Word: central
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...event, Noriega also discussed Ortiz’s life in reverse chronology and emphasized the search for identity that is central to Mexican-American work...
...Kyrgyz themselves are of Turkic stock, one of the many confederations of Central Asian nomadic tribes that coalesced into an ethