Naryn schedule renewed for five years after four months of talks

TASH-KÖMÜR — The joint technical commission of the Naryn Water and Power Protocol on Saturday formally adopted a renewed five-year framework schedule for releases from the Toktogul reservoir, at a meeting chaired by a UNMI official at the mission's sector headquarters in Tash-Kömür.

The schedule, which runs until 2027, divides the reservoir's stored water between winter generation and summer irrigation. Like the renewals of 2012 and 2017, it makes only minor changes to the framework first adopted in 2007, and it keeps the minimum reserve level introduced after the record low of 2008. This year's renewal followed four months of talks. Agreement in principle was reached in early September, after the tribal side's consent was settled at the Kurultai on the Aksay Plateau.

That consent was held up for much of the summer. Kökjal elders of the Toktogul basin, many of whose families were resettled when the reservoir was filled, refused to agree to further drawdown without compensation for flooded pastures. The deadlock was broken when three elders from outside the reservoir area, led by Biybolot Moldosh uulu, proposed that a fixed yearly share of the tribal side's Toktogul revenue go to a fund for Toktogul-basin families run by Kökjal elders. The Kökjal then stood aside.

Observers from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan attended the meeting without a vote. The Kyrgyz delegation filed its customary written reservation. The division of export revenue between the two administrations is set out in an annex that has never been published, and neither side commented on whether it had been changed.