Madeleine Reeves University of Manchester
Border Work, Belonging and the Territorial ‘Fix’
ESF Exploratory Workshop: Borders Through Time and Space
Draft paper for workshop discussion: not for reposting or redistribution
“Unfortunately people’s mentality hasn’t changed. Although we are all independent states since 1991, the citizens have remained the same old citizens of the Soviet Union! They used to have common pastures, common water and bore holes, common energy sources, and they think all of that can still hold, but it can’t! We have sent notes [of complaint] to the Tajik foreign ministry…Until matters are resolved we have decided to close the border, with the goal of protecting the safety of our citizens and those of the neighboring state” (Jontoro Satybaldiev, Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan, at a Press Conference on January 16th 2014).
“It’s a difficult situation, that’s why people don’t like it. Here you’ve got a Tajik, and the wall of his home is like that [showing with his hands] and the Kyrgyz house is just here, sharing a wall. And here you’ve got a Tajik home, and so on. So how are you going to divide all of that? There is no way you can divide them [ich bölüshkö tuura kelbei jatat]! Otherwise you’re going to have serious quarrels [chatak] appearing.” (Pirmat-ata, whose house is built on “contested” territory, summer 2004).
In this presentation I want to foreground the social and material work of making borders ‘stick’, and the stakes of such work for questions of belonging and collective coexistence in a region of undemarcated international border. What might spatial justice look like in a region of so-called “contested territory” (spornaia territoriia), when the grounds for determining territorial parity are disputed? And how do official concerns with security and territorial integrity, of the kind voiced by Satybaldiev in January this year, intersect with local understandings of what constitutes a fair or “right” (tuura) distribution of water and land?
In the Isfara valley, one of Central Asia’s most densely populated and geographically complex, social justice is understood to be bound to topography in particularly powerful and consequential ways. The river that sustains livelihoods and waters domestic garden plots along the length of the valley tacks back and forth multiple
1 times between the jurisdiction of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. So does the single north- south road running up to the mountains. The valley is home to one of the world’s largest extra-territorial enclaves, Vorukh, with a population of around 30,000. Extensive sections of the international border here remain to be officially delimited and demarcated twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In official discourse this indeterminate territory is referred to as “undescribed” (neopisana) or simply as “contested” (spornaia). Whole villages and village districts, including Pirmat- Ata’s, have been built on land that was loaned “for long-term use” (na dolgosrochnoe polzovanie) between collective farms during the late Soviet period, the status of which, now that that the nominal loan has expired, is unclear.
In recent months, attempts by Kyrgyz authorities to build a new bypass road that would circumvent Tajikistani territory in the Isfara valley have turned the undemarcated border here from a “matter of fact” into a “matter of concern” in Latour’s (2005) sense: that is, as an unstable object that is temporarily “gathered” as a site of controversy. On January 11th, when Kyrgyzstan resumed construction of a bypass road on territory that Tajikistan deems disputed (but Kyrgyzstan doesn’t), territorial disagreements that had largely been discussed behind the doors of inter- governmental meetings took on violent local form. Kyrgyz and Tajik border troops exchanged gunfire near the villages of Khodji-Alo (Tajikistan) and Kök-Tash (Kyrgyzstan), leaving eight border guards wounded, each accusing the other side of violating international norms and entering the neighbouring state without permission. This escalation of military presence and military force in a region that was only minimally patrolled in the mid-2000s has been accompanied by an increasingly vocal public commentary, with Kyrgyzstan’s Vechernii Bishkek newspaper accusing Tajikistan’s border services of willfully reducing the territory of the Isfara valley by 500 hectares in its map of the region, and the head of Tajikistan’s border service in turn condemning the “seizure, expansion and appropriation of the territory of Tajikistan by citizens of Kirgiziia”, which had illegally turned the village of Vorukh into an enclave in the 1950s (REFS). Amid mutual accusations of violation of the border regime, topography has itself become front-page news in national capitals, complete with competing maps of where the inter-state the border here really lies.
