The uneasy relations between Uzbekistan and neighboring Tajikistan have deteriorated lately following continuous complaints from the Tajik authorities about delays in transiting goods through Uzbekistan’s railways. In response to these claims, the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs made an official statement, calling Tajikistan’s complaints “false and ungrounded”.
Delays in transiting railway wagons heading for Tajikistan through the territory of Uzbekistan began last winter, delays which on several occasions throughout the year affected as many as two thousand Tajik wagons. The Uzbek authorities have explained the delays by technical problems in certain areas of its railways.
After the meeting of the Presidents of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in July this year in Tashkent, an agreement was reached that the Uzbek side will no longer impede transit of goods on its territory, except for those that carry materials for constructing the Roghun hydropower station. In mid-October, the head of the Goods Transportation Department of Tajik Railways, Andrey Tropin, reported that Uzbekistan started to let through wagons for the Roghun station. However, this information was proven false after a couple of days and the Tajik railway authorities stated that thousands of Tajik wagons remain in Uzbekistan.
On November 1, the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement, calling all the accusations of the Tajik side false and ungrounded. Specifically, the Uzbek MFA explained that “facts and statistical data show that the statements of the Tajik authorities do not correspond with reality and have no grounds … According to the official data of the customs service of Uzbekistan, the volume of goods to Tajikistan does not decrease and has a stable growth tendency”. For instance, during the first nine months of 2010, the volume of goods transited by railway across Uzbek territory to Tajikistan amounted to 57,000 wagons, which is 1,780 wagons more than during the corresponding time period in 2009.
In addition, the Uzbek MFA stated that creating large-scale artificial delays which would gather thousands of railway wagons on the territory of Uzbekistan is technically impossible since this would require extremely long stretches of spur tracks, and would potentially paralyze the economy of Uzbekistan itself.
Furthermore, the Uzbek MFA referred to the statement of the Tajik authorities, according to which Tajikistan’s foreign trade turnover increased by 3.6 percent in 2010, and exports grew by 14 percent. Considering that the foreign trade turnover of Tajikistan depends on the major railway routes through Uzbekistan, the Tajik economy would hardly reach the indicated level in the case of a transportation blockade on Uzbekistan’s part.
The MFA of Uzbekistan concluded that the existing problems with transit through Uzbekistan’s territory are exclusively due to technical and logistical problems, and a significant increase in the cargo traffic and workload of the country’s railway infrastructure, as well as the necessity to conduct maintenance work on certain stretches of the railroad. Moreover, the increase in cargo traffic is due to Uzbekistan’s international commitment to provide transit of non-military and humanitarian goods to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, it was reported in the end of October that over one hundred Turkish and Iranian trucks were stuck on the Tajik-Uzbek border at the Dusti checkpoint in Tajikistan’s Tursunzade rayon for more than five days. The truck drivers say Uzbek border guards did not let their trucks enter the territory of Uzbekistan and did not provide reasons for this. The Tajik Customs Committee confirmed this information, and one of the committee’s representatives noted that this problem is similar to the delays in railway transit through Uzbekistan. In addition, on November 1 Uzbekistan unilaterally closed the border checkpoint in the Penjikent rayon of Tajikistan without any explanation.
As the MFA of Uzbekistan warned in its note, “ungrounded claims and statements of Tajik authorities towards Uzbekistan … do not promote the development of good-neighborly and mutually beneficial relations between the two states, and undermine the level of trust and mutual understanding in interstate relations”. Indeed, relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have already been antagonistic for a long time, with a number of disputed political and economic issues such as water management, border control, etc. Therefore, the current exchange of accusations regarding railway transit does little to improve the state of affairs.