Uzbek Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoev rejected on Wednesday accusations by Tajikistan that Tashkent imposed a transport and energy blockade on its eastern neighbor.
"The accusations by the Tajik side are baseless,” Mirziyoev said.
The Tajik Embassy in Russia issued a statement earlier this week, claiming that Uzbekistan had imposed a transport and energy blockade, which could negatively affect the Tajik economy. Uzbekistan recently decided to halt gas deliveries to Tajikistan and no longer provides transit of electricity from Turkmenistan to Tajikistan.
A statement by the Tajik embassy claims Tashkent's restrictions on rail transportation and energy shipments to Tajikistan may cause “a humanitarian catastrophe” and are “aimed at destabilizing the socioeconomic environment there.”
In a letter to his Tajik counterpart, Mirziyoev said that the Uztransgas pipeline operator performed its contract-guaranteed supplies of 45 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Tajikistan in full and that the issue of further supplies “should be decided between the commercial entities, according to the general international practice.”
He also said that “as the Turkmen and Uzbek gas transportation systems function separately from each other, the transit of Turkmen gas via Uzbekistan is impossible.”
The premier also dismissed the accusations by the Tajik embassy of a “transport blockade” of the southern and central regions of Tajikistan.
Mirziyoev said the growth of transit costs for Tajikistan-bound rail traffic was “a forced countermeasure,” because “Tajikistan’s rail authorities increased tariffs manyfold in a short period of time”. According to the Uzbek prime minister, tariffs tripled in 2011 and grew by 40 percent in 2012.
Uzbekistan’s increase of tariffs in the reported periods was 30 and 23 percent, respectively, Mirziyoev said.
