Materialising State Space: ‘Creeping Migration’ and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan

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Notes

Research for this article was generously supported by a postgraduate training award from the Economic and Social Research Council and a RCUK Research Fellowship. I would like to thank Dacia Viejo-Rose, Edmund Harzig and Alexander Morrison for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this paper in seminars at Cambridge and Oxford, to Dastan Nadyrov and Gulnara Aitpaeva for responding generously to my questions; and to Sally Cummings, Peter Gatrell, Maja Petrovic-Steger, Montu Saxena and two anonymous E-AS reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments on an earlier draft.

The revelation of concessions of land to China by former President Akaev during closed-door negotiations fostered public outrage and was the catalyst for popular demonstrations that led to political violence in Aksï in 2002. See ICG (2002, pp. 17–18), Khamidov (2001), Plenseev (2002) and Sydykova (2003) for contemporary analyses of these events, and Lewis (2008, pp. 127–33) on the significance of the allegations of ‘treacherous’ land sales for Akaev's political demise.

Several local and international organisations working in the Ferghana valley have examined the phenomenon in published analyses. See, for example ICG (2002), Kuehnast and Dudwick (2008), Passon and Temirkulov (2004), UNDP (2006) and most systematically, FTI (2008). For an important recent contribution which situates ‘creeping migration' within the broader context of regional ‘delimitation politics' see Bichsel (2009, pp. 114–6).

All translations are my own.

The main period of field research was between March 2004 and September 2005 in Batken and Sokh raions, supplemented by two shorter return visits in 2008. This research was primarily qualitative, and involved participant observation and extended ethnographic interviews with dozens of people whose livelihoods involved crossing, guarding or ‘working’ Batken's southern borders, including traders, herders, students, border guards, children, teachers, grandparents, customs officers, NGO employees and bus drivers. I have used pseudonyms throughout the essay unless requested otherwise by my informant. All translations are my own.

See, indicatively, Lubin and Rubin (1999), Passon and Temirkulov (2004), Satarbaev (2006), Slim (2002), Tabyshalieva (1999), UNDP (2006) and Young (2003).

During my period of research in the mid-2000s, interventions with the aim of conflict prevention or mitigation were being conducted, amongst other agencies, by the UNDP through its ‘Preventive Development in the South’ programme (UNDP 2001); the German Organisation for Technical Cooperation (GTZ); Mercy Corps, through its Peaceful Communities Initiative (PCI); the Swiss Development Cooperation, through its project on Regional Dialogue and Development; and through programmes on poverty alleviation and cross-border co-operation in the Ferghana valley and peace promotion in the Ferghana valley, as well as several local donor-funded NGOs. In some border villages, these agencies have occasionally been working at competing purposes (interview with Gerald Gunther, GTZ, Batken, July 2005). See also Passon and Temirkulov (2004, p. 51) and Maasen et al. (2005, p. 21).

Such is the case, for instance, with Ming-Örük, a border village established in 1991 to accommodate ethnic Kyrgyz ‘returnees’ from Tajikistan. The most striking example of such strategic village-building is in the case of Maksat, in Batken's western-most Leilek district. This village was created in 1996 with Kyrgyzstani state funds with the explicit aim of limiting the unregulated occupation of land in the Maksat massiv since the late 1980s by ethnic Taijks from the much larger village of Qalacha (Tajikistan) (FTI 2008, p. 4). In the words of one recent newspaper article, the village was conceived to act as an ‘outpost [forpost] in the way of unwanted migration’ (Khamidov 2006).

The bypass road around the Sokh enclave was commenced in 2006 using unpaid voluntary labour [ashar], later supplemented with state funding (Urumbaev 2007). Construction of the detour around Chorku and Surh was commenced in 2007 (Anarkulov 2008b).

For example, recent school-building initiatives in the border village of Tashtumshuk (bordering Taijkistan) and Charbak (bordering Uzbekistan in the Sokh valley), have been explicitly conceived to obviate the need for children to pass through the neighbouring state on their way to school (FTI 2008, p. 18).