2 My aim in this paper is not to dissect this current escalation of tension, nor to weigh in on the debate over where the border does or should lie, so much as to historicize the search for parity (paritetnost’) and territorial integrity (territorial’naya tselostnost’) in this region of formerly Soviet internal border, and in so doing, to think anthropologically about the category of “territory” itself. The story that I trace here concerns the repeated renegotiation of inter-republican borders between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the late Soviet period, and the way that this past inflects contemporary concerns over territorial parity, existential security, and the threat of so-called “creeping migration”.
While much attention has been given to the national-territorial delimitation of 1924- 27 and its role in consolidating (or even constituting) Central Asian “nations” where they did not previously exist (Hirsch 2005, Gorshenina 2012, Haugen 2003, Abashin 2005), much less attention has been paid to subsequent exchanges of land between constituent Union republics of the USSR, and the way that these served both to normalize a particular conception of the right relation between people and territory, and to foster concern that a relocation of people would also entail a relocation of border. While the long-term consequences of the original national-territorial delimitation should not be under-estimated, I argue that it should be seen less as a singular process of territorial fixing than the first in an ongoing process of territorial renegotiation that continued right up until the final years of Soviet Union’s existence, and now beyond. If the first phase of territorialisation was primarily concerned with “consolidating” populations that were deemed lacking in national consciousness through the creation of putatively national (natsional’no-odnorodnye) republics, it is the second phase, marked by population resettlement, inter-kolkhoz land transfers and the search for industrial agriculture in the post-war period that are crucial to understanding the origins of contemporary territorial indeterminacy.
Today in the Isfara valley, the de facto distribution of homes, schools, and in some cases entire villages, simply does not match any of the readily available maps of the region (including the version of border represented by google maps). The village of Tojikon, for instance, which has a school and medical centre under the jurisdiction of Tajikistan, established after land was “loaned” (arendaga berilgen) from Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan in 1982, does not figure at all on late Soviet maps, and figures, unmarked),
3 as lying in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan respectively according to the maps issued by these authorities.
But there is something more, and it is this aspect hat I want to dwell on here. For as well as fostering a disjuncture between actual de facto land use and the cartographic boundary between Union republics (and later between independent states), the process of drawing and re-drawing maps; of refiguring the border to catch up with the “real” distribution of people and homes, and in so doing making up for past failures in mapping the border, has served, ironically to turn ethno-territorial determinacy—having a border that is delimited, demarcated, contiguous and materially present on the landscape—into a proxy for spatial justice itself. In government reports and policy interventions, determinate borders come to be seen as the key to harmonious trans-boundary relations, even as in practice, it is the very ambiguity of administrative regulation that has enabled border markets to flourish and local residents to move about relatively unhindered in the first decade and a half of independence. Moreover, the tendency to redefine borders according to de facto land use (fakticheskoe zemlepolzovanie) has produced particular, highly ethnicized conception of territory, according to which the resale of now-privatised homes and land-plots between citizens of one state and the other is interpreted as marking a shift in the border itself: an instance of “creeping migration” that undermines the territorial integrity of the state (Reeves 2008, Bichsel 2013).
Anthropology, territory and territorial “integrity”
To unpack this argument, I want to dwell for a moment with the category of territory. In contrast with the flourishing anthropological literature on space, place and landscape, “territory” seems to be a word out of anthropological fashion. When it is invoked, it is usually to qualify something else: we have territories of rights (or topographies of justice), territories of difference, territories of desire. But there is little that could be said to constitute an anthropology of territory: an anthropology, that is, of the way that space is transformed into territory—and how this occurs differently in different political configurations (though see Moore (2005) for an important exception). Part of the reason, perhaps, has to do with the fact that “territory” is a term intimately bound up with the state: invoking it can imply a
4 privileging of a state-centric perspective, or an assumption that there are unambiguous “insides” and “outsides” to the political order: the “territorial trap” well critiqued by John Agnew (REF) with regard to the disciplinary field of international relations. Anthropologists have long critiqued the assumption that culture can be “read” from place; or that particular ethnic communities can, or should be seen as having a primordial attachment to particular places (Malkii 1992, Gupta and Ferguson 1992). As Gupta and Ferguson suggested over two decades ago now: “we need to ask how to deal with cultural difference while abandoning received ideas of a (localized) culture.” This move, generative as it has been, has led to much more innovation with respect to exploring that “cultural difference” unmoored from place than it has in leading us to consider how we might rethink the category of “place” itself in more lively, less essentialised ways.
