DUSHANBE, February 12, 2016, Asia-Plus — Kyrgyz have removed their flag from a Tajik-owned private house in the village named after Halim Boboyev in the Ovchi-Qalacha jamoat of the Bobojonghafourov district in the Tajik northern province of Sughd.
An official source at the Main Border Guard Directorate of the State Committee for National Security (SCNS) of Tajikistan says representatives of the village community of the Kyrgyz village of Kulundu removed the Kyrgyz national flag from a Tajik-owned private house on February 12.
According to him, border representatives of the two countries have reached an agreement not to install national symbols in the disputed border areas until the delimitation and demarcation of the mutual border is fully completed.
We will recall that the head of the village community of the Kyrgyz village of Kulundu accompanied by Kyrgyz border guards installed the Kyrgyz national flag on a Tajik-owned private house in the village named after Halim Boboyev on February 6, claiming that the building was on Kyrgyz territory.
According to information posted on the website of the Tajik Embassy in Bishkek, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tajikistan sent a note over the arbitrariness of Kyrgyz local authorities to Kyrgyzstan’s Foreign Ministry on February 8.
The Tajik side reportedly expressed protest and demanded that an investigation be launched into the incident and decisive measures be taken to prevent such arbitrariness in the future.
The Tajik Embassy notes that such illegal actions contradict the agreements reached by the intergovernmental commission for delimitation and demarcation of the Tajik-Kyrgyz border.
The Ovchi-Qalacha jamoat in Tajikistan’s Bobojonghafourov district borders the Kulundu jamoat of Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region.
The Border Guard Directorate’s office in Sughd province has called actions of Kyrgyz border guards ‘provocation.’
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have been unable to agree on the location of the border they inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. They have delimited only about half of the 971 kilometers. As the population in the dense Ferghana Valley grows, it has become increasingly difficult to demarcate the contested sections, where valuable agricultural land often lies.
In recent years, the tension along the Kyrgyz-Uzbek and Kyrgyz-Tajik borders have intensified after outbreaks of violence involving residents and border guards from all sides.
The latest skirmishes sparked by a territorial dispute between residents along the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border escalated on August 4, leaving several people injured and damaging multiple homes.
The area at the focus of this and much previous unrest lies on the jagged frontier where the east of Tajikistan’s Sughd province and Kyrgyzstan’s Batken province meet.
