With nerves on the Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan border only now dissipating, authorities in Bishkek have embarked on the potentially foolhardy move of helping themselves to four Uzbek-owned resorts at a popular tourist destination.
Local media has been full of the news about embattled Prime Minister Temir Sariyev signing a government order to appropriate the resorts on Issyk-Kul lake on April 4.
The timing is awkward, although it could stand to help Sariyev out of a tight spot.
On March 26, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan pulled back troops from a disputed section of shared border, ending an uneasy week-long standoff sparked by the sudden deployment of Uzbek soldiers and military vehicles to the area.
On balance, it feels like Uzbekistan lost the battle of wits and nerves. It withdrew its forces first from the high-altitude territory without ever properly explaining what prompted it to mobilize its men in the first place.
Still, the episode did momentarily blow some wind into the beleaguered opposition’s sails, so Sariyev may be looking to shore up his position and exploit the patriotic card to forestall an expected vote of no-confidence in parliament.
By all appearances, this looks like an ill-conceived gambit. According to a report by Tazabek.kg, only one of the four resorts seems to be long-term leased to a commercial organization, while the other three were controlled by state-owned Uzbek entities.
The agreements underpinning the ownership of the resorts date back to the Soviet era, when power-brokers in Moscow decided to boost Issyk-Kul’s profile as a place of rest and therapeutic treatments.
Since the relatively poor Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic lacked the funds to build multiple resorts for mass tourism on the lake, their fellow Kazakh and Uzbek republics stepped in, each building four health spas, known locally as sanatoriums.
The agreements were rejigged following independence in a way that allowed Kyrgyzstan to benefit by taxing the properties and collecting rent payments. Still, a slice of the windfall from the lake’s 2-3 month tourist season continued to flow to Kyrgyzstan’s richer neighbors, exciting nationalist passions in the process.
Those passions were in evidence after the country’s second revolution in 2010, when the interim government threatened the nationalization of the Kazakh-owned resorts. In the event, the resorts survived unmolested.
The legal status of the Uzbek resorts was most recently raised by Uzbekistan’s deputy Prime Minister Rustam Azimov during negotiations to negotiate a gas dispute in 2009. Even then, Tashkent was not happy with the status quo.
There is an interesting parallel in the fact that the resorts Kyrgyzstan has spirited away from Uzbekistan are subject to a similarly vexed status as the one governing the reservoir at the heart of the standoff in March.
The Kasan-Sai reservoir was built with Uzbek investment and largely intended for use by Uzbek agriculture, but remains on Kyrgyz land.
Prior to the Uzbek deployment to the disputed section of the border, Kyrgyz officials said Tashkent had asked permission to carry out routine work at the reservoir, a request Kyrgyzstan refused.
Kyrgyzstan may misguidedly believe this is a time for it to be plucky.
Now Kyrgyzstan no longer requires its larger, militarily superior neighbor as a point of transit for Uzbekistan’s electricity and no longer receives its gas supplies, Tashkent has a diminishing array of diplomatic levers at its disposal.
That leaves only displays of armed might as a means to settle differences. But if Kyrgyzstan is counting on big brother in Russia to leap to its defense on such occasions, it should think twice.
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