People living along the frontier of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are getting a visible representation of what the long-awaited border agreement between the two countries looks like. At the end of April, Kyrgyz soldiers started building a fence topped with barbed-wire across fields that were not long ago no-man’s land.

The communities in this area have lived side-by-side for as long as people have been living there, but now they are divided by a mutual agreement of their two governments.

Recent tensions

Of course, these communities have not always co-existed peacefully. Even during the time when Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were Soviet republics, there were outbreaks of violence between Kyrgyz and Tajik villages.

When the USSR collapsed in late 1991 and the Soviet republics became independent countries, the internal administrative lines drawn on Soviet maps took on genuine significance. They were not just borders between two new countries. For the area along what is now the Kyrgyz-Tajik frontier, they were borders in a place where there had never before, in thousands of years of habitation, been formal borders.

Nearly all of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border remained unmarked and, by 2010, there were already disagreements about where the dividing line should run. Tensions arose over the use of water and agricultural land.

Fights broke out, sometimes involving hundreds of people. Both countries sent additional border guards and soldiers to the area and, in January 2014, there were exchanges of fire, leaving five Kyrgyz and two Tajik border guards wounded.

Prior to this incident, fighting between communities was limited to throwing punches or stones, but after the January 2014 violennce, firearms were increasingly employed when disputes broke out.

The number of roadside checkpoints increased, as did the watchtowers, accompanied by more and more troops and equipment. The inevitable happened at the end of April 2021, when the militaries of the two countries engaged in brief but fierce fighting involving artillery and armoured vehicles. Matter repeated in mid-September 2022.

More than 200 people were killed in those two episodes, while homes and other buildings were extensively damaged.

The border agreement

The April 2021 battles gave a new urgency to border delimitation talks. The second outbreak of large-scale hostilities in September 2022 then sparked rapid progress in these talks. A series of border negotiations gradually resolved disputed sections of the frontier and, by the end of 2024, a draft document on delimitation was ready.

Talk of barbed wire was notably absent as presidents Rahmon and Japarov met in Bishkek to seal the border deal (Credit: Kyrgyz presidency).

Two months ago, on March 13, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov signed the long-awaited border agreement, fixing the frontier line on the map..

The two countries’ governments hailed the agreement as “historic”. Japarov said the border would serve as a border of “eternal friendship of the two countries and peoples.”

The most difficult border sections to agree, and therefore the last to be resolved, were the parts in the picturesque Ferghana Valley, some of the most arable, and therefore most inhabited, land anywhere in Central Asia.

A third country, Uzbekistan, also shares the Ferghana Valley with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In the first two decades of post-Soviet independence, Uzbekistan’s borders with its eastern neighbours were the most dangerous in the Ferghana Valley.

Uzbek border guards were concerned about Islamic militants crossing into Uzbekistan from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as they had in 1999 and 2000. The Uzbeks put landmines along sections of its borders with both of its eastern neighbours, but after Shavkat Mirziyoyev became Uzbekistan’s president in late 2016, relations with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan improved dramatically.

The Kyrgyz-Tajik agreement paved the way for the first-ever meeting of the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to celebrate the delimitation of all the borders in the Ferghana Valley and make plans for a new era of cooperation there.

The three presidents met in the valley at the spot where their three countries meet, a tripoint. A stele was unveiled at the three-way junction amid celebrations that brought together people from the three countries. Speakers at the event talked about friendship, good neighbourliness, and mutual trust.

The new reality

Kyrgyz soldiers started their work erecting the new border fence from the point where the stele stands. Plans for the first phase call for extending the barbed-wire fence along 420 kilometres (261 miles), complete with anti-tanks trenches dug in some places, of the frontier with Tajikistan before the end of this year.

Tajik authorities are quiet about work being done on their side of the border, but soldiers there are likely also erecting fences or other defensive works.

The director of Kyrgyzstan’s Border Guard Service, Abdikarim Alimabyev, attended the start of the construction of the barbed-wire fence and called it an “event of great importance for the citizens of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.”

It is of great importance as a measure aimed at ensuring there is no more escalating violence of the kind that plagued the Kyrgyz-Tajik frontier for more than a decade. However, statements of eternal friendship might ring a bit hollow for residents of the border area.

For the first time, and for years to come, they will see a barbed-wire fence cutting through the hills and across the fields. It’s a reminder not so much of an agreement as a monument to a failure to find a peaceful resolution to the border problems that did not require the constructing of a barrier to separate two peoples.