Tuesday, May 01, 2012 -
Kazakhstan’s border guards said Tuesday they will erect barriers along the country’s frontier with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan this year.
The Border Guard of Kazakhstan will set up a system of barriers, fences, guard posts, and other facilities along 1,550 miles of southern border, said its director Nurzhan Myrzaliyev.
The security authorities will build facilities from Zhetysai region in southern Kazakhstan all the way to the Caspian Sea, the KyrTAG news agency reported Myrzaliyev as saying.
“Major works are currently underway in this area,” the security chief told journalists at the sidelines of an international meeting of border troops.
Myrzaliyev said the country’s greatest cross-border threat is posed by drug traffickers.
“The most vital issue is countering drug business and routing out the existing drug trafficking flows,” the TengriNews.kz news agency reported the official as saying.
Other threats include illegal migrants, human trafficking, and terrorism, he said.
“There have been no apprehensions of spies at the border, but we are constantly and quite successfully countering illegal migration,” he added.
Myrzaliyev noted that Soviet era facilities along Kazakhstan’s border with China are still functioning well. Similar Soviet systems on the Kazakh-Kyrgyz and Kazakh-Uzbek borders are still in good state, he said.
Kazakhstan was a Soviet republic until 1991 when it claimed independence from the disintegrating union.