The incident occurred on June 1 at the border crossing near Saryagash district in South Kazakhstan region. 27-year old Nurzhigit Potanov, resident of the Kazygurt district, according to accounts given by Kazakh border guards, traveled in a hired car to neighboring Mayaul village in Uzbekistan to get his intended bride, a citizen of Uzbekistan, for their wedding ceremony. At the check-point his car was stopped by Uzbek border guards who took the ignition key from the driver and kept the car detained for unknown reasons. When Potanov went out of the car demanding an explanation border guards fired warning shots apparently not intending to kill him, but one of the bullets mortally hit Potanov. He was hurriedly transported to the hospital but he died a few minutes later from profuse bleeding.

This is in no way an isolated case of loss of a human life on the Kazakh-Uzbek border. According to official reports, there have been 20 shooting incidents provoked by Uzbek border guards over the last five years. Since 1999, four Kazakh citizens have been killed in minor border skirmishes. The circumstances under which most of these confrontations and shootings take place remain obscure to the wider public. Every time an incident occurs, each side blames the other for “unfriendly behavior”.

So indeed this time. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan sent a protest note to Uzbek officials. The Uzbek Embassy in Kazakhstan shrugged off all accusations alleging that the Kazakh citizen trespassed on the Uzbek territory as Kazakh herdsmen did many times before. In this atmosphere of verbal standoff, it is very hard to tell which side is nearer the truth. The only encouraging sign is that the involved sides reached an agreement to set up a commission to investigate the circumstances which led up to the death of Patanov. On June 3 the secretary of the Security Council of Kazakhstan, Bolat Otemuratov, met his Uzbek counterpart Ruslan Mirzayev in Tashkent and discussed the possibilities of introducing simplified regulations for crossing the border.

The embarrassing point both for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is that the shooting took place not long after the first border posts were solemnly erected on Uzbek-Kazakh border at the crossing “Zhibek zholy” (Silk Route) on May 19, symbolizing good will to end decade-long disputes. The ceremony was attended by high-placed officials from both sides. All in all, hundreds of posts are to be set up along the 2351 km. Kazakh-Uzbek border. On November 16, 2002, Presidents Karimov and Nazarbayev signed an agreement on the delineation of their countries’ border, but the process has been advancing slowly since then. The border delimitation process, as stated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will be completed in three years. But in reality, things do not look so optimistic. Most of the apples of contention lie in the South Kazakhstan region which shares a 890 kilometer border with Uzbekistan.

The absurdity of the territorial claims in disputed areas has gone so far that the residents of one and the same village in some cases find themselves cut off by borderlines from each other. Holders of Kazakh passports are sometimes left on the Uzbek side of the divide and vice versa. Such territorial chaos is created frequently by the arbitrary decisions of local governments. Those who suffer the most are the people on both sides. Uzbeks have to cross the border daily to work on cotton fields and construction sites in South Kazakhstan or to buy relatively cheap basic goods. These normal cross-border activities, however, are increasingly used for propaganda purposes. “We provide work for poor Uzbeks”, Kazakh papers proudly state. “Uzbek traders leave millions of dollars in the supermarkets of Kazakhstan” retort Uzbek officials. The patriotic rhetoric generates intolerance towards neighbors. Border conflicts and unregulated migration have created a stereotyped image of arrogant Uzbek and Tajik petty traders pushing Kazakhs out of local markets.

The smoldering animosity towards the neighbors did not yet reach the point of inter-ethnic violence, nor did it lead to unmanageable border conflicts. Nevertheless, the current geopolitical trend in Central Asia is not conducive to fostering trust between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in particular, and the integration of Central Asian states in general. According to philosopher Karim Otebayev, “The adherence of Central Asian nations to different geopolitical blocks weakens the already fragile trend of integration in the region, and can in future generate international conflicts, and particularly, border disputes”.

To all likelihood, the leaders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will avoid the edgy subject of sporadic border incidents during the upcoming Tashkent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization scheduled for June 16-17. After all, there are other issues of no less importance to be addressed such as removing trade barriers, working out the harmonized use of water resources, and energy and transport communication policy. It seems, the way to the elimination of border problems lies in the civilized economic integration of European type within the Central Asian Cooperation Organization. But that, given the complexity of the bottleneck issues piled up, will probably remain wishful thinking for another decade, unless the steps now being taken to reinvigorate regional cooperation in Central Asia will bear fruit.