Border talks resume after a nine-month freeze
Negotiators returned to the table with a narrow agenda: crossings, water rights, and a mechanism for everything else.
Expectations are being managed carefully on both sides. The delegations arrived with instructions to resolve two practical questions and to avoid the larger one entirely.
The first is the reopening of three commercial crossings, closed since last spring, which has pushed freight onto a single route and added days to journeys that used to take hours. Both economies have felt it, and both delegations have domestic constituencies demanding a fix.
The second is the management of a shared river system during a drought that is now in its fourth year. Technical committees have met continuously even while political contact was suspended, and officials describe their draft as close to complete.
Everything else — status, sovereignty, the disputed stretch of highland in the north — has been deferred to a standing mechanism that will meet quarterly and is expected to resolve nothing for some time.
Diplomats involved describe this as the point. Talks that aim at everything collapse. Talks that aim at crossings and water sometimes produce crossings and water.
