Kyrgyz-Tajik Border Agreement Hoped for in ‘Nearest Future’

Kyrgyz and Tajik officials are hopeful of completing border negotiations in the next two to three months. If an agreement is indeed reached, it will signal a major milestone in a long-running border dispute that triggered deadly violence in 2021 and 2022.

Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Jeenbek Kulubayev said in an August 5 press conference that while “a number of points remain” the two sides are moving toward an agreement. Kulubayev said that the two countries’ heads of state want an agreement reached in the “nearest future.”

“You understand that the border is a very sensitive issue, so now active negotiations are underway and we are comparing the positions of the parties. I think in the nearest future, in the next two or three months, we will complete it," Kulubayev said.

The Kyrgyz-Tajik border is about 975 kilometers long (sometimes it is reported as 972 km, sometimes 980 km). The border – particularly the stretch that divides Kyrgyzstan’s Batken and Osh regions from Tajikistan’s Sughd – has been a source of tension for more than three decades, culminating in the violence in September 2022, when researchers say both sides may have committed war crimes in targeting civilians.

Kulubayev’s comments come in the wake of months of negotiations between working groups and various officials, and numerous meetings that have alternated between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

This latest round of positive announcements came after an early July meeting in Buston, Tajikistan, of the co-chairs of the Kyrgyz and Tajik government delegations engaged in the negotiation process: Kyrgyzstan’s Kamchybek Tashiev, the powerful head of the State Committee for National Security, and his Tajik counterpart, Saimumin Yatimov.

That meeting was followed on July 21-24 with a visit by Kyrgyz representatives to disputed territories near Chorkuh, a Tajik village which has had disputes with an upstream Kyrgyz village over the flow of a water canal, and Vorukh, a Tajik exclave surrounded by Kyrgyz territory, which has been a long-standing flashpoint.

The head of Tajikistan’s Sughd region, Rajabboy Akhmadzoda, said during a July 26 press conference that “94 percent of the border line has been fully described.”

The special representative of Kyrgyzstan’s Cabinet of Ministers on border issues, Nazirbek Borubaev, quoted the same figure to RFE/RL in a July 30 interview. Borubaev added that the remaining 6 percent were in “difficult areas” in Batken region’s Batken district.

On August 11-17 the relevant working groups met again in Batken city, as Akhmadzoda and Borubaev said they would.

But the road ahead is not easy.

In December 2023, Kyrgyz and Tajik officials said that more than 90 percent of their mutual border had been agreed upon. In the ensuing seven months, the two sides have notched that figure up to 94 percent. Specifics on what parts of the border are agreed upon have not been published, nor has there been much reporting on the content of the discussions between the working groups. Arguably the most difficult portions remain unsettled.

An agreement on paper will be a powerful diplomatic achievement for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, but the real work will come after in implementing the border. How the two sides plan to realize their border after decades of dispute in and among the affected communities and navigate future conflicts responsibly is unclear. On both sides of the border, officials have leaned into nationalist rhetoric when domestically useful, and have struggled to communicate the rationale and necessity of at-times controversial government decisions to the publics that have to live them out.