I am here forwarding a news report dealing with the border situation in Ferghana Valley. I have got the report from the oxiana newsgroup.
Best wishes,
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Christian Berghänel
Sweden
christian.berghanel@...
----- Original Message -----
From: <oxiana@yahoogroups.com>
To: <oxiana@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, July 23, 2004 3:31 PM
Subject: [oxiana] Digest Number 1302
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 19:05:32 +0200
From: "Bruno De Cordier" <ak_saj@...>
Subject: IRIN: 'CENTRAL ASIA: Focus on conflict prevention in Ferghana Val'
CENTRAL ASIA: Focus on conflict prevention in Ferghana Valley
[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
BATKEN, 22 July (IRIN) - Men, women and children from Too Moyun village in
Osh province, southern Kyrgyzstan, sweat in the baking summer heat to
complete the walls of a school in time for the new term in the autumn.
They are building the school because the village, along with hundreds of
others in the volatile region, suffers from accidents of history,
geography and politics - most of its meagre resources now lie in the
neighbouring state of Uzbekistan, just across a barbed wire fence, but for
the villagers, a world away.
"We need somewhere for our children to go to school. Since the border went
up they have had to travel too far to get to a school on the Kyrgyz side,"
Haticha Jumbaeva told IRIN as she took a break from heaving roof timbers
onto the school building site. The villagers grow wheat and cotton to
survive. Many have relatives a stone's throw away, but visiting them often
requires a visa - they are over the border in Uzbekistan. Much of the
population views these new restrictions with hostility and has felt the
disruption in traditional patterns of commerce and society acutely.
HISTORY OF TENSION
The 300 km Ferghana Valley, a single structure geographically, operated as
a relatively unfractured political and economic unit until 1991. But since
independence that year, the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have partitioned the area with border lines that
form a tangled knot, indecipherable on a map and implausible in practice.
Many of the current difficulties can be traced directly back to a
difficult Soviet legacy. Moscow established administrative borders of its
Central Asian republics in the mid-1920s, which followed neither natural
geographic boundaries nor strict ethnic lines. Soviet planners often
avoided drawing more homogeneous or compact republics for fear they would
fuel ethnic separatism. Further, given the highly centralised nature of
Soviet planning, economic and transport links were designed to cross
republic borders freely. Goods flowed largely unimpeded across these
internal borders, and people would notice little more than a plaque or a
small police outpost as they moved between republics.
Today, at least 50 places along the border are contested between
Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and, despite warmer relations, some between
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Islands of territory, designated part of one
country, have been completely surrounded by another, forming enclaves that
are completely impractical tributes to the national pride of the three
nations intertwined in the valley. These enclaves are the legacy of a time when republics were
permitted to secure the long-term lease of territory from other republics.
Border demarcations that were once of little significance are now
affecting the lives of ordinary people in dramatic ways.
COMMUNITIES DIVIDED
The main road linking the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh with the provincial
town of Batken, 200 km to the southwest, passes straight through a bubble
of Uzbek territory. Dishevelled Uzbek conscript border guards demand
passports and transit visas from Kyrgyz citizens and foreigners alike. An
hour later, having crossed the enclave, the traveller is confronted by
more border guards crossing back into Kyrgyzstan. Such restrictions have a major
impact on the social and economic life of the valley.
"The borders here [around the Uzbek enclave] are just a waste of time. You
see how they stop every car, check all the documents. What a disruption,
and for what?" the deputy governor of Batken province, Tokto Ilimbezova,
told IRIN as she waited in the heat for a border guard to return her
passport as she returned from a regional meeting in Osh. Uzbekistan has
strengthened or closed many of its border crossings with its neighbours
after terror attacks in the capital Tashkent and the city of Bukhara
earlier this year were blamed on foreign religious extremists.
According to "Calming the Ferghana Valley", a report sponsored by the
Centre for Preventive Action, "prevention of violent conflict over the
long haul requires more than the right policies by governments. It also
requires measures to make those governments accountable, to make
information about brewing tensions that could lead to trouble available,
and to enable citizens to take responsibility for managing their own
affairs under the rule of law."
