A Ferghana Valley border clash this weekend yet again highlights the potential for violence in Central Asia’s most densely populated and ethnically diverse region.
Several hundred residents of the Uzbek enclave of Sokh reportedly attacked a Kyrgyz border post and took Kyrgyz citizens hostage on January 5 and 6, according to local news wires. Sokh (also spelled Soh) is an island of territory controlled by Uzbekistan and entirely surrounded by one of Kyrgyzstan’s poorest provinces, Batken.
Though Sokh is populated mostly by ethnic Tajiks, a minority in both countries, the episode is an unsettling reminder of the fighting between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan that left hundreds dead in 2010.
The incident started during the afternoon of January 5 when Kyrgyz border guards were overseeing the installation of power lines to the newly constructed border post near the village of Charbak.
Residents of the Soh enclave village of Hoshyar reportedly attacked the guards and the post.
Kyrgyz border guards fired into the air to disperse them.
On January 6, a group of residents from Soh returned and took six residents of the village of Charbak back into Soh as hostages.
At least seven others were captured while driving through the Uzbek enclave when the unrest broke out.
Russia's Interfax news agency cited witnesses to the events as saying, "At the start there were more than 100 people (Uzbek citizens) but their numbers grew…"
Kyrgyzstan's newspaper "Vecherny Bishkek" early January 7 reported the crowd eventually numbered more than 1,000 people.
The Uzbek citizens reportedly tried to seize weapons from the Kyrgyz border guards.
AKIpress reported several Kyrgyz border guards were injured in the clashes.
Life for Tajikistan’s conscripts manning the drug-infested Afghanistan border is dismal. Frequent reports tell us they are cold, hungry and untrained (“recruits fire only nine shots over a 40-day” Russian-led training). But life for their dogs may be even worse, we now have learned thanks to Wikileaked American embassy cables.
