6. OSH GOVERNOR VISITS A KYRGYZ IN UZBEKISTAN.
Governor of the
southern Osh Province Naken Kasiev has
visited the Kyrgyz village of ,
situated on Uzbek territory. It belongs to the Kara-Suu
district of Osh
Province and was not
an in the Soviet times
(this will be the fact, why its not marked in the maps).
There are about 700
residents in the
village. Head of the Kurgan-Tobe district administration of
Uzbekistan Malik Kasymov accompanied Kasiev. The governor
promised all
possible help to the village residents.
on this Link they talk about "numerous tiny enclaves inside Uzbekistan":
http://www.iwpr.net/archive/rca/rca_200106_57_3_eng.txt
In another region of southern Kyrgyzstan, Osh, the situation is the opposite.
Several Kyrgyz communities found themselves on Uzbek territory. One of them, Barak, a village of 627 Kyrgyz people, has
become, the locals say, a major bone of contention in border talks with
Uzbekistan.
Like other Kyrgyz people living in the numerous tiny enclaves inside Uzbekistan, they have stopped
all dealings with the Kyrgyz mainland. "It's too hard," one man said.
Men
from Barak always carry two kinds of ethnic head dress - at home they wear the
Kyrgyz kalpak, but when they venture into Uzbekistan they feel it's safer to
wear the Uzbek tubeteika, skull cap.
Barak council leader Gapurjan Tairov
says local cotton and wheat farmers need written permission from Tashkent in
order to transport and sell their crops in Kyrgyzstan. Getting the permits takes
an age and in the meantime the farmers' produce goes off and drops in
value.
The villagers feel unwanted and dispossessed. Health care
provision is limited. In this one-village enclave, pregnant women have to make
arrangements well in advance to travel to Kyrgyzstan for the last weeks of their
pregnancy to be sure of decent treatment when they go into labour.
The
local GP, Marapat Borueva, says there are no emergency medical facilities in the
village and without the relevant papers it's often impossible to transport
critically-ill patients to larger hospitals outside the enclave.
"My
daughter had an appendicitis seizure this spring - we tried to take her to our
municipal hospital, but Uzbek border guards wouldn't let us through," Borueva
recalled. "We did eventually smuggle our daughter across the border at a
different checkpoint. We barely made it."
Barak has a primary school, but
is too small to have a secondary school. When the border checkpoints were set up
it became increasingly difficult for older children to commute to middle and
high schools in larger, nearby villages.
In early spring, Barak residents
demonstrated in protest at their plight outside the Osh regional government
building. It seems this was the first time the authorities were made aware of
the village's plight.
Mediation by the new Osh governor Naken Kasiev has
brought the villagers access to telephones and a new site has been set aside for
a high school. But the tiresome border point checks remain.
Interesting to see, that Barak is just one of some more places
in identical situations.It would be
intersting to find out, why the enclaves came into existence or why
barak is called an enclave and "all the others" not. maybe its the effect
of the protest of the people of barak that barak got the focus, the
consciousness of the media.