Kyrgyz-Uzbek Border Incident Sparks Political Row

Tensions remain high in a village on the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border following a raid by Uzbek police last month which sparked a diplomatic protest from Bishkek.



Everyone agrees that Uzbek police raided homes in the village of Chek on April 19. Beyond that, the details and interpretation of what happened differ according to whether the account is Kyrgyz or Uzbek.



A protest note which the Kyrgyz foreign ministry passed to the Uzbek ambassador on April 30 said armed border guards and police with batons conducted a house-to-house search on homes belonging to citizens of Kyrgyzstan.



The ministry criticised the police for singling out Kyrgyz nationals in the operation.



“According to eyewitness evidence, the inspection of [identity] documents and the house searches were conducted selectively, and only for people with Kyrgyz citizenship,” it said, adding that police officer behaved inappropriately and subjected residents to verbal abuse.



The village of Chek is divided between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan by a canal that runs through it and forms a natural boundary. Administratively, that means there are really two settlements – one in Kyrgyzstan’s Nooken district, and another, formally called Yangi Chek, in the Pakhtaabad district of Uzbekistan.



There has been no formal demarcation of the border here and – until the row about the police raid flared up – no frontier posts dividing the settlement.



Eyewitness accounts indicate that the police raids took place on the Uzbek side of the river, in an area where most residents are nationals of Kyrgyzstan. The lack of clear boundaries coupled with custom and practice has led these people, and their compatriots on the other side of the river, to believe that these homes lie within Kyrgyzstan, or that they should.



This assumption is implicit in many of the statements coming out of Kyrgyzstan.



Immediately after the raid, a group of angry residents wrote to Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiev asking him to safeguard their rights – the implication being that his country’s sovereignty was involved.



The foreign ministry statement similarly suggested that the Uzbek action represented an unwarranted intrusion, describing it as “openly provocative” and saying it “went beyond all international and legal agreements”.



In an unusually strongly-worded statement, the ministry asked the government in Tashkent to ensure all those responsible were held to account.



That seems unlikely to happen, given the frosty response from Uzbekistan’s border guards service, which was published on May 8 by Russian news agency Regnum Novosti.



The statement rejected the Kyrgyz foreign ministry’s claim that the raids were illegal, saying that they were intended to check people’s passports and took place inside Uzbekistan.



It also said that protest notes like the one issued by the Kyrgyz could “complicate and destabilise the situation on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border”.



Mirzaolim Ahmadjonov, deputy head of the Pakhtaabad district, under which the Uzbek part of Chek comes administratively, justified the need for the house searches.



“These actions were carried out in order to check for smuggled goods passing through Uzbek territory,” he said.



Ahmadjonov denied that any pressure was put on locals who hold Kyrgyz passports, adding, “This was in no way about forcing people to move out.”



Aliyarbek Musaev, whose home was one of those raided, told IWPR, “They checked the house contents to see whether there were any smuggled goods. They also searched through foodstuffs. When they came across two or three sacks of flour, they asked why these stocks were being held and tried to take them away. They also looked also at fertilisers [stored] for the sowing season, asked where they’d come from and who had supplied them.”



Smuggling is certainly an issue on this porous border, with consumer goods going into Uzbekistan and cotton going the other way.



However, the Uzbek police may also have been looking for other things, as Musaev’s comments about fertiliser indicate.



A Tashkent-based analyst, who asked to remain anonymous, said explained that what Uzbek law enforcement officers did is a usual practice in his country,



“In Uzbekistan, villagers are not allowed to store large amounts of fertilisers as they contain potassium nitrate. That can be used to make explosives which opponents of [Uzbek president Islam] Karimov’s rule could use to committing acts of terrorism.”



He acknowledged that citizens of Kyrgyzstan, where things are done differently, might find Uzbek policing methods “clumsy and offensive”.



Salamat Alamanov, who heads the government department for regional affairs in Bishkek, took a different line from that heard in other Kyrgyz statements, indicating that the community involved did live inside Uzbekistan.



That left two possible solutions, he said in an interview for IWPR. “One is that these 24 Kyrgyz families take out Uzbek citizenship. The other is that the Kyrgyz authorities resettle them inside Kyrgyzstan,” he said,



Following the incident, Uzbek border guards erected a frontier post at the bridge which crosses the canal.



“Now we are surrounded, as the Uzbeks have set up a frontier post at the outskirts of the village,” said Manajan Bojoev, whose home is on the Uzbek side of the checkpoint. “They won’t allow any of our relatives to visit us, and we can go across only if we show our passports.”



People like Bojoev are concerned that nothing is being done to defuse the situation. They say the Uzbek authorities have not responded well to complaints, and accuse the Kyrgyz government of failure to take swift and resolute action.



