While Russia and Ukraine war over their shared border, two Central Asian nations prove that borders can be changed by mutual agreement.
A hand with an eraser and red pencil over a map of Central Asia. (Illustration by News Decoder)
This article was produced exclusively for News Decoder’s global news service. It is through articles like this that News Decoder strives to provide context to complex global events and issues and teach global awareness through the lens of journalism. Learn how you can incorporate our resources and services into your classroom or educational program.
In the modern world, the “inviolability of borders” has been the sacred principle preventing conflict.
States may not like existing borders but they do not try to change them by force. Vladimir Putin violated this rule when he seized Crimea in 2014 and it is the reason why the war in Ukraine now has such worrying implications for global order.
But what if two states, who have suffered decades of cross-border violence, voluntarily redraw their frontiers in the interests of peace?
In February, the Central Asian states of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan did just that, announcing that they will freely exchange territories disputed since the fall of the Soviet Union decades ago.
The land in question is in the beautiful, fertile Fergana Valley, but more of that later. First, let’s think about borders and how they come about.
Mountains and rivers are the world’s natural borders but much of the map as we know it today is an artificial construct. Colonial rulers literally took rulers and drew unnaturally straight lines through tribal lands in Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia and other places, cutting related peoples off from each other and mixing rival groups. They didn’t care about people, only imperial gains.
Shifting borders
In the former Soviet Union, another empire, dictator Josef Stalin played with borders and internally deported whole peoples, creating pockets of future ethnic tension and even war.
When Yugoslavia fell apart in Eastern Europe in the 1990s it split into six different countries to represent the six different peoples who had made up its population.
But they weren’t neatly located in the sections that split off and many people found themselves stranded in new independent countries, where they were now part of a minority.
That’s a recipe for trouble.
News Decoder Recommends
Want to know more about borders and politics? Helen Womack recommends reading “Prisoners of Geography“ by Tim Marshall.
But wise politicians have known that when it comes to borders, you can’t try to unravel all the complications of history — better to accept today’s borders as they are and ensure the rights of minorities living in the countries we have now.
Leaders in Africa knew that, thoughtless though the imperial borders were, any attempt to redraw them could lead to forced relocations, chaos and violence, as happened at the Partition of India in 1947. That was why the African Union, founded in 1963, declared in its charter that existing boundaries were “unalterable”.
And as a result, for example, the Gishu tribe lives today in both Uganda and Kenya.
Likewise in Europe, the Helsinki Accords, signed at the end of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1975, obliged all 35 signatories to recognise the inviolability of the continent’s post-World War Two borders.
Many people might like to redraw borders. For example, ethnic Serbs in their enclave of Bosnia and Herzegovina may lean towards Serbia-proper but the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 sets the borders as they are today, and that’s the way it has to be.
That’s the way it should have been with Crimea too. Nobody disputes that Russia has historical and cultural links with the peninsula but Crimea belongs to Ukraine. Peaceful arrangements could easily have been made for ordinary Russians and Ukrainians to enjoy the Black Sea resorts of Crimea together.
Instead Moscow chose war, opening a Pandora’s box for countries from China to the United States that might like to fiddle with the world’s geography.
Which makes the peaceful agreement between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over land in the Fergana Valley all the more remarkable.
In Moscow, in Communist times, I knew about the Fergana Valley because of the peaches and apricots I bought from Central Asian traders on the market. Little did I know that this patchwork quilt of ethnicities was about to be torn apart.
The valley, which owes its fertility to the Naryn and Kara Darya rivers, lies mostly in eastern Uzbekistan but extends into southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan.
Stalin divided it between these three Soviet republics but fatally, the nationalities were not living exactly within the borders drawn for them.
The crumbling of the Soviet Union brought bloodshed. I remember covering clashes in Kyrgyzstan’s Osh province in 1990 between ethnic Kyrgyz, who were mainly animal herders, and ethnic Uzbek, who were mainly farmers, with very different needs and interests.
Since then, disputes over grazing and water rights have also boiled over along the borders of Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region and Tajikistan’s Sughd region. In autumn 2022, in the worst fighting over the border since the fall of the Soviet Union, dozens were killed and thousands forced from their homes.
It was after this that the leaders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan started working on new demarcation lines. Now, after successful diplomacy to deal with the root cause of the problem, the two nations have agreed to shift their borders.
“Negotiations have reached the final point and can be discussed openly,” Kamchybek Tashiev, head of Kyrgyzstan’s secret service, told the Kyrgyz parliament in March. “After parliamentary consideration, our presidents will sign the ratification.”
Under the deal, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan will swap small areas of land and make better arrangements to share water resources. A number of disputed roads will be declared “neutral” and made available to both nations, according to the Defense Post.
Which all goes to show that to secure friendship and good neighbourly relations, you sometimes have to define your boundaries.
Recommended reading: “Prisoners of Geography” by Tim Marshall, an excellent account of how geography affects history and politics.
Questions to consider:
- Why might there be disputes over borders?
- Why does the world generally agree that existing borders should remain untouched?
- What does the case of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan tell us about changing borders?
From column writing, British-born Helen Womack went on to write a book about her experiences in Russia: “The Ice Walk – Surviving the Soviet Break-Up and the New Russia”. From 1985 to 2015, Womack reported from Moscow for the Reuters international news agency as well as The Independent, The Times and the Fairfax newspapers of Australia. Now based in Budapest, she covers the European Union’s relatively new eastern members. Since the refugee crisis of 2015, she has written for the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, about how refugees are settling in Europe.