DUSHANBE. Feb 16 (Interfax) - Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have completed another round of negotiations on the border delimitation and demarcation, a representative of the Tajik Foreign Ministry's information, media, analysis, and foreign political planning department told Interfax on Friday.
"Another meeting between working groups of the governmental delegations of the Republic of Tajikistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan on the delimitation and demarcation of the Tajik-Uzbek state border was held in the city of Jizak in the Republic of Uzbekistan on February 7-16," the department representative said.
"During the negotiations held shortly before a Tajik-Uzbek summit, the sides continued to delimit the remaining parts of the state border. The meeting was constructive and amicable. A protocol was signed at the end of the negotiations," he said.
The Tajik media said earlier that Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev was due to pay a state visit to Dushanbe on the first ten days of March.
The intergovernmental commissions on trade and economic cooperation and the border delimitation and demarcation agreed at their meetings in Dushanbe on January 10 on visa issues and the most disputable part of the borderline, the dam lake of the Farkhad hydropower plant.
After the Dushanbe meetings, Tajik and Uzbek ministries and departments were ordered to prepare bilateral agreements on cooperation in transport, communications, trade, the economy, and the border.
Tashkent and Dushanbe stepped up bilateral relations in late 2016, after Mirziyoyev took the presidential office.
Negotiations on delimiting the state border, which is 1,200 kilometers long, resumed in November 2016. The Intergovernmental Commission on Trade and Economic Cooperation met in Dushanbe in December 2016. Flights between the two capitals suspended in fall 1992 resumed in April 2017. An Uzbek-Tajik business forum was held in Tashkent in October 2017.