Businessman Askar Salymbekov has appealed to the President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and asked him to open the border with Kyrgyzstan. His appeal was posted on his Facebook page.
On the eve of a meeting of the head of Kazakhstan with the President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov, the businessman asked the head of the neighboring state to pay attention to the problem worrying the Kyrgyz people.
«For centuries, the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs have been brotherly kindred peoples. With the advent of a new era, two independent states have formed — Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and for thirty years of their sovereignty they have accumulated a rich experience of building bilateral relations, which have their own rough edges and difficulties. One of them is the issues related to the common border, which has not only separated the two brotherly peoples, but also continues to alienate them from each other. We have repeatedly witnessed jams of large cargo trucks at the border, the flow of goods stopped, and ordinary people could not even get to the funerals of their relatives and friends,» he wrote.
The businessman noted that modern history shows successful solutions to such issues, when countries removed internal borders and united external ones.
«A striking example is the Schengen zone, where the principles of free movement of goods and people come first. Creation of the EAEU presupposes just such a format of relations. What prevents us from using this experience and widely opening the border between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan for trade and economic cooperation?» — the author of the post offers.
He is confident that such a step would give impetus to the socio-economic and cultural rapprochement of the two nations.
The President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev will pay an official visit to Kyrgyzstan on May 26.
