday, December 4, an agreement to demarcate its border with Tajikistan, the last disputed territorial delimitation in Central Asia, putting an end to three decades of sporadic conflicts since the fall of the USSR, particularly for the control of the 'water.

The head of the Kyrgyz secret service, Kamtchybek Tashiev, and his Tajik counterpart, Saimyumin 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.

The agreement between Bishkek and Dushanbe comes more than two years after the ceasefire concluded, which suffered from violations, between these two mountainous former Soviet republics, which have regularly clashed since the fall of the USSR around 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, officially cost the lives of more than 150 people, including many civilians, and devastated villages in the regions of Batken (in Kyrgyzstan) and from Soughd (in Tajikistan).