RUSSIA TO CUT BORDER GUARD PRESENCE IN TAJIKISTAN

DUSHANBE, Jan 25 (Reuters) - Russia will cut the number of border
guards it deploys in ex-Soviet Tajikistan by one third in 1999 after a
similar percentage cut in 1998, a senior Russian army official said
at the weekend.

Nikolai Reznichenko, head of Russia's Federal Border Service in
Tajikistan, said financial difficulties in both countries had forced
the cuts.

After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Moscow maintained forces in
Tajikistan along the tense former Soviet frontier with
Afghanistan.

"There will be a reduction in the numbers by one third under difficult
financial conditions connected with economic problems in Russia and
Tajikistan," Reznichenko told a news briefing on Sunday.

He did not put a figure on the number of troops who would remain after
the cuts. Late last year he said that the force at that time numbered
around 11,500 men.

The Russian guards mainly patrol the southern border with Afghanistan,
where the advance of the conservative Islamic Taleban movement has
unsettled Moscow, which fears the spread of religious extremism
through its soft underbelly.

The Russian presence has also been key in preserving a fragile peace
agreement between the Moscow-backed secular government and the
official Islamic United Tajik Opposition (UTO) party.

The two sides fought a five-year civil war in which tens of thousands
perished and which has left the impoverished state's economy in
tatters. A ceasefire was signed in mid-1997.

The guards said in a statement that their main aim in 1999 was to
protect Russia's interests in Central Asia, an unusually frank
admission that they are there for their own motives as well as to
strengthen Tajikistan's southern flank.

Reznichenko said the guards' main "headache" remained drug trafficking
from Afghanistan, the world's main source of opium.

He said that around one tonne of illegal drugs had been seized by the
Russian border guards in 1998, 172 kilogrammes (378 lbs) of which was
pure heroin.

Four Russian guards and around 40 others were killed last year due to
armed clashes between troops and people trying to cross illegally from
Afghanistan into Tajikistan.