Caracalpaks
The Karakalpaks ( karakalpak. Qaraqalpaq , Qaraqalpaqlar ; literally “Black Kalpaks” from “ Kalpak ”, a traditional Central Asian headgear) are a Central Asian Turkic people with around 550,000 members today. They are linguistically closely related to the southern Kazakhs and largely profess Sunni Islam .
Settlement areas
The majority of the Karakalpaks mainly settle in the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakistan in Uzbekistan . Smaller groups of them live in and around Choresm and in the Fergana Valley . There are also smaller Karakalpak minorities in the neighboring states of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan . There they live mainly in the border areas with the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakia.
About 20,000 caracalpaks also live in Iran , where they were settled on Lake Urmia . But a small Karakalpak minority of around 5,000 people also lives in Afghanistan .
history
prehistory
The ancestors of the caracalpaks lived in the northern regions of the Aral Sea after the 6th century . They are the descendants of the long-established Iranian -speaking oasis and city populations as well as various Turkic-speaking nomad tribes . Since the 16th century they can be traced as pastoral nomads on the central reaches of the Syr-darja .
Tatar rule
In the 13th century the Caracalpaks belonged to the empire of the Golden Horde , where they were subordinate to the White Horde and ruled by the Gengiskhanids . After the disintegration of the Golden Horde in the 16th century, the Karakalpaks suffered from the raids of the linguistically related Kazakh tribes , which were now organized in their own khanate .
Escape from the Kazakhs and the Oirat rule
In the 18th century, under pressure from the Khan of the Great Horde, some of them moved to Fergana Valley , where they joined the Uzbeks . Another part of the population settled in the Amudarya Delta. On the southern shores of the Caspian Sea , the carakalpaks settled down and became fishermen and farmers . The new settlement area on the Caspian Sea belonged to the territory of the Persian khanate Khiva . Since the 17th century this had been a tribute to the Khan of the Great Horde , but otherwise acted autonomously. When the Mongolian Oirats established their nomadic steppe empire, the Karakalpaks, like the neighboring Kazakhs, came under their influence. So the Oirats marched several times through Central Asia, plundering .
The Karakalpaks and the Alash Orda State
At the time of the Russian Civil War , the Alasch Orda State, proclaimed in December 1917, raised claims to the settlement area of the Karakalpaks. Due to the close linguistic relationship and the former supremacy of the Great Horde, these were declared as "Kazak-Kirghiz" and assigned to the southern Kazakhs. But this did not meet with the approval of the Karakalpaks: in 1918 they declared their independence from the Kazakhs and established an autonomous region.
Soviet time
In 1920, with the smashing of the Alasch Orda state, the "Autonomous Territory of the Karakalpaks" came under Soviet Russia : This divided the former Alasch-Orda area into the "Autonomous Territory of the Kyrgyz" and added the Karakalpak settlement area to it.
In 1932, the "Autonomous Territory of the Karakalpaks" received the status of an independent ASSR , which was now part of Russia and no longer within the territory of Kazakhstan. With the constitution of 1936 , the ASSR of the Karakalpaks became a part of today's Uzbekistan.
Post Soviet time
With the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union (from 1989), a large part of the Karakalpaks demanded that their ASSR be connected to Kazakhstan, which saw itself as the “legitimate protective power” of the Karakalpak minority. In the period from 1989 to 1999, Kazakhstan repeatedly claimed the Karakalpak-populated areas in Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan justified its territorial claim historically with the recent past and recalled the fact that the Karakalpak ASSR belonged to the Kazakh SSR between 1925 and 1930. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan had border disputes with one another at the diplomatic level for a long time. For example, the town of Bagys was extremely controversial, and there were similar disputes about the affiliation of another 139 border sections. In 1999 negotiations began on defining the borders between the two countries. By November 2001, around 96% of the current border line had been clarified, and the two countries concluded bilateral agreements for the mutual recognition of the existing borders. The settlement of the dispute over Bagys' affiliation was deliberately avoided, with the result that both sides carried out armed border attacks. The governments of both countries finally agreed by treaty not to close the borders around the place in question after several deaths had occurred on both sides. The Karakalpaks were largely spared from these border conflicts. Today they enjoy extensive autonomy within Uzbekistan , consequently the question of joining their territory to Kazakhstan no longer arises.
literature
- Heinz-Gerhard Zimpel: Lexicon of the world population. Geography - Culture - Society , Nikol Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-933203-84-8
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heinz-Gerhard Zimpel: Lexicon of the World Population , Article "Karakalpaken", p. 259
- ↑ a b Klett Verlag : TaschenAtlas Völker und Sprachen , p. 106
- ↑ Roland Götz and Uwe Halbach: Political Lexicon GUS , p. 295
- ^ Roland Götz and Uwe Halbach: Political Lexicon GUS , p. 296
- ↑ a b Marie-Carin von Gumppenberg, Udo Steinbach (Ed.): Central Asia , article “Borders”, pp. 102 and 104ff