DUSHANBE, November 26, 2014, Asia-Plus – Kyrgyzstan hopes that documents of Soviet archives will help resolve the rest of its common border with Tajikistan.
Kyrgyz media sources report that the Kyrgyz authorities plan to send a delegation to the Russian Federation to study documents that would help resolve the issue of delimitation and demarcation of disputable stretches of Kyrgyzstan’s common border with Tajikistan.
A roundtable on this subject reportedly took place in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek on November 26. Speaking at the meeting, Kurbanbay Iskanderov, the special representative of the Kyrgyz government on the border delimitation and demarcation issues, noted that a total length of the Kyrgyz-Tajik border is 970.8 kilometers and 590 kilometers of the border has been delimited so far.
“We plan to send a delegation to the Russian Federation to study the historical documents on the border. Tajik delegation has already been to Russia on this subject,” Iskanderov noted.
Kyrgyz official said Kyrgyzstan has suggested using the maps of the periods of 1955-1959 while Tajikistan has suggested working with documents and maps from the 1924-1927 period for delimitation and demarcation of the border. “Therefore, we have not yet defined a mutual document,” Iskanderov was quoted as saying by K-News news agency.
We will recall that Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have been locked in a tense border dispute over Vorukh, an exclave of Tajikistan within Kyrgyzstan, for months.
As far as the mentioned maps are concerned, the maps of the early 1920s show the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic as incorporating Vorukh within its borders while the maps of the 1950s show Vorukh as an exclave within the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic.