“The [Kyrgyz] government is ignoring us. We wrote to the president asking him to defend our rights. After that, Uzbek border guards visited our homes and threatened us. Since then, the tension has increased and we feel under threat. We don’t know what’s going to happen next.”



A preliminary attempt to hold talks on the dispute was set for May 3, when Kyrgyz officials from Jalalabad’s regional government and law enforcement were due to meet their counterparts from Pakhtaabad district. However, the Jalalabad governor’s spokesman Orozali Karasartov said the Uzbeks did not turn up.



A meeting finally took place in the nearby Uzbek city of Andijan on May 12 involving regional governors from both sides and police and officials from Pakhtaabad and Nooken, the districts to which the Uzbek and Kyrgyz parts of Chek belong.



The claim that Kyrgyzstan should have sovereignty over the pocket of land on the Uzbek side of the canal is one of about 70 unresolved questions along the 1,400 kilometre border between Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.



Speaking at a meeting four days after the police raid, Kyrgyz prime-minister Igor Chudinov said there was some disagreement about which Soviet-era boundary decisions were applicable. One of these documents dates back to 1924, setting out what was then merely an administrative boundary between two republics of the USSR. This focused on which ethnic groups lived where, while a later ruling from 1956 amended some borders to create what was meant to be a more rational distribution of economic resources.



“The first draft was based on drawing borders according to where people were located, while the second one demarcated the frontier according to economic assets,” he explained.



An Uzbek official who asked to remain anonymous said merely that the process of defining boundaries was problematic, saying, “A lack of funding and effort on the Kyrgyz side is hindering the successful completion of border demarcation.”



The Kyrgyz residents are sticking to their guns, with community leader Salimurza Jumabaev insisting he has proof of Kyrgyz sovereignty and warning, “If our [part of the] village is ceded to Uzbekistan, we will move out, we won’t stay. Then either the Uzbeks or Kyrgyzstan should pay us compensation to build houses in other areas.”



He added, “One policeman, a soldier and a member of public selected by a village meeting will be on duty around the clock. Now we are being careful, as we’re fearful of conflicts and problems.”



The foreign ministry statement on the police raids in Chek is not the first time the Kyrgyz have sent protests to the Uzbek government in recent times. Last June, a protest note was sent when two Kyrgyz police officers were detained by their Uzbek counterparts while driving along a road that traverses both countries. Earlier the same month, residents of Nooken district beat up and disarmed two Uzbek border guards who tried to arrest a suspected smuggler.



Some analysts note that the Chek incident comes amid a general deterioration of relations between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, caused by disagreements over water and energy. The Uzbeks are unhappy about their neighbours’ plans to build new hydroelectric schemes on rivers that, downstream, supply them with water. Tashkent fears the dams will deprive them of irrigation, especially in the peak spring and summer seasons.



The Chek incident took place just over a week before the five Central Asian presidents gathered in Almaty to discuss these issues. Instead of achieving progress, the meeting saw public recriminations traded among the region’s leaders, which highlighted the divide between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which have water but few other energy resources, and Uzbekistan, Kazakstan and Turkmenistan, which depend on the former two for water flows but have plenty of oil and gas.



Begaly Nargozuev, a member of the Kyrgyz parliament from the governing Ak Jol party, is certain what happened in Chek was a calculated move.



“I think this is another provocation. We’ve started talking openly about our plans for the river Naryn,” he told IWPR. So the Uzbeks have resorted to such actions in order to threaten us.”



A businessman in Uzbekistan, who asked not to be named, expressed similar suspicions.



“One gets the impression that in Chek, our police were demonstrating how they can flex their muscles,” he said.



Kyrgyz political analyst Mars Sariev believes Tashkent might be trying to test the resolve of the Kyrgyz government.



“I think it’s a way of putting pressure on Kyrgyzstan and at the same time testing the strength of the country’s government,” he said. “This could create an explosive situation in Kyrgyzstan, because if central authority is weak, [it] cannot ensure territorial integrity, and this would create instability.



As the Kyrgyz parliament makes plans to discuss the Chek controversy, another Akjol member, Ibrahim Junusov, called for an inclusive negotiating process involving various tiers of government from both sides.



“If we don’t solve these problems soon, they will only get worse. It’s important that when decisions are taken, all sides are present and are able to come to some mutually acceptable conclusion,” he said. “Such matters need to be solved not just by government officials, but also with the involvement of people from the areas concerned.”



Chinara Karimova is a pseudonym for a journalist in Kyrgyzstan. An Uzbek journalist who asked not to be named contributed to this report.