Uzbekistan’s prime minister, Abdulla Aripov, arrived in the Kyrgyz capital on August 16, leading a delegation attending a session of the Kyrgyz-Uzbek intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation.
That might not sound like much, but considering the poor state of Kyrgyz-Uzbek relations during the last couple of decades, the first meeting of this intergovernmental commission since December 2009 should be seen as a positive development.
And it’s not the only sign of better ties between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Since Shavkat Mirziyoev came to power in Uzbekistan in September 2016 after the death of longtime Uzbek President Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s foreign policy has been a clear departure from the 25 years of Karimov’s rule.
Probably nowhere is that more evident than in Uzbekistan’s new ties with Kyrgyzstan.
One year ago, in August 2016, troops from Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry seized a television relay station on Ungar-Too Mountain, in Kyrgyzstan, beginning a standoff that lasted several weeks.
A similar standoff had already occurred in the same place in March 2016.
The major cause of those tensions was the dispute over where the border between the two countries lies, an issue that has plagued Kyrgyz-Uzbek ties since the two countries became independent after the U.S.S.R. collapsed in late 1991.
So it is another good sign that a second commission -- the intergovernmental commission on the delimitation and demarcation of the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border -- will also be meeting in Bishkek.
Kyrgyz Deputy Prime Minister Jenish Razakov will be leading his country’s delegation in those talks. Razakov said it would mark the first time that commission had met since 2006.
Kyrgyz-Uzbek border talks started barely a week after Mirziyoev was formally named Uzbekistan’s acting president.
It's not just that the 1,378-kilometer Kyrgyz-Uzbek border is poorly marked, it's more that there never were any borders there until Soviet mapmakers penciled them in.
There have been at least nine rounds of border demarcation talks since the September 2016 meeting. There have also been visits by officials from border cities and towns.
Aitmamat Kadyrov, the mayor of Kyrgyzstan’s second city, Osh, crossed the border to meet in Andijon, Uzbekistan, with that city’s mayor, Dilmurat Rakhmatullaev, on August 10. Officials and business delegations from those two cities had already exchanged visits starting last September.
It is an interesting choice of venues.
Andijon and Osh are big cities that are close to one another -- some 50 kilometers. But the two cities also have the unfortunate distinctions of being the scenes of the worst violence in Central Asia so far in the 21st century.
In both cases -- in Andijon in May 2005, when government troops opened fire indiscriminately on a crowd that was made up of overwhelmingly unarmed protesters, sending tens of thousands of Uzbek citizens fleeing into Kyrgyzstan; and in Osh in June 2010, when interethnic rioting broke out between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities, also sending tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks to the border of Uzbekistan -- the violence hardened attitudes on both sides.
And that is added to shootings along the border that have gone on for two decades.
The big question is: What is motivating Uzbekistan’s abrupt turnaround in policy toward Kyrgyzstan?
The Kyrgyz-Uzbek border area has probably been the most dangerous border in Central Asia, though it’s worth mentioning that Uzbekistan laid mines along part of the border with Tajikistan, limiting the potential for mischief from that quarter.
Dozens of people, at least, have been killed and many more wounded along the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border.
Kyrgyz and Uzbek border guards shoot at smugglers and rustlers, and sometimes at each other.
Angry locals have assaulted border guards from the other country and border guards have crossed uninvited into their neighbor's territory to drag back suspects.
Since the border talks restarted last September, there is a calm along the Kyrgyz-Uzbek frontier that has not been seen since the first years of independence.
In fact, Uzbekistan’s border guards even reported last October that its troops received an ailing Kyrgyz border guard and brought the latter to an Uzbek medical facility for treatment since it was closer than any Kyrgyz medical facility.
There are other indications of warming Kyrgyz-Uzbek ties.
Representatives of the two countries have discussed increasing the number of flights between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and the number of trains, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan’s Issyk-Kul mountain resort area.
The big question is: What is motivating Uzbekistan’s abrupt turnaround in policy toward Kyrgyzstan?
The easy answer would be that now Mirziyoev is Uzbekistan’s president and he wants Uzbekistan to have friendly relations with its neighbors.
But Mirziyoev was Uzbekistan’s prime minister from 2003 to 2016, the last half of Karimov’s rule as Uzbekistan’s president, when the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border was increasingly sealed and bilateral ties continually plummeted.
A better answer is that Mirziyoev is being pragmatic.
His country is in an economic bind, caused in no small part by Karimov’s “fortress Uzbekistan” policy that changed Uzbekistan from a natural regional transit country to a semi-isolationist state.
There is nothing to gain in continuing the antagonism with Kyrgyzstan.
Uzbekistan once sold natural gas to Kyrgyzstan and Karimov’s government used that as leverage to punish Kyrgyzstan for decisions Karimov did not like, by suspending supplies.
But Gazprom bought state company Kyrgyzgaz in April 2014 and supplies Kyrgyzstan with gas, ironically from gas fields Gazprom is working in Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan also often obstructed road and rail traffic to and from Kyrgyzstan, but now the long-awaited China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway project seems finally to be making progress.
This will be a shorter route for Uzbekistan to export goods to China than the current route through Kazakhstan, but it involves cooperation with Kyrgyzstan.
For the people living along the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border, Tashkent’s motivations for improving ties are probably not important.
Being able to trade openly with partners on the other side of the border and being able to visit friends and relatives more easily are a change for the better already.