There are, I think, two further currents that have led to the displacement of “territory” as a distinctly anthropological concern—and with it, to an occlusion of the spatial and material infrastructures of everyday life. The first reflects concerns, influenced by the later Foucault, to uncouple governance from the state, “cutting off the king’s head” in our analysis of power. To govern, in this sense, is “to structure the possible field of action of others” (Foucault, 1982: 790). It is productive, rather than restrictive; it works through forms of self-discipline rather than through prohibition. Government, in this reading, “does not have to do with territory, but rather a sort of complex composed of men and things. The things with which in this sense government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with other things” (Foucault, 2002 [1978]: 208-9).
This analytical move has been enormously generative, fostering attentiveness to the constitution of the self-governing subject and the politicisation of what Niklas Rose has called ‘life itself’ (Rose, 2007). But one corollary of this productivity has been that ‘territory’ is reduced to a kind of residual category – a leftover from an older, Westphalian model of states as power-containers, but no longer really central to an analysis of contemporary governance. Territory, then, comes to be seen as no longer particularly helpful or meaningful as a site from which to interrogate the workings of contemporary sovereign power: altogether too flat and fixed to capture the unboundedness of power that penetrates the skin. In their introduction to
5 Sovereign Bodies, Hansen and Stepputat for instance explicitly urge us to ‘shift the ground’ of our analysis of contemporary power from questions of territoriality towards “the internal constitution of sovereign power…through the exercise of violence over bodies and populations” (Hansen and Stepputat, 2005: 2). In this reading, ‘the exception’ comes to be located inside the very body of citizens, in “tissues, genes or irrationalities beyond the control of the individual, legislated by the state or patented by corporation” (ibid: 18).
The second, interlinked current concerns critical interrogations of the category of space. Rather than regarding space as a static attribute, a geometrical extension, or a mere backdrop to social life, recent anthropological scholarship has explored space as the always-provisional, always-contingent outcome of an encounter. As Corsin Jimenez puts it in his account of “space as a capacity”, space is “no longer a category of fixed and ontological attributes, but a becoming, an emergent property of social relationship” (2003:140). This approach directs attention to how space is done; how it is relationally produced. One corollary, however, of this radical de-ontologisation of space, is that it leaves little room for the thinking space in material as well as relational terms; and more specifically, of exploring the way that particular material configurations—the stuff of rocks, mud, water that moves, pastures that erode, pipes, irrigation canal, roads—can inhibit or facilitate particular political visions and spatial practices.
In exploring the category of territory, it is this simultaneity of material-social and political concerns that I wish to capture. For territory is space is produced in particular ways, through particular technical and material interventions (the EU’s Border Migration in Central Asia programme is devoting considerable resources to GIS mapping, for instance) and in particular relation to the state. In order to explore territory in this way—as a kind of unstable material-social assemblage—I have found it helpful to think with recent work on infrastructure, which has drawn attention to the way that particular material and technical formations constrain and channel the social, often in unanticipated ways (Collier 2005, 2011). In a Latin American context, for instance, Harvey and Knox show how new roads linking the Amazon interior with the coast are ‘enchanted’, drawing on Jane Bennett’s discussion of vibrant matter to capture the “more generally visceral, affective form of relating to that
6 which is sidelined or cast out of formalised, rationalised descriptions of material and social phenomena' (p. 523) Roads enchant through promises of speed, of political connectivity, of economic integration, they argue. As well as technical expertise, their appearance also requires “a force of social and political will which is able to generate and foster the belief that these technologies have a capacity to transform the spaces through which they will pass” But more than this, roads enchant through the kinds of everyday engagements that they elicit: "It is through an articulation with the lived, material encounters of statis, rupture and blockage” they argue, “that infrastructural promises become reinvigorated and recast.”
This approach, I think, can help us to reanimate our account of territory—territory, here, not in the realist sense of a preconstituted, naturalized container for social life, but as a site of intense social, political and affective investment that is produced differently in different political formations. Territorialization here precedes territory, not the other way around.
