DUSHANBE, April 16, 2013, Asia-Plus — Tajik Foreign Ministry has called the statement delivered by Social Democratic Party (SDP) leader Rahmatillo Zoirov in an interview with Iranian Radio
Sada-ye Khurasan
“provocation.”
“The statement delivered by SDP leader Rahmatillo Zoirov in an interview with Iranian Radio Sada-ye Khurasan over border lands ceded to China is provocation,” the Tajik MFA spokesman Abdulfayz Atoyev noted at a briefing in Dushanbe on April 16.
According to him, the MFA has already applied to relevant bodies over that issue. “This statement is absolutely baseless,” said Atoyev. “I do not know what such statements are made for, but those, who make them, pursue their own interests.”
We will recall that SDP leader Rahmatillo Zoirov claims that China has obtained disputable territories more than Dushanbe ceded to it.
He remarked this in his interview with Iranian Radio
Sada-ye Khurasan
on April 15. He further added that it could not be ruled out that the upcoming military exercises in Khorog were connected with that.
SDP leader also does not rule out the possibility that Tajikistan may cede one more part of the Murgab district to China in exchange for its debts.
Sada-ye Khurasan
, in particular, quoted Zoirov as saying that Chinese border guards are deployed 20 kilometers farther than its is provided for the agreement.
Zoirov also considers that sending troops to Gorno Badakhshan under the pretext of conducting anti-terror exercises in the area is connected with discussions on ceding part of border lands in the Murgab district to China and Dushanbe’s debt to Beijing.
Sada-ye Kurasan
notes that some Russian media sources have already reported that government forces were sent to Gorno Badakhshan for preventing possible protest actions of local population over ceding more border land to China in exchange for Tajikistan’s debts to China.
The Ministry of Defense of Tajikistan has denied those reports as absolutely baseless.
The territorial dispute dates back to 1884, when a border demarcation agreement between the Qing dynasty China and Tsarist Russia left large segments of the frontier in the sparsely populated eastern Pamirs without clear definition. At the time of independence, Tajikistan inherited three disputed border segments, constituting about 28,500 square kilometers, which China and the Soviet Union had been unable to resolve.
In 1999, Tajikistan and China signed a border demarcation agreement, defining the border in two of the three segments. Under the 1999 deal, Dushanbe ceded about 200 square kilometers.
Negotiations over the largest contentious border segment ended in 2002, after signing supplementary bilateral agreement in which Tajikistan agreed to cede 1,100 square kilometers of border land to China or about four percent of the territory that Beijing had claimed.
The lower house of the Tajik parliament ratified the 2002 deal on January 12, 2011. For China the deal reportedly symbolized the “final and complete solution” of its border dispute with Tajikistan.
