Tough life in Barak enclave

Less than an hour's drive northwest from the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh is the Kyrgyz village of Barak, a tiny community of some 700 residents. What makes it unique is the fact it is located in Uzbekistan. And although only 3 km of Uzbek territory separates the Barak enclave from the mainland, life is not easy for Barak inhabitants. "The problem is when something related to security happens in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan. If there is a terrorist attack in Uzbekistan or mass demonstrations in Kyrgyzstan, the Uzbek border guards block the road linking our village with the mainland for days and we are completely isolated," Zuurakan, a Barak resident in her 30s, said near the office of the Ak-Tash rural municipality, to which Barak belongs. The office is located in Kyrgyzstan proper, while Barak is completely surrounded by Uzbekistan. "There is a small health clinic in Barak, which cannot deal with serious cases. Last year, a small boy died because his parents could not take him to the district hospital in [the southern Kyrgyz town of] Kara-Suu, because the border was closed due to terrorist attacks in Tashkent," Zuurakan explained. A legacy of the Soviet era, enclaves in the Ferghana Valley shared by Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are islands of territory completely surrounded by land belonging to a neighbouring country. The Soviet leaders established administrative borders of the Central Asian republics in the mid-1920s, which followed neither natural geographic boundaries nor strict ethnic lines. Soviet planners often avoided drawing more homogeneous or compact republics for fear they might fuel ethnic separatism. Given the highly centralised nature of Soviet planning, economic and transport links were designed to traverse borders between republics freely. Goods thus flowed largely unhindered across these internal borders and people would notice little more than a plaque or a small police outpost as they moved from one republic to the next. But things changed when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and former Soviet republics gained independence, with the most pressing problem for the Barak population being the issue around transporting cotton - the primary source of income - to the Kyrgyz mainland. "The biggest problem for all Barak residents is the issue of transporting cotton they grow on their land plots to the mainland," Burhan, head of the Barak council, explained. Most of the residents grow cotton and their livelihoods depend on this cash crop. "The Uzbek authorities do not allow us to transport our cotton harvest to Kyrgyzstan until their cotton-picking campaign is finished and sometimes we have to wait as late as February," the local council leader complained. "We have to store all our cotton in our houses and it is not very comfortable to live surrounded by big piles of cotton. They need to find a solution to this problem of ours," he said. Some reports suggested that the move by Tashkent was prompted by alleged smuggling of Uzbek cotton into Kyrgyzstan given that prices for it vary substantially in the two neighbouring states. Another issue enclave residents face is the transportation of goods to their village. Under normal circumstances there is a bus service linking the village with Kara-Suu inside Kyrgyzstan, where enclave residents buy most of the goods and products they need. However, residents complain that if they are bringing back larger loads, it takes a longer time to pass the border. "If you have a small bag, it's not a big deal. But if you are taking home a sack or something bigger, the Uzbek border guards give you a hard time. So, we end up bribing them to avoid those long checks," a local resident, who did not want to be identified, claimed. Janysh Baike, an accountant working at the Ak-Tash rural municipality and a Barak resident himself, continued that their relatives could not visit them given that the border point was not an official one and any visitors to the village had to pass through the Dustlik border crossing point near Osh and make a long curve to reach their village. The Uzbek border guards allow only Barak residents to go back and forth through the short road to Kyrgyz territory, checking their IDs, where their residence address is specified or going through the list with the names of village residents.

Transporting goods to the enclave remains a key challenge for residents

In an effort to tackle the issue of the Kyrgyz Barak enclave and the Uzbek Sokh enclave in southern Kyrgyzstan, in 2001 Bishkek and Tashkent provided respective corridors to them via a land swap deal. The two governments signed a secret memorandum, but the Kyrgyz parliament annulled the document on the basis that should that happen, most of the southwestern Kyrgyz province of Batken would effectively become an enclave itself. Meanwhile, most Barak residents say that the ultimate solution might be land swap between Bishkek and Tashkent, urging the Kyrgyz authorities to relocate them altogether to an area that has access to the mainland. "We would agree if the authorities resettled all of us as a group," a group of local residents concurred. But relations between the two countries have soured following the evacuation of more than 500 Uzbek refugees from Andijan. They found refuge in southern Kyrgyzstan after Uzbek security forces violently suppressed protests in the eastern Uzbek city in May. Further aggravating the situation were recent accusations by Uzbekistan's prosecutor-general in September that alleged terrorists involved in the Andijan uprising were trained on Kyrgyz territory - charges that Bishkek has flatly denied.