Territorializing the Isfara Valley
The Isfara valley is a steep side valley at the far south west of the Ferghana basin. Starting at an altitude of several thousand metres in the Alay mountains, the Isfara river tacks back and forth between the jurisdiction of Kyrgyzstan, where it begins, and Tajikistan, where it forms a narrow band of irrigated land to Isfara town and beyond, here just a few hundred metres above sea-level. Historically, settlement patterns followed a model similar to that found in other parts of the Ferghana basin, with a contrast between settled, valley based modes of livelihood based on intensive irrigated agriculture, and a pastoral nomadic population moving seasonally between high mountain summer pastures and lower over-wintering grounds. This pattern is usually cast today in the ethnic binary of Tajik and Kyrgyz (Tajiks lived in the valley basin, Kyrgyz lived in the mountains), but this distinction overplays the salience of encompassing national categories of identification in the pre-Soviet period and conceals important distinctions of region and lineage group, in particular between those Tajik communities that had lived in the Isfara valley in the large villages of Vorukh and Chorkhuh, and those migrated to the region from Matcha (on the far side of the Alay mountains) in the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of hunger:
7 distinctions that are still retained today in patterns of endogamy and in the name locally given to the village of Khodjai’-A’lo of “Matchai” (see also Bushkov 1990). The region has historically been marked by considerable inter-dependence between settled and pastoral populations, with common markets and herding agreements, the presence of Kyrgyz/Tajik variants for several of the villages and landmarks in the valley, and some (albeit limited) marriage between Kyrgyz and Tajik communities, particularly during times of war or hunger.
As other parts of rural Central Asia, this was a region decisively transformed by the Soviet arc of modernization. Beginning in 1924, Soviet officials embarked on a process of national-territorial delimitation. This was a two-fold process. On the one hand a process of boundary marking was intended to establish the spatial contours of constituent republics within the Soviet Union, transforming the Turkestan, Bukharan and Khivan republics into notionally mono-national (odnorodnye) Soviet republics. But this spatial and administrative transformation was also guided by a Marxist teleology that saw the articulation of national consciousness as a necessary precondition for the emergence of “real”, class-based antagonisms. As one of the architects of the delimitation, Juazos Vereikis put it to a meeting of the party faithful in Tashkent:
We must foster in all ways possible the appearance of revolutionary, class consciousness among the batraks [peasants] and the poorest farmers. For that reason we must unravel as quickly as possible all those interethnic contradictions [rasputat’ vse mezhnatsional’pr’nye protivorechiia], which are obscuring class relations, preventing class conflict. The national delimitation, illuminating the clarity of national relations among the Uzbeks, Kirgiz, Turkmens, Kara-Kirgiz and Tajiks, will untangle the network of international contradictions and in that way will clear the stage for the social, class war. (1924, 61)
Cold war historiography often presented the delimitation that was initiated in 1924 as a cynical act of divide and rule, intended to stymie a nascent pan-turkism by dividing Turkic peoples against themselves or cynically leaving a portion of one ethnic group “stranded” inside another majority ethnic republic. Writing in 1953,
8 the diplomat-scholar Olaf Caroe argued that “it seemed as if the absurdity of the interrepublic borders was designed in order to compel a certain degree of central direction, making nonsense of a real local autonomy” (Caroe [1953] 1967, xiv–xv). This argument finds echoes in some contemporary historiography and much current writing on conflict and its prevention in Central Asia, which often attribute the source of current border conflicts in Central Asia to the whim of Stalin and his malevolent map-makers (the three major enclaves inside Kyrgyzstan “allocated by a stroke of Stalin’s pen” as one author puts it, Lewington 2010: 224; see also Slim 2002; Shishkin 2013).
Such an approach, however, conflates effect with intention. For all the hubris and haste of the national-territorial delimitation, the archival record suggests that Bolshevik activists saw themselves as undertaking a thoroughly rational, modern and emancipatory project: one that would act as a corrective to the “artificial [iskusstvennye] administrative boundaries” of the czarist era, which “did not correspond either to the national nor the economic demands of the peoples” (Khodzhaev 1934, 3), and which was explicitly framed at the time as a counter to the “bourgeois nationalism” that underpinned the Wilsonian vision of a league of nations. Rather than an excess of ideological unity, Soviet leaders saw in the Central Asia of 1924 “a highly fragmented society” (Haugen 2003, 90): the product of administrative incoherence and tribal antagonism.