However, see Collier (2001, 2004).

See, for example Carrère d'Encausse (1987). For critical analyses of Western historiography of the delimitation, see Byrbaeva (2005, pp. 73–84) and Haugen (2003, pp. 9–29). For an analysis of the divergent reinterpretations of the delimitation in contemporary Uzbekistani and Kyrgyzstani scholarship, see Reeves (2008, pp. 51–52).

According to Osh historian Zairbek Ergeshov (personal communication, Workshop on Nationhood and Narrative in Central Asia: History, Context, Critique, Issyk-Kul, January 2009), the fact that the initial process of delimitation occurred in the summer months, when Kyrgyz herders tended to be in the summer pastures (jailoo) meant that many Kyrgyz pastoralists found that their winter settlements and summer grazing grounds were located on the territory of different Union republics. See also Dzhunushalieva (2006, pp. 9–10) and Koichiev (2001, pp. 48–77).

Such appeals are common. In a recent instance when the Kyrgyz authorities sought to deport a Tajik farmer from Chorku who had started to lay the foundations for a home on contested territory, the farmer justified his actions by reference to the fact that he had helped his grandparents farm that land immediately after the war (interview with Mansur-aka, Ak-Sai, August 2008).

Examples of villages in the Isfara valley that have both Tajik and Kyrgyz variants include Govsvuar/Orto-Boz, Tojikon/Poselok, Tangi/Kapchïgai and Hoji-A'lo/Machai/Oktiabr'.

According to one elderly informant from Ak-Sai, due to extreme poverty during the Second World War, Tajik girls from Vorukh would often be married at a young age to Kyrgyz men, who were prepared to pay higher bride-price (interview with Tolib-aka, Ak-Sai, August 2008). Certainly, until the resettlement of Kyrgyz herders in the 1970s and 1980s, the village of Vorukh, today considered ethnically ‘Tajik’, had a significant Kyrgyz-speaking and identifying minority, and ethnic inter-marriage, mutual visiting and ritual celebrations seem to have been much more common than they are today (author's informal conversations with elderly residents of Ak-Sai, Vorukh and Tojikon villages, June–July 2005). Kyrgyz–Tajik inter-marriage in the Isfara valley is today extremely rare. When I asked young people from Ak-Sai and Ak-Tatïr in 2004–2005 whether they condoned inter-ethnic marriage, the response was almost uniformly negative. ‘Tukhum buzulup baratat’ (‘the lineage would be broken’) was how one eighth-grade schoolgirl put it.

This is not, of course, the same as according some ontological status to ethnicity, or assuming it to be the ‘driver’ of conflict. As Brubaker has demonstrated, the conceptual challenge is to understand how and when social life comes to be structured in terms of ethnicity—when ethnicity ‘happens’—without taking it to be a self-explanatory analytical category, or according ontological status to ‘ethnic groups’ (Brubaker 2005; Brubaker et al. 2006).

Tursun-agai mentioned here two international organisations, the names of which I omit.

Author's interview with Tursun-agai, Ak-Tatïr, July 2005.

My informants often mentioned the considerable social and legal sanctions that inhibit people today from selling land to citizens of Tajikistan, even in those instances where the latter could offer a larger sum for the purchase of the land than a citizen of Kyrgyzstan. According to Salamat Alamanov, director of the Institute for Regional Problems under the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, and the geographer responsible for chairing Kyrgyzstan's commission on demarcation and delimitation, there are few contemporary instances of illegal land sales, but there were many historical instances of such sales, and it is precisely because these families are now well established and cultivating the land in question that they ‘create headaches for us today’ (Alamanov 2007; see also ‘Batken: Prokuror oblasti Ryskul Baktybaev oproverg soobshcheniya o sluchayakh zakhvata kyrgyzskikh zemel' grazhdanami Tadzhikistana’, KyrgyzInfo, 28 April 2005).

