Kaktus Media video from 30 April in the village of Arka-1, Kyrgyzstan.
One disputed area between the two states is the Tajikistani enclave of Vorukh, which is located on the territory of Kyrgyzstan, and home to more than 30,000 people.
Officially Vorukh belongs to Tajikistan, but since the end of the Soviet era, it has become an ‘island’ of Tajikistani territory amid Kyrgyzstani land. At the end of March this year, Kyrgyzstan offered to exchange Vorukh for other similar territories in Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region. In response, President Emomali Rahmon said that Vorukh would remain a part of Tajikistan.
Parviz Mullojanov, a political scientist and independent researcher from Tajikistan, said that while “negative energy has been accumulating for a long time on both sides of the border”, “no one expected an escalation” in 2021 given the effect of the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Mullojanov, the new Kyrgyzstani leadership’s exchange offer for Vorukh acted as a ‘trigger’ for hostilities by Tajikistan. “The proposal was made in a very strong form immediately after the trip of [Kyrgyzstani] president, Sadyr Japarov, to Moscow and simultaneously with the announcement of Kyrgyz military exercises in the Batken region,” he said.
As Mullojanov puts it, there was strong concern and anxiety in Tajikistan over Vorukh. Social networks began to “practically accuse the government of treason” regarding a possible handover of the enclave, Mullojanov said, and tensions in Tajikistan’s border areas began to grow rapidly.
As official reports put it, the recent clashes erupted over the struggle for water at the Golovnaya water intake of the Tortkul reservoir, located on an undemarcated section of the border in Batken region.
According to the Kyrgyz border service, on 28 April Tajikistan decided to install CCTV cameras on power transmission poles near the water intake, allowing them to monitor the distribution of water. Residents on the Kyrgyzstani side objected to this, and asked that the cameras be removed, but residents of the Tajikistani village refused. Later, Kyrgyzstani citizens decided to cut down a pole that a camera was installed on, which led to a confrontation. As a result, about 150 people gathered from both sides. A fight broke out, people threw stones at each other. But by the evening the situation had stabilised.
The next morning, however, the conflict escalated into a more serious confrontation. It was reported in the Kyrgyz press that citizens of Tajikistan first threw stones at the houses of Kyrgyz citizens, after which they fired at passing vehicles.
The situation escalated to the point where a firefight took place between Kyrgyzstani and Tajikistani forces, which lasted almost until midnight. The Tajik side opened fire on five border posts. As a result of the mortar shelling, the Dostuk outpost caught fire. In response to these actions, Kyrgyzstan seized a Tajikistani border post. Additional military forces from both sides were deployed along the entire perimeter of the border.
At that moment, the situation escalated out of control. Submachine guns, mortars, machine guns and military helicopters were deployed. Tajik servicemen fired on residential areas, and civilians were hit by bullets and shells.
“On the first day, the shots continued with short interruptions until four in the morning,” Sarvar Turdiboyev, who watched the conflict unfold from his village of Borborduk, told openDemocracy. “It seemed to me that then the mass evacuation had not yet begun, but some of our neighbours left the village because of fear – after all, we are not used to such serious conflicts… I also decided to take my family away from the border and gave my friend our car, and returned home.
“Then we began receiving WhatsApp messages that Kyrgyz troops were about to enter our village, and that we needed to climb to the wasteland and wait out the clash there, which is what we did with our neighbours. One of the villagers came up to us and said that Tajik soldiers had started to enter other people’s houses. This alerted me and I immediately went to my house.”
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Kamila Eshaliyeva | Radio Free (2021-05-06T13:05:25+00:00) What is happening on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/05/06/what-is-happening-on-the-kyrgyz-tajik-border/
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