A citizen of Uzbekistan has been sentenced to 16 years in jail for spying for Tajikistan in fresh reminder of the unabated tensions between the two countries.

The way in which the news was revealed is also telling as each side seeks to sharpen its weapons in a long-standing information war.

On April 4, Uzbek state television aired a documentary titled “Traitor” (“Sotkin” in Uzbek) explaining how Sharifjon Asrorov purportedly collaborated with Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security to pass on classified information.

The information in question was related to the situation in prisons, refugees, and military bases and personnel in the Uzbek regions of Surkhandarya, Kashkadarya and Bukhara, the documentary explained.

The film stated that Asrorov, who it said is married to a woman from Tajikistan, confessed to spying.

Traitor was shown at 9 p.m. local time on the main state channel, although the station’s logo was not featured on the screen during the broadcast.

As a station employee explained, these type of programs are rarely advertised in advance, even to the channel’s management, and regularly bump scheduled shows off the running order at the last minute.

“The film was made by the television production unit of the National Security Service [SNB], which has lately taken to producing a lot of films and television programs about terrorism, drug-trafficking and espionage. In the jargon, this is what we call ‘unscheduled programing,’” the station worker told EurasiaNet.org.

As the television station employee said, editorial staff are never informed about the content of SNB films before they are aired. The feature on Asrorov will likely be repeated.

A quiet battle has been waged for several years between the security services of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Alleged spies are regularly jailed for divulging information usually available from open sources. There is no certain information about how many citizens of either country are currently serving sentences for spying.

Relations between the two countries went into terminal decline in the 1990s, during Tajikistan’s civil war, a conflict in which Russian and Uzbek armed forces were involved to varying degrees.

A series of episodes lead to a worsening of ties, which have not been restored since.

One was when seasoned military commander Makhmud Khudoiberdiyev attempted to seize the northern Tajikistan city of Khujand. Khudoiberdiyev was allegedly based in Uzbekistan and rumors at the time suggested the Uzbek secret services were in some way implicated in the intrusion.

Khudoiberdiyev shortly afterward disappeared, but Tajik authorities remain firmly convinced he is being sheltered in Uzbekistan.

Likewise, Uzbek authorities believe that Tajikistan’s security services connived with militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to foment unrest.

Things took a turn for the worse when Tajikistan decided it would build the Rogun hydroelectric dam, which Uzbekistan opposes on the grounds that the structure would block its access to irrigation water. Tashkent has periodically piled pressure on Dushanbe through interruptions of gas supplies and blocking transport links joining the two countries.

Uzbek political analyst Anvar Nazirov described the situation as a “cold war.”

"Tajikistan needs an enemy in the form of Uzbekistan. Anti-Uzbek ideology dominates in modern Tajikistan. And we all know that the Tajik security services are involved in drug-trafficking and Uzbekistan often detains smugglers coming from the country. This ‘cold war’ will not be over any time soon,” Nazirov said. 

Then again, cases like that of the alleged spy Asrorov are not exclusive to Tajikistan. In December 2014, an Uzbek military court sentenced a 41-year old citizen of Kyrgyzstan, Kubanych Eraliev, to 10 1/2 years in prison for espionage.