As Francine Hirsch (2005) has demonstrated, the process of national-territorial delimitation served to mobilise “nation” as a category through which demands for rights to land and water could be mobilized. But it also, I would suggest, was the first constitutive iteration of a conception of “territory” as a finite, bounded landmass to which a particular national group, practicing a particular mode of livelihood (agricultural production, stockbreeding, transhumant herding…) has a privileged claim. Ethnographic and topographical mapping were critical to this process. When literary critic Walter Benjamin visited Moscow in 1926, he found that the newly issued maps of the Soviet state and its constituent republics were “almost as close to becoming the center of the new Russian iconic cult as Lenin’s portrait” ([1928] 1978, 118). For the leaders of the newly established USSR, the great expanse that had been acquired from the Russian empire had to be known by being incorporated ( osvoen
9 ). As Widdis (2003, 20), puts it: cartography and planning alike were crucial to “the transformation of space into territory.”
The process of national territorial delimitation served to territorialise ethnicity. But since ethnic boundaries were presumed to correlate with mode of economic livelihood (Tajiks and Uzbeks in the valley plains primarily occupied in settled agriculture and trading; Kyrgyz in the mountains and foothills prmailiry occupied with transhumant pastoralism), the delimitation had the further effect of entrenching economic distinctions, between “settled” and “pastoral” mode of livelihood, which had previously been much more fluid.
In rural and sparsely populated regions of Central Asia, moreover, this process of mapping was inconclusive and contested—perhaps unsurprisingly so, given the lack of salience of national categories of identification. The territorialization of ethnicity presupposes that such ethno-spatial boundaries are geographically coherent. It also implies that they are coherently mappable: that the resulting ethnic map will be one of smooth finite spaces rather than of dots, blurs, or mixed-up shades of color. Yet the categories of Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen that were to constitute the basis for national delimitation were overlapping and non-exclusive. Kyrgyz and Tajik communities living in southern Ferghana were as likely to define themselves by religion, lineage (uruu/ avlod) or valley as they were in exclusive national categories. In September 1920, an article published in a Moscow’s magazine, Zhizn' natsional' nostei (Life of the Nationalities), noted that even young people who had “mastered the principles of Soviet power . . . [could] not even solve such an elementary question as what to call their people [ narod ]—Turk, Uzbek or Muslim” (quoted in Fierman 1991, 69). A few years later the celebrated orientalist, Vasilii Bartol'd, warned that “the national principle, as it was brought to life during the delimitation of Middle Asia in 1924, is a product of West European history of the 19th century and is completely alien [ sovershenno chuzhd ] to local historical traditions” (Bartol'd, [1925] 1991).
Quite apart from the difficulties of establishing where ethnic boundaries lay, conceptually and spatially, the national imperative conflicted from the start with the economic one: the need to ensure that republics were economically coherent, that
10 mountain populations were not cut off from the markets they used, and that the integrity of irrigation systems was preserved (Haugen 2003, 188–191). The delimitation, rather than a technical process of categorization or unambiguous act of “divide and rule,” was rather a fraught business of compromise—between Moscow, Tashkent, and host of competing regional elites; as well as between “national” and “economic” imperatives. These competing priorities led to a proliferation of claims and counterclaims by those living in border districts that continued well into the 1930s (Bergne 2007; Koichiev 2001, 48–79). Indeed, by 1927 there were so many disagreements concerning the proper adjudication of lands lying in the Isfara valley (as well as the neighbouring Sokh valley), that on May 4, after a brief spate of land exchanges in southern Ferghana, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR issued a decree prohibiting any further changes to the existing borders for three years (Koichiev 2001, 79).
In the southern fringes of the Ferghana basin, where Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekstan and Tajikistan meet, subsequent socio-spatial transformation is bound up with the long, violent history of collectivization from the 1930s onwards; the transformation of previously unirrigated hillside (adyr) into regions of intense cultivation through the building of new water channels, pump stations and reservoirs; and the large-scale resettlement of mountain populations, who were considered too scattered to be productive, into grid-like “planned villages” (planovye sela) in the lowlands. In one sense this is a classic instance of the high modernist state transforming land into territory and rendering populations legible—particularly nomadic, pastoral or transhumant populations whose seasonal movement often frustrated state administrators (Scott 1998).
