Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon said this at the opening ceremony of a secondary school providing education in the Uzbek language in the border Ganchinsky district of the Sogdi region in the north of the republic. The Tajik leader is staying in the biggest industrial region of the country on a working visit, during which he participated in the opening ceremony of a number of industrial, social and cultural facilities, the press service of the Tajik president reports on Thursday.

Emomali Rakhmon expressed the hope for the further strengthening of bilateral relations in economic and humanitarian cooperation, pointing to the fact that “for its part, Tajikistan has been exerting all efforts for this.”

All conditions are created in the secondary school for 1,300 pupils with a computerized system of education, modern design and a gym-hall to educate children of this agrarian region of the republic where several dozens of thousands of families of ethnic Uzbeks are living. About US$500,000 from the state treasury were spent on the construction of the educational complex.

Uzbekistan is of strategic importance for Tajikistan since it is the main supplier of natural gas and electric power in winter. Only through Uzbekistan the country has a “transit exit” to the CIS countries and Europe.

At the same time, as independent observers note, despite numerous public statements of the two neighboring countries’ leaders on their adherence to the spirit of friendship of peoples of many centuries, bilateral relations, especially in the post-Soviet period, developed “nervously.” In 1992, Tashkent unilaterally suspended air communication with Tajikistan and in 1999, it introduce a visa regime and partially mined its border referring to a threat of intrusion of armed Islamists from outside. A new spiral of tension between Tashkent and Dushanbe has emerged in the last two years after the Tajik authorities’ decision to resume the construction of the powerful Rogun GES which, according to Uzbekistan’s view, upsets the water balance in the region.