Photograph by Flickr user guixacuitora (CC-usage).

Editor’s note: The embassy of Uzbekistan in Tajikistan has released a statement defending the ongoing stoppage of Tajikistan-destined freight trains as an innocent side-effect of repairs being made to the railroad, but neweurasia’s Dushanbe isn’t convinced. He picks through the statement with his analytical scalpel. “It seems Ragnarok Roghun-style is threatening to expand beyond just Tajikistan and Uzbekistan…”

If you can read between the lines of the latest statement from the Uzbekistan embassy to the government of Tajikistan, good luck. The embassy criticized the Tajik mass media for its reports about the captive railway carriages in Uzbekistan as “lies and baseless allegations.” They went on to say,

“The passage of the transit goods destined for Dushanbe and the Soghd province railroad stations of Tajikistan through the border stations of Kudukli and Bekabad in Uzbekistan have been continuing without delays and obstacles.”

This would be true if we were not distinguishing between freight and passengers.  The route is only open for passengers. Additionally, only a small number of freight cars go from Uzbekistan to Dushanbe and Soghd in general, especially in comparison with the Khatlon stations in the south of Tajikistan, where the Roghun and Sangtuda power plants and the highways and bridges to Afghanistan are slated for construction. Meanwhile, many companies in Dushanbe and Soghd province continue to suffer. They complain that they are losing millions of dollars because they can’t get hold of their cargo.

Now, the Roghun hydroelectic project isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Uzbekistan embassy’s statement, but it’s definitely there. Uzbekistan’s government is claiming that part of the railroad was damaged by torrential downpour:

“Despite the necessity of repair works for restoring top structures and the composition of the railroad in the Termez -Amuzang section [that was] affected due to heavy rainfall and mudslides, the Uzbek state company of ‘Uzbekistan Temir Yullari’ has taken all possible measures to resolve the issues pertaining to the transfer of the carriages to Tajikistan’s southern regions.”

The implied meaning is, The train stoppage has nothing to do with Roghun, honestly! By the way, what follows this portion of the statement is a paragraph full of numbers about how many carriages have been transferred to Tajikistan during this repair work, totaling 1337, just to reinforce their point.

However, there is a number of discrepancies in both the figures and their meaning. Consider:

- The unofficial blockade began in February 2010, at the height of the Tajikistan government’s propaganda campaign to raise money for the Roghun project. The line about the rain damage done to the Termez-Amuzang section of the railroad was actually first raised by Uzbekistan’s ambassador to Tajikistan, Shoislom Shohqosimov, who added that the repairs would be finished fairly quickly. All in all, the timing is suspicious.

- The length of the Termez-Amuzang section is 44 kilometers and the rain supposedly affected only half of it. Does it really take six months to repair 22-25 kilometers of rail? And incidentally, a quick glance at the history of Central Asian railroads reveals that none of those built by the Soviets, which includes this one, have ever suffered so badly from inclimate weather. I’ll trust the legacy of Soviet engineering over the pronouncements of shady government officials.

- As to those 1337 carriages that did make it through, a source in Uzbekistan Temir Yullari told me that some of carriers indeed had been passed to Tajikistan, but only because there are no more roads in Uzbekistan to keep them there! In other words, the blockade is actually resulting in a build-up of Tajikistan-destined goods in Uzbekistan, which is getting harder to contain or secure.

- There’s also the quality of those 1337 carriages’ cargo once they finally made it to their destination. Consider 37,000 barrels of asphalt, sent from the Russian city of Ufa in January 2010 on behalf of the Japanese companies Dai Nipon and Nipo, who are building a strategic highway to Afghanistan which was supposed to reach southern Tajikistan in February while the weather was still cold. The carriages only arrive in June, after their contents had exploded and were of no use.

The foregoing has been to pick apart the contents of the Uzbekistan embassy’s statement, to say nothing of its timing. It’s probably not a coincidence that the embassy is talking now, only a few days after Iran’s President Ahmedinijad threatened to blockade Uzbekistan’s freight carriages to Turkey. The reason, of course, is that Iran is building the Sangtuda 2 plant in Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan is holding onto a lot of Iranian purchased hardware.

It seems Ragnarok Roghun-style is threatening to expand beyond just Tajikistan and Uzbekistan…