In the Isfara valley, pastures are a particular source of local contention. There are barely any Tajikistani pastures, and as foreigners on Kyrgyzstani pastures, citizens of Tajikistan have to pay a land tax of 200 som per month (c. $5), plus 50 som ($1.5) per head of livestock to the shepherd who looks after them (figures from 2005). Citizens of Kyrgyzstan pay a land tax which entitles them to use the pastures, and the rates per head of livestock are considerably lower (25–30 som) which is a source of some resentment (author's fieldnotes from Ak-Tatyr and Orto Boz villages, July 2005; UNDP 2006, p. 19). This has led to widespread illegal pasture use, a source of concern to the Batken border authorities (Aiypova 2008).

According to Kyrgyzstan's 1999 Land Codex (Zemel'nyi kodeks), foreign citizens do not have the right to purchase land in Kyrgyzstan, though they do have the right to purchase property. In practice, however, the procedures involved, which demand presenting a packet of documents to the Ministry of Justice in Bishkek for authorisation, mean that virtually none of the property in question is exchanged in a juridically authorised way. See Poriadok priobreteniya inostrannymi grazhdanami zhilykh, nezhilykh pomeshchenii i zemel'nykh uchastkov, available at: http://www.kg.spinform.ru/articles/bvv004.htm, accessed 11 January 2009. Further complicating the legislative environment in Batken is the coupling of statewide legislation with locally issued ‘orders’ (rasporyazheniya), some of which are in tension with statewide legislature. In March 2006, for instance, the local administration of Batken oblast' issued its own order forbidding the sale of houses and land to foreign citizens (O zaprete na prodazhu domov i zemel'nykh uchastkov inostrannym grazhdanam). This gave the regional administration and the mayors of towns the authorisation to conduct investigations amongst border settlements to determine whether there had been instances of illegal land sales to citizens of Tajikistan, and authorised the state security agencies to invoke ‘strong measures’ against those found violating Kyrgyzstan's land codex (FTI 2007b, 2008, pp. 8–9). Land and property sales are also affected by a bi-party moratorium on land sales in contested areas between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and by the law on the state border of the respective states (Imanaliev 2006a, 2006b).

A 2004 report analysing peace and conflict potential in Batken oblast', for instance, identifies the ‘mahalla concept’ as one among a series of ‘sources of conflict’ in its discussion of inter-ethnic relations in the Isfara valley: ‘Because people are strongly attached psychologically to their communities (the ‘‘mahalla concept''), they are reluctant to migrate permanently to other places. They fear not being accepted by residents of other regions if they leave their homes. The demographic pressure combined with a perceived need to remain close to one's place of birth forces Tajiks to migrate to nearby disputed areas and Kyrgyz territory rather than to less controversial land further away. However, neither land shortage nor demographic growth is currently having a practical impact on their mahalla concept’ (Passon & Temirkulov 2004, p. 50).

In densely populated Chorku and Surh, for instance, many young families have been allocated land in the Shorab, a mining town that formerly enjoyed ‘Moscow provisioning’ (Moskovskoe obespechenie). Shorab has lost the majority of its population through out-migration and its dependence upon pumped water for irrigation and drinking has made domestic cultivation virtually impossible. Many of the families allocated land there only reside during part of the year, returning downstream to Chorku during the spring planting season.

This sense of ‘betrayal’ comes through vividly in a comment made by the head of the Vorukh farmers' cooperative, Validjon Nozirov, to a local Tajik journalist: ‘The will of one local Soviet official cannot carry authority for the population … However, precisely because of this betrayal on the part of local officials during the life of the Soviet Union, Tajiks now find themselves caught in a vice [zazhati v tiski]. Today we are forced to reap the fruits of that tolerance and internationalism, which was drummed into our heads in Soviet years. Judge for yourself: the Tajik villages today are deprived of pastures, of water, of any kind of land reserve [for distribution to new families]. Each year the population is growing and people need to find homes for young families, and yet the borders of Vorukh village cannot in any way be moved. Is there any logic in the fact that all the land surrounding this settlement should belong to the neighbouring state?’ (Mirsaidov 2008).

