ABSTRACT
Kyrgyztan is a small country with five million inhabitants bordering on Kazakhstan in the north, Uzbekistan in the west and Tajikistan and China in the south, with a majority Kyrgyz population and some 20 per cent Russians. Most citizens live in the north and in the Ferghana Valley. The Kyrgyz was a nomadic people until recently and has an old history of ruling the region from the ninth century until the Mongols took over in the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, an independent Kyrgyz state was created, later to break up in clan-based smaller societies. Russia took over in the mid-nineteenth century (the Kokhand khanate), and repeated Kyrgyz revolts have been crushed. Islam is the major religion since the seventeenth century, although Kyrgyztan is a secularized country. In 1918, Kyrgyztan was included in the Turkestan Autonomous Republic (which in 1924 became a Kazakh-Kyrgyz Autonomous Republic) and in 1936 Kyrgyztan became a Soviet Republic.