PREVENTATIVE PROGRAMMES
The construction of the Too Moyun school is part of the United Nations
Development Programme's (UNDP) initiative to reduce conflict and promote
tolerance and development among the people of the Ferghana Valley. "The
programme provides support to local projects like the school, but also
works to improve conflict resolution skills among local authorities and
has an early warning capacity - to try and prevent conflict from breaking
out," Olga Grebennikova, UNDP's public affairs officer in Kyrgyzstan,
said.
The Ferghana region is one of the poorest in Central Asia, although the
fertile land of the valley has the potential to fuel economic growth if
agricultural reform and foreign investment are forthcoming. The collapse
of state-owned farms and industrial establishments has contributed to
widespread unemployment. Drug and human trafficking, intravenous drug use
and seasonal labour migration are all contributing to destabilise this
vulnerable region. Support for radical Islamic groups is growing.
In July 1999, Islamic militants from Tajikistan infiltrated the remote
province of Batken and later seized five mountain villages, taking a team
of Japanese geologists hostage. The militants wanted to force the release
of 50,000 Muslims held in Uzbek prisons and to reopen thousands of mosques
and religious training institutions. Reacting to this threat, the Uzbek
air force bombed the mountains above the provincial town of Batken. It was
just one in a series of clashes in the Ferghana Valley since the three
nations became independent.
DISPUTES OVER SCARCE RESOURCES
These days, conflict tends to be a result of the deterioration of social
infrastructure that has deprived many people of access to affordable
education, adequate health care and basic services such as potable water
and irrigation systems for agriculture. Three out of four villages in Osh
and Batken provinces lack access to drinking water and typhoid is on the
rise.
"We had a fight with people on the Uzbek side [of the border] over water.
I spent a week in hospital after being hit on the head with a spade," one
villager said. Rivers and streams that have traditionally irrigated the
lands snake down the valley, now passing into different countries as many
as 20 times. The region has always been short of water but the new borders
have set community against community, family against family. "Many of the
disputes are over water, for irrigating crops as well as drinking, so
helping to identify and retain water supply systems for these border
villages is critical," Usem Shainazarov, a regional UNDP preventive
development officer, said.
NGO RESPONSE
At another border village, Askhar, not far from Too Moyun, the community
are trying to accomplish just this. "We need to divert water from the
river Nyman, then we would have our own supply for most of the year,"
Iskender Narmatov, head of the NGO responsible for the water initiative,
said. "There's the small problem of US $6,000 to buy the materials, but
the villagers will provide all the labour for free."
A number of grass roots NGOs like Iskender's in each of the countries are
working to monitor government activities, share information and promote
civic involvement. However, they face difficult working conditions. Even
more than their counterparts in northern Kyrgyzstan, NGOs in the Osh
region suffer from a lack of community involvement, difficulty in
accessing information and extreme dependence on scarce foreign funding.
Furthermore, the challenges of daily life leave little time for NGO work.
Alongside UNDP, other international organisations such as USAID, the World
Bank and DFID have recognised to boost local capacity by working through
local NGOs. "Our governments are not taking the initiative, so we as the
people affected have to move towards resolving the border and economic
problems," Abdirahim Burkutov, head of a Batken NGO working on building
links between border communities, said.
REGIONAL PICTURE
Regional analyst and author Ahmed Rashid told IRIN that the major issue in
the Ferghana Valley which the bordering countries needed to address was
the establishment was a more flexible cross-border regime to facilitate
the movement of people. "This can be only done through community level
initiatives," he stressed.
Rashid added that the Ferghana Valley remained a pocket of "enormous
instability" in the region, the stabilisation and development of which was
linked to the need to improve conditions in countries such as Afghanistan
and Tajikistan.
According to a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG),
"Negotiations over border demarcation in the valley have been charged with
tension and have stalled over scores of disputed points. While talks
continue with a broad understanding that border issues must be settled,
there is little likelihood of a final breakthrough any time soon".
UNDP is trying to show the way by ensuring offices in Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan cooperate as far as possible. "The future has to be in
cross-border cooperation. UNDP is making this a reality between many
Kyrgyz and Tajik villages on the common border. It's an important start,"
Anna Mateeva, a UNDP regional peace and development adviser, said.
[ENDS]
IRIN-Asia
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Fax: +92-51-2292918
Email: IrinAsia@...