Parity deferred
But this process of territorial production was neither singular and smooth, nor uncontested. Nor was it entirely clear what territorial “parity” would look like in a context where collective farms, including those at the borders of Union republics, had often, informally, been using pastures that lay inside the neighbouring republic, or leasing out land to a contiguous farm to avoid excessive land taxes. Administrative boundaries that existed on paper in the 1920s, but with no physical correlate on
11 landscapes that were deemed economically unproductive, were largely ignored in daily life. When in 1949 a parity commission was established to determine the rightful boundaries between Kyrgyz and Tajik SSRs, it noted that maps from a decade earlier bore little correspondence to the de facto distribution of land. Anticipating concerns that have continued to dog repeated parity commission, the 1949 commission noted:
In order to prevent future potential land conflicts and misunderstandings in the use of unallocated (neraspredelennykh) lands,” [we] . . . consider it imperative in the near future to clarify the interrepublic boundaries between the Tajik SSR and the Kirgiz SSR, considering that the borders shown on the maps . . . published in 1938–40 do not reflect the actual location of both republics [fakiticheskogo raspolozheniia obeikh respublik], as a result of which fourteen collective farms belonging to Batken district of the Kirgiz SSR have found themselves [having lands] within the borders of the Tajik SSR, including settlements belonging to eight of these collectives. (quoted in Alamanov 2010, 39–40)
As Christine Bichsel (2009, 111) has noted, such commissions typically recommended adjusting the republican borders to fit current de facto land use (fakticheskoe zemlepol’zovanie) at the time of their work, rather than treating the original 1924–1927 delimitation as authoritative. Such an approach appears to have privileged more sedentary modes of life, because it is easier to tell that land is being “used” productively when it is being cultivated rather than grazed. It also served to reinforce a working assumption that land that is being used by ethnic Kyrgyz members of a Kyrgyz collective farm de facto belongs to the Kyrgyz SSR; and vice versa for ethnic Tajiks. In other words, it fostered a particular conception of territorialized ethnicity (and of ethnicized territory) in which the ethnic affiliation of somebody living in a region of disputed territory was seen to determine not only the person’s own administrative membership (in which republic they are registered), but the very identify of the land on which they lived (is this house in the Kyrgyz republic or the Tajik republic?)
12 In the Isfara valley, questions of delimitation were particularly acute. Kyrgyz and Tajik village communities were distributed in so called “chessboard” (shakhmat) fashion, as the site of previous wintering grounds (kyshtoo) were turned into fixed village communities with settled populations employed on collective and state farms. Throughout the post-war period, population growth and forced resettlement were accompanied by new parity commissions (paritetnye kommissii) that sought to determine the rightful location of inter-republican borders. The most important of these were conducted in 1958, 1975 and 1989; the last two in response to violent escalations of conflict.
The 1989 commission is particularly interesting because its work coincided with a high moment of perestroika-era debate over the legacies of Soviet environmental, agricultural and national policies. Whereas the previous commissions’ work passed with little public commentary, the 1989 commission, which followed a period of extended inter-communal conflict over land and water use, prompted first fleeing, and then more sustained debate, in the newspapers Kommunist Tadzhikistana and Sovetskaia Kirgiziia.
Writing in a June 1989 article under the heading, Conflict Could have Been Avoided [Konflikta moglo ne byt’], Popov launched one of the first sustained public critiques of the national-territorial delimitation of 1924-25, which made the map of Central Asia appear as though it had been “cut with scissors”.
“When the border has only a symbolic character, people carry on living according to their own established principles. The population of mixed villages would receive their documents and get registered in the nearest village administration, with Tajiks in the Tajik [administrative centre], and Kyrgyz in the Kyrgyz one. Alongside this practice of registration, people got used to an understanding of extraterritoriality [voshlo poniatie ekstraterritorial’nosti], that is, the right of representatives of the other republic, irrespective of their place of residence, to follow only their own laws. And the same is true of their land holdings”.
