Enclaved

The Ferghana valley straddles three states Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan with intermixed populations and unmatched modern borders. It is a large triangular valley at the intersection of two rivers, the Naryn and the Kara Darya which join to form the Syr Darya. One of the more fertile areas of the region it is densely populated with an ethnically diverse population, where traditionally seasonal movement was a way of life and land and water was shared accordingly. The Valley had been under a single political entity for most of its history until the defeat of the poly ethnic Kokand Khanate in 1876, when its heartland the Ferghana Valley was declared an oblast with several uyezd level administrative territories.

This was complicated by the fact that the Ferghana Valley was home to both nomadic and sedentary populations and their proportions in the uyezds varied greatly. It is not surprising that the implementation of the national territorial delimitation plan in the Ferghana Valley particularly its eastern and southern sectors was the most difficult task in the entire process of delimitation in Central Asia. Both the Uzbek SSR and the Kyrgyz ASSR disputed the final settlement and both demanded that the process be reconsidered.

Conflicting claims sprang up in many places of the Ferghana Valley after the delimitation of 1924. The Kyrgyz ASSR wrote several petitions to the Soviet government requesting Isfara and Sokh volosti which had been allocated to the Uzbek SSR. In 1927, when new republican boundaries were drawn, it was decided that Sokh and Isfara would remain within the boundaries of the Uzbek SSR. However administrative borderlines in the Ferghana were often neither enforced nor even established on the ground. Similarly, in the 1930’s, there was violence between Kyrgyz practicing transhumance and the sedentary Tajiks in the area of the Vorukh enclave, as Tajik farmers allegedly began to extend their settlement to the Kyrgyz winter encampment of Bedek. In the ensuing violence many were injured and Soviet authorities allocated Bedek to the Tajik SSR while resettling the Kyrgyz herders to another area predominantly inhabited by the Kyrgyz.

This conflict history was shaped by the encounter of two different modes of production (agriculture versus animal husbandry) and lifestyles (sedentary versus transhumant) and the related construction of moral authority for land claims. This is exemplified by the fact that the land into which cultivation was expanded appeared to the Tajiks as empty ‘desert’ land lying idle and awaiting cultivation. Conversely to the Kyrgyz, it represented ancestral grazing land and pastures, which were used extensively for cattle breeding. Gradually the conflict was reconfigured with a shift in the mode of production and lifestyle when the Kyrgyz gradually adopted a more sedentary lifestyle while still predominantly engaged with animal husbandry. With this shift not only their claims to land and water altered, but their strategies to assert these claims also took on a new form, exemplified through the building of settlements.

Subsequent building and resettlement projects and the institutionalization of social life tended to thoroughly ignore republican borders, indeed to shift them entirely in practice through the leasing of land from collective farms on one side of the border to another. ‘Pastoralist’ Kyrgyz populations were resettled into ‘planned villages’ further down the valley in such a way that the summer migration patterns now traversed the land of the neighbouring republic. Reservoirs and canals were built entirely ignoring the republican boundary line, tractor stations nominally under the jurisdiction of one republic were built on the land of the neighbouring republic, new Tajik mahallahs that were subordinate to state farms in the Tajik republic were built on the outskirts of villages that were themselves administratively part of the Kyrgyz SSR.

Such arrangements, motivated in part by acute water and land shortage and in part by the fact the delimitation of the 1920’s had left several Tajik collective farms with minimal room to increase in size were entirely pragmatic within the context of broader Soviet state formation. It was never assumed that a long term land-lease from one Union republic to its neighbour would result in the creation of what are now known as enclaves of one independent state inside another. Yet with the collapse of the Soviet Union this is precisely what has happened. The borderlands of the Ferghana Valley have become a cartographic conundrum with dozens of villages now situated in such a way that travel along the single road connecting villagers to their nearest source of water, their local bazaar, friends or relatives who now happen to be citizens of a different state or place of worship entails the crossing of an international border. Restrictions at state borders have become a part of everyday reality for people and sometimes a bus journey from one part of the country to another requires crossing back and forth over international borders no fewer than six times in the course of a fifty kilometer journey with some of the stretches of alternating jurisdiction just a few dozen meters in length.

Two lines of arguments discursively bestow legitimacy to claims for disputed territories. The first refers to historical legacy, and in the Central Asian case brings to the forefront the fact that final decisions need to be based on pre-Soviet borderlines and related maps. Ambiguities also arise from the territorial differences of Soviet demarcations and their incomplete endorsement within Soviet institutions. The question of which map becomes legally binding for the new states is at the heart of discussions. For example in their disputes while Tajikistan insists on the map of delimitation of 1927, Kyrgyzstan insists that decisions should be made on the 1958 Parity Commission maps.  In addition the Tajiks and the Kyrgyz also refer to pre Soviet sources in order to bestow legitimacy. In the case of the Tajik people this entails written documents and archaeological artifacts while the Kyrgyz people mainly refer to oral accounts.  A second argument refers to actual land use. Here, ambiguities arise about whether citizenship or ethnicity bestows legitimacy to the user. Also questions arise about what land use constitutes in the first place and what form of land use bestows legitimacy to territorial claims.

Such contradictions are, however, not limited to any specific region and finds echoes not just in the recently resolved question of the ‘chitmahals’ on the Indo-Bangladesh border but also in the varying perceptions of political frontiers and frontiers of influence that crisscross the subcontinent.

Anita

2 September 2017