|
Peace with Tajikistan not possible for now: Kyrgyzstan's defense ministry
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Kyrgyzstan’s defense ministry said Wednesday that peace with Tajikistan was not possible under the current circumstances, a month after border festivities between the two Central Asian neighbors left around a hundred people dead.Tajikistan later accused its neighbor of seeking to "escalate" the situation near the border. Clashes regularly erupt between the two former Soviet republics, as around half of their 970-kilometer (600-mile) border has been contested since the end of the Soviet Union. Fighting last month in the southern Kyrgyz region of Batken, bordering Tajikistan, left around a hundred dead according to authorities from both sides. Both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are members of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a regional military alliance. Kyrgyz Defense Minister Baktybek Bekbolotov said Wednesday that he recently met with CSTO Secretary-General Stanislav Zas and "told him that there would be no peace between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan." "Kyrgyz people have their truth, Tajik people have theirs," Bekbolotov told a presser in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. "Until an arbitrator comes between us, there will be no peace," he added. He suggested the deployment of a "small contingent" of CSTO peacekeepers that would carry out "ceasefire control and the withdrawal of heavy equipment from the border." According to the minister, Kyrgyzstan is also purchasing S-125 "Pechora-2BM" missile systems from Belarus, which will be delivered "by the end of the month" and deployed in the boder town of Batken. A spokesperson for the Kyrgyz parliament told Russian news agency TASS that on Thursday politicians will consider a bill facilitating the procedure for firearms permits in the border regions with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Also on Wednesday, Tajikistan’s border guard service accused Kyrgyzstan of "deliberate actions to escalate the situation in the border areas," the Khovar news agency reported. It accused Kyrgyzstan of repeated "violations" of the Tajik airspace, including near the town of Isfara close to Batken. Earlier this week, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov asked his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin  ...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...to help resolve the border dispute. Posted by: Fred 2022-10-21 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=647329 |