The current configuration of Tajikistan’s common border with Kyrgyzstan is the product of Soviet mapmakers drawing the dividing lines for Soviet republics. After the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, these became the borders of independent nations.
Little more than 500 kilometers of the 971-kilometer border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan border has been demarcated today.
The issue of demarcation and delimitation of the mutual border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan has been going for more than 20 years. Many official bilateral meetings have been held since 2020.
From the very first negotiations, the parties could not agree on the normative and legal aspects of the issue.
The main problem is that the two republics are using two different geopolitical maps: Tajikistan operates with maps from 1924-1927 and the Kyrgyz Republic with the maps from 1958-1959 and 1989.
Tajikistan has suggested working with documents and maps from the 1924-1927 period, which show Tajikistan as incorporating Vorukh within its border.
Meanwhile, Kyrgyzstan has suggested using the maps of the bilateral commissions from the periods of 1958-1959 and 1989, which show Vorukh as an exclave within Kyrgyzstan’s territory.
Analysts say the inability of the countries to solve the exclave problem not only keeps local tensions high. It also levies an economic cost by requiring them to build new transportation routes as alternatives to the existing Soviet-era ones that pass through one another's borders. They note that until the countries do resolve the exclave problem, little is likely to change.
Media reports say Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to provide Bishkek with archive Soviet-era maps to help resolve the ongoing dispute between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over disputed segments of their mutual border.
Kyrgyz Security Council Secretary Marat Imankulov said on October 17 that Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov asked Putin to help with the demarcation and delimitation of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border when they met along with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon on the sidelines of the CIS summit in the Kazakh capital of October 13.
Putin said earlier that there was more "true" information about borders between the former Soviet republics available in the archives than in those republics themselves.
Kyrgyz authorities have asked the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) to provide a limited contingent of troops at disputed segments of Kyrgyzstan’s common border with Tajikistan, where dozens of people were killed on both sides in clashes last month.
Kyrgyz Defense Minister Baktybek Bekbolotov told reporters in Bishkek on October 19 that he had discussed the issue with the CSTO's Secretary General Stanislav Zas earlier in the month.
“I told him that there will be no peace between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. I'll tell you why. Because the Kyrgyz have their own truth, and the Tajiks have their own truth,” the minister said.
"An independent mediator must stay between us, such as a limited group of CSTO troops, with the goal of maintaining a cease fire and the withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the border. If they solve these two issues, then it will be possible to start discuss with them the political goals on the delimitation and demarcation of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border. It has not been going on for 30 years, it has been going 98 years,” Bekbolotov added.
Meanwhile, IAS Parliament, which is the initiative launched by Shankar IAS Academy in 2016, noted last month that the path to resolution of the conflict will require warring groups to agree upon a common map and an intergovernmental agreement is needed to be signed to define property rights to access and use water and pasture resources
Besides, the international community will have to make efforts to solve the dispute, according to IAS Parliament.
