Climate: mostly mid-latitude desert; semiarid grassland in east
Terrain: mostly flat-to-rolling sandy desert with dunes; Fergana valley in east surrounded by mountainous Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; shrinking Aral Sea in west
Natural resources: natural gas, petroleum, coal, gold, uranium, silver, copper, lead and zinc, tungsten, molybdenum
Population: 22.8 million (39% urban, 61% rural)
Life expectancy: 73 (female); 66 (male)
Infant mortality: 43 per 1,000 births
Literacy rate: 99% (female); 99% (male)
Ethnic divisions: Uzbek 71%, Russian 8%, Tajik 5%, other 16%
Principal languages: Uzbek 85%, Russian 5%, Kazakh, Tajik, Tatar
Principal religions: Muslim (mostly Sunnis) 75-80%, other (includes Farsi) 20-25%
Rank of affluence among U.N. members: 113/183
Uzbekistan is flat and arid, an ancient place but a new nation since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Most people live in a long, winding tongue of land that curls into the Fergana Valley between the Tien Shan and Gissar-Alay Mountains. The Fergana Valley is among the more fertile and populous areas in central Asia, and a center of Sunni Islam. Indeed, modern Uzbekistan is the descendent of a series of Islamic kingdoms that traced their origin to the empire of Genghis Khan. These had declined by the 19th century, leaving Uzbekistan split among weak, feuding principalities. Russian armies easily moved in, capturing the capital, Tashkent, in 1865, but the czar's rule had little long-term impact.
By contrast, the effects of the Soviet revolution in 1917 were seismic. Lenin pushed the small farmers onto huge collectives to grow cotton for export. This created a big industry--Uzbekistan became the world's third largest source of cotton--but disastrously lowered overall agricultural productivity. Because the profits went to Moscow while the declines in productivity stayed at home, Uzbekistan was impoverished. Worse, the cotton industry's overuse of fertilizers, defoliants, and irrigation damaged soils and watersheds throughout the area. Indeed, irrigation drained so much water from the Amu Darya River that it actually began drying up the Aral Sea, on Uzbekistan's northwestern border.
In 1991, Uzbekistan declared its independence and elected former Communist leader Islam Karimov as President. He ended government restrictions on Islam, but cracked down on religious militants following the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in neighboring Tajikistan. There are ambitious plans to exploit Uzbekistan's great mineral wealth--no easy task in a nation beset by internal strife and under international attack for its record on human rights and the environment.