Integrum database, available at: http://www.integrumworld.com, is a database of print and online media reports from Russia and the CIS. See, indicatively, Abdullaev (2006), Aiypova (2008), Anarkulov (2008a), Kozhomkulova (2008), Omuraliev (2008), Pozharskii (2008), Skorodumova (2007) and Urumbaev (2005, 2006, 2007). For a critique of the tenor of some of this reporting, see Mirsaidov (2008) and Alamanov (2008).

‘I. Chudinov obespokoilsya zaseleniem prigranichnykh raionov yuga respubliki grazhdanam sosednikh stran’, Obshchestvennyi reiting, 27 February 2008.

‘V Batkenskoi oblasti 8 zemel'nykh uchastkov pereshli na balans Tadzhikistana’, Obshchestvennyi reiting, 12 September 2007.

‘Igor’ Chudinov: Pravitel'stvo vystupaet za pridanie osobogo statusa prigranichnym raionam strany', Gazeta.kg, 27 February 2008, available at: www.gazeta.kg/image/2008-02-27/4252, last accessed 17 January 2009.

Draft law, ‘On Special Border Settlements of the Kyrgyz Republic’[Ob osobykh prigranichnykh naselennykh punktakh KR] initiated by Deputy Juraev, available at: http://www.kenesh.kg/.f/98ccf0fe-c839-46ef-ab45-2495d24aeb16/Проект%20закона%20о%20пригр.пунктах.doc, accessed 1 May 2009. The parliamentary debate was widely covered in the print and online media. See Akmat uulu (2008), Anarkulov (2008a), Erkin uulu (2008), Karimov (2008), Kozhomkulova (2008), Nurakun uulu (2008), Temir (2008a, 2008b) and ‘M. Dzhuraev: Na granites s Tadzhikistanom bole 3 tysyach gektarov territorii Kyrgyzstana zakhvatili grazhdane sosednei strany’, Obshchestvennyi reiting, 4 March 2008.

Draft law, ‘On the Special Legal Status of Border Settlements of the KR’[Ob osobom pravavom statuse prigranichnykh naselennykh punktov KR], initiated by Deputies Imanaliev, Tekebaev, Juraev and Shernyazov in 2006, see FTI (2007b).

A figure, as one of the reviewers of this article correctly noted, regarded with fear by minority groups in Kyrgyzstan for his outspoken nationalist statements.

The one village that was not in Batken oblast' was Barak, a small enclave of Kyrgyzstan with a population of 700, in the territory of Uzbekistan.

Draft law, ‘On Special Border Settlements of the Kyrgyz Republic’, Article 1, available at: http://www.kenesh.kg/.f/98ccf0fe-c839-46ef-ab45-2495d24aeb16/Проект%20закона%20о%20пригр.пунктах.doc, accessed 1 May 2009.

‘Obosnovanie k proektu Zakona Kyrgyzskoi Republiki ‘Ob osobykh prigranichnykh naselennykh punktakh Kyrgyzskoi Republiki’, available at: http://www.kenesh.kg/.f/98ccf0fe-c839-46ef-ab45-2495d24aeb16/Проект%20закона%20о%20пригр.пунктах.doc, accessed 1 May 2009.

‘Grazhdane Tadzhikistana uzhe zakhvatili bole 2 tysyach gektarov kyrgyzstanskoi territorii’, Gazeta.kg, 4 March 2008, available at: http://www.gazeta.kg/news/2008-03-04/4382, accessed 1 May 2009.

The event alluded to here referred to a violent outburst that emerged between Batken governor Aijigitov and Tajik border guards posted at a mobile border unit in Surh in January 2007. The mobile post was located on a stretch of Tajikistani road that had been loaned to Kyrgyzstan for 49 years (and therefore should not have any border controls). The event escalated into an open conflict, involving the border units of both states (FTI 2007a).

‘K. Bakiev prinyal uchastie v prezentatsii tekhniki, priobretennoi Mintransom’, Kabar, 4 August 2008.

‘I.Chudinov prinyal uchastie v torzhestvennom sobranii ko Dnyu rabotnikov avtomobil'nogo transporta’, Kabar, 10 October 2008.