How are negotiations on the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan being conducted?

In 2000, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan created an Intergovernmental Commission on Delimitation and Demarcation of the State Border. The Agreement on the State Border of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan was signed on October 5, 2002, in Dushanbe, during the visit of the President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov. The document states that “the parties have identified about 1,100 km, that is, 86% of the crossing border of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. During the further negotiations on the border, the ownership of the Farhod hydroelectric power station, located on the Syrdarya river, near the city of Shirin in the Syrdarya region of Uzbekistan, has caused a lot of controversy. Another problem was that during the civil war in Tajikistan, the Uzbek authorities mined the area along the Uzbek-Tajik border. The arrival of Shavkat Mirziyoyev to power gave a new impulse to the negotiation. At a meeting of the Tajik-Uzbek intergovernmental commission on the delimitation and demarcation of the state border, held on January 10, 2018 in Dushanbe, the parties fully agreed upon the disputed sections of the state border, including the Farhod hydroelectric power station. During the state visit of the Uzbek president to Tajikistan in March 2018, an agreement on the demarcation of certain sections of the state border was signed. Then the Tajik authorities declared the ownership of only a small plot remaining unclear. Therefore, the state border of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan is completely delimited on the basis of the Agreement of October 5, 2002, and the Treaty on separate sections of the state border of March 9, 2018. According to the media, Dushanbe and Tashkent appointed relevant groups, including surveyors, cartographers, representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Border Service, to agree on the procedure for installing border signs by the end of 2021.

According to OSCE, border delimitation is a legal formalization of the line of the state border between neighboring states by a treaty, that is graphically depicted on a topographic map, with its corresponding description, which can be an integral part of the treaty or an annex to it.

Demarcation – the marking of the state border between neighboring states on the ground with border marks with the development of demarcation documents.

The Farhod reservoir was built in 1947 on the Syrdarya River in northern Tajikistan. Its area is 48 km, volume – 350 million m³, length – 46 km, width – 3.1 km and average depth – 7 m. Its purpose is to collect water from Syrdarya, and let it naturally flow in the grounds of Golodnaya (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) and Dalverzin (Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) steppes. The structure of this hydroelectric complex includes a dam and water supply regulators, one of which serves the Farhod hydroelectric power station. The Farhod hydroelectric power station and the Farhod reservoir were “bone of contention” in the relations between Dushanbe and Tashkent for many years. Both countries claimed this border section. In 2002, Dushanbe established the control over this territory, and Tajik military personnel were stationed at the dam. On August 17, 2018, Republic of Tajikistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan exchanged notes on the ratification of the Agreement on certain segments of the state border of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Based on this, the legal status of the Farhod dam was determined. According to it, Farhod remained at the disposal of Tajikistan. The infrastructure of the Farhod hydroelectric power station was transferred to the disposal of Uzbekistan. The territory on which the HPP is located will be recognized as the territory of Tajikistan, and the HPP itself will become the property of Uzbekistan. Tajikistan is responsible for the security of the facility, while Uzbekistan provides maintenance.

According to the agreement between the governments of the Republic of Tajikistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan on checkpoints across the state border of 2002, there are 16 checkpoints on the state border, including 9 checkpoints having international status, and the rest are bilateral. On the Tajik side, 12 checkpoints (checkpoints) are located in the Sughd region, the rest are in the Khatlon region and the city of Tursunzade. On the Uzbek side, one checkpoint is located in Samarkand and Namangan regions, and in the city of Gissar. In Jizzakh, Syrdarya there are 2 checkpoints, in Tashkent and Fergana regions – 3, in Surkhandarya – 4. In addition, in February 2019, another 17th checkpoint was opened, which connected the Gissar region of Tajikistan with the town of Babatag, Uzun district of the Surkhandarya region of Uzbekistan.

According to Uzbek political scientist Rafael Sattarov, the tightening of relations between Presidents Islam Karimov and Emomali Rahmon influenced the delay in the negotiation process on the Tajik-Uzbek border. “Today, the personal factor of the second president in Uzbekistan has given rise to warmer relations between the two countries and a shift in the process from a dead place to a more dynamic direction,” – Sattarov says. However, Rustam Burnashev, professor at the Kazakh-German University, believes that the process of negotiations on the borders between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan progressed at about the same pace as it was in neighboring countries. “Until recently, it was correct to talk about not the difficulties with demarcation, but with the delimitation of individual sections and the functioning of borders (the presence of a visa regime between the two countries, mining of border areas, etc.). Fortunately, many of these difficulties have been gradually solved,”- Burnashev says. He finds it difficult to explicitly answer the question of why some areas encountered difficulties in the process of delimitation of the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. According to him, a more or less substantiated picture can be obtained by applying the methods of situational analysis, which are fixed on the allocation of special analytical blocks: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political. “For example, lives of the people, living in the area, are very close. People get married and have relatives on both sides of the border. It is obvious, that these people will not be interested in the complicated border regime,”- Burnashev says. According to him, there are also economic and technical difficulties connected, for example, with issues of water use or pastures. The technical and political aspects include the lack of generally recognized documentation of borders within the Soviet Union. This situation is aggravated by the fact that the problem of borders in our region manifests itself at several levels at once – at least at the national, local and community levels. “If central authorities reach the solution, this does not always mean that they will agree with it at the local or community level. And vice versa,”- says Burnashev.

There are no official comments on this topic. Tajik scientist Anvari Safari in his dissertation “Border Issues in Foreign Policy of the Republic of Tajikistan” (pages 141-142) with reference to the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan writes: “From 13 to 18 February 2007, a joint meeting of the Intergovernmental Commission on Delimitation and Demarcation of the State Border took place in the city of Tashkent. At this meeting, the issue of determining the state border in the remaining four disputed points between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – Kyzyl Mazor (now the village of Zarkukh), the reservoir of the Farkhod hydroelectric power station, Sarvak and the Kanibadam forest massifs – was discussed, and appropriate decisions were made based on the results of the joint commission ” … Safari notes that, according to the archives, the Tajik side relied on previously drawn up documents to confirm points belonging to Tajikistan, and the Uzbek side referred to the inaccuracy of these documents. As a result, disagreements arose over the ownership of the disputed points, and the demarcation of the border was postponed. However, a report by the Tajik newspaper “Farazh” says that in accordance with a bilateral agreement with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan plans to transfer 300 hectares of land in the Matchinsky region to this country. According to the source, there is a large gold deposit on these 300 hectares of land. Local authorities refused to give comment on this message to the publication. Later, the administration of the Sughd region denied the message about the gold.

According to the assessment of the former deputy commander of the Tajik border troops, General Nuralisho Nazarov, there are no serious problems with delimitation and demarcation of the border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. However, according to him, domestic conflicts have been taking place in the border areas of the two countries for a long time. Experts believe that border negotiations should be accelerated to avoid possible negative scenarios. “Undoubtedly, uncertainty in delimitation and demarcation can lead to negative consequences. In particular, it significantly reduces mutual trust between states, which negatively affects the direct ties between subjects of economic relations, citizens, and their socio-cultural structures,” says Tajik political scientist Shokirjon Khakimov. He also added that the governments of the two states should give more information to the public about the progress of the negotiations. Political scientist Rafael Sattarov believes that extraordinary measures are needed to resolve the accumulated bilateral problems, “including the option of the state borders being administrative.” “The second point is to openly inform the public that the policy of “not an inch of land and no concessions” has a very narrow-minded and short-sighted nature. It is time to abandon this wrong axiom. Considering the economic potential and importance, as well as the growing threat to food security, the parties must somehow make inevitable, but win-win concessions,”- says Sattarov.