Kyrgyzstan?

Population and Borders

The republic contains five major ethnic groups. The Kyrgyz, predominantly herders in the high plateaus and valleys, comprised 72 percent of the population at the 1989 census. Uzbeks formed the second-largest group at 14 percent, concentrated in the Fergana Valley region around Osh, where the border with Uzbekistan is not a clean line but a patchwork of enclaves and exclaves left behind from Soviet administrative divisions. This fragmentation has been the source of periodic conflict. Tajiks, Russians, and Tatars made up the remainder, with Russians steadily declining in number since the August Emergency.

Kyrgyzstan's borders were entirely drawn by Soviet planners rather than by historical political entities. Stalin's 1924 administrative reorganization of Central Asia divided the Fergana Valley among three Soviet republics — Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan — in a pattern deliberate enough that some historians argue it was designed to make unified resistance to Moscow difficult. The result is a border with Uzbekistan comprising twenty-three separate Kyrgyz exclaves and thirty Uzbek exclaves embedded within Kyrgyzstan, making the boundary unmapped in fine detail and harder to police after the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords gave republics greater control over frontier security.

Economic Structure

The republic economy centres on agriculture and mining. The lowland valleys in the north and south produce wheat, sugar beets, and tobacco; the highland regions support pastoral herding of sheep and yaks. Cotton cultivation in irrigated areas depends on water diverted from upstream rivers, a dependency that puts Kyrgyzstan in perpetual negotiation with Tajikistan over water rights. Soviet collectivization had converted most herding into collective herds by the 1960s, but the post-1992 period saw the gradual reversion to private herding, particularly in the high plateaus where the herds of the Kyrgyz nomadic minorities graze.

Mining was developed in the Soviet period primarily to supply other republics; the republic contains gold, mercury, and rare-earth deposits, largely in the Talas range and the Pamir plateau. The state mining enterprise, the Kyrgyz State Mining Company, was nominally restructured as an independent agency by the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords, but capital and equipment shortages after 1992 reduced output. A Chinese firm, Zijin Mining, entered into contracts to extract gold from the Kumtor region beginning in 2004, giving the republic its largest employer by 2010 and creating direct revenue to Bishkek outside the Union budget.

Political Structure

External Relations

Society