Popov went on to critique the last major round of territorial redrawing, which occurred in 1958. He gave the example of the village known at the time as Oktiabr’,
13 but known today in Tajik as Khodji’A’lo and in Kyrgyz as Matchai—the same village that, in January 2014, was the site of an exchange of fire between Kyrgyz and Tajik troops, each accusing the other of violating the sovereign territory of the neighbouring state. Popov noted that among the 2000 inhabitants of Oktiabr’ in 1989 were around 150 Kyrgyz families who had moved to the village when there was “still enough land for everyone” and who, in contrast to their Tajik neighbours, were considered to be living in Batken raion of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic.
“There was so much freedom at that time that in 1958 the leadership of the Kalinin kolkhoz on the Isfara district even considered it possible to gift (peredat’ v dar) 144 hectares of land belonging to the Kalinin kolkhoz (sic) of Batken raion. That stretch of land lies right next to the territory of Oktiabr’. In Kyrgyzstan, ratification of that donation of land went through all the necessary levels, but in Tajikistan, not all the formalities were observed. The presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the republic did not issue a decree in regard to this exchange. But that did not stop the neighbours using the land that was given to them. Today, thirty years later, the short-sightedness (neobdumannost’) of that step is particularly stark. The population of Oktiabr’ has grown rapidly and it is necessary to increase the number of domestic irrigated plots to ease problems with agricultural production. But there is no contiguous land left now next to the village.” (Popov 1989)
The parity commissions’ readiness to adjust the border according to existing de facto kolkhoz use, and the fact that their findings might be ratified by the supreme soviet of one republic but not the other, meant that such border reassessments, far from resolving contention over “unallocated” lands, tended rather to replicate uncertainty. To this day, the major obstacle slowing the delimitation of the Kyrgyz- Tajik border is disagreement over which maps and normative acts, ratified in one Union republic but not the other, should be taken as the authoritative basis for discussion. While Kyrgyzstan refers to the map following the parity commission of 1989, Tajikistan takes the original map of 1928 as the authoritative basis of discussion.
In practice these commissions’ recommendations never gained juridical force and were largely ignored in practice. Tajik or Kyrgyz, border dwellers during Soviet
14 times were still citizens of the same, Soviet state. Public transport and road infrastructure knitted republics together. Indeed, as recently as 2008 the ageing Pazik bus that had been running the route since the 1970s crossed the unmarked Kyrgyz-Tajik border no fewer than six times, linking villages on either side into a shared regional economy defined less by the bounds of the state than the lie of the Isfara river and the location of regional markets.
What persisted, however, was a residual sense that borders couldn’t be relied upon; that in allowing a village to grow or a new plot of land to be sown, the border itself might shift. One effect is that both sides of the dispute feel an acute sense of historical grievance: that borders can’t be relied upon to stay put. As Khalil, one of the elders from the former Oktiabr’ village, commented in a newspaper interview two decades after the 1989 parity commission, “The biggest problem we face [today] is the lack of irrigated land and the absence of pastures. The last time that land was [swapped] between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan was in 1989. Then the leaders of the commission from amongst the rayon and oblast-level officers, those who were supposed to be representing our republic, didn’t act fairly. They put together a map according to which all the lands that are beyond the reach of the last house would be considered Kyrgyz. As a result of which all four mountains surrounding our village have gone to our neighbours. […] Even the house in which I live at one time used to be considered right in the centre of the Khoji-A’lo neighbourhood. And now it’s right on the edge of it! Twenty metres further and you are already inside the territory of Kyrgyzstan.”
The progressive redelimitation of land had a further effect. For in a context where borders can’t be relied upon to tell the truth about the “real” distribution of territory, topography itself comes to be interrogated as the ultimate source of truth about historical and ethnic primacy. Arslan-ata was in his late-70s when I interviewed him in 2010 abut his experience of working for several decades a mine-worker and union leader in the nearby mining town of Shorab, He had moved from Shorab sevral years earlier after life in a town where irrigation water no longer reached became too hard to sustain. Today, he lives right on the edge of Kok-Tash village, at the side of the new bypass road on land that remains disputed. After drinking tea and chatting, Arslan showed me the outhouse that had, he claimed, been destroyed by
15 people form Chorkuh who claimed that it was illegally built on the territory of Tajikistan. When we got on to talking about his period of mine work, he turned back to the question of historical primacy, recalling the land exchange that meant that the Shorab mine-workings, which traversed Soviet republican boundaries several kilometers to our noth, became part of the Tajik SSR:
Arslan-Ata: When we first moved there, in 1939, there was no Shurab to speak of. It was called Shor-suu. . ..
Elmira-Eje: . . . it had a Kyrgyz name
Arslan-Ata: It belonged to the Kyrgyz SSR. The Kyrgyz had always been there, looking after their animals. They used to call it Burovoi kishlak . . . But then when the Soviet power came they started to call it Shorsuu. And then it went over to the Tajiks.
Elmira-Eje: The Kyrgyz gave it as a loan, for nineteen years.
Arslan-Ata: And they changed the name to Shurob, to make it Tajik, you see? It went over to the Tajiks, but all the people living there were Kyrgyz. […] The Taijks didn’t have their own mine. Not an underground mine. The Kyrgyz had lots of mines at the time—Sülükta, Jangy-Aryk, Kyzyl- Kiya. So it was given to the Tajiks, first of all as a loan [arendaga berilgen], and then in Khrushchev’s time it was given to them permanently, in 1957—no, in nineteen-sixty something or other—it was to mark the fortieth anniversary of the formation of the Tajik SSSR. [As though reading a decree, in Russian:] “To give the source of coal of the Shurab workings to the Tajik SSR.” It was all official. It was an order from the Supreme Soviet. I remember reading about it in Pravda
16 newspaper then. You could still find that article somewhere.
My concern here is not with the validity or historical accuracy of Arslan-ata’s reading of this particular historical exchange; nor to suggest that this kind of ethno-spatial narrative is the only kind of discourse about Kyrgyz-Tajik relations that figures in local conversation. It is rather that memories of a relatively recent past – of late Soviet land exchanges that continued right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, often substantiate particular grievances into the present: the niggling sense as we saw also with the Tajik elder, Khalil, that borders are not where they used to be and not where they should be.
This has implications for how we think about the history of spatial reconfiguration in the Isfara valley during the twentieth century. Rather than a singular moment of boundary-drawing, the national-territorial delimitation of 1924–1927 should be seen as the first iteration of an ongoing story of twentieth-century border-moving in rural central Asia, which has continued beyond the Soviet Union’s collapse. Indeed, current road-building initiatives in the Isfara valley, which have proven so contentious, can be understood as continuing the same logic in more assertive form, by materializing a de facto boundary between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in a context of intractable disagreement over which maps should serve as the basis for territorial negotiation (Reeves 2013).
This, in turn, has implications for our broader concern in this panel with thinking borders in relation to identity and belonging. Trans-boundary conflict in the Isfara valley—as in the Ferghana valley more generally—is often attributed to the failings of the original national-territorial delimitation in the 1920s. In Uzbekistan, for instance, official historiography has stressed the failings of the 1924-27 national territorial delimitation, which created “divided ethnoses” divided between new Soviet republics. As one 700-page history of Soviet Turkestan puts it: “In essence, a delayed-action landmine has been laid under future ethno-national processes and interrelations among the peoples of Central Asia; one that is capable in extreme situations of erupting into all-possible conflicts and tensions” (Abdullaev et al. 2000, 669). This assertion, as we have seen, also figured in western denunciations of
17 Stalinist “divide and rule” in Central Asia. The implication of such an approach is that a more accurate—a more completely ethno-territorial—delimitation of Central Asia would have avoided current tensions over the allocation of land and water. What such accounts miss, I suggest, is a sense of the degree to which ongoing processes of territorialization in the Isfara valley fostered a situation where “parity” was experienced as constantly deferred. Each new attempt at establishing parity according to de facto land use heightened the sense that borders were not where they should be, because they were not where they used to be: that borders can never really be trusted to stay put. The irony today is that the very modes of social coexistence that are denounced in national capitals as relics of a “Soviet mentality” to be overcome with determinate borders and properly national infrastructures, are, in a context of ongoing militarization, perhaps the greatest guarantor of cross- border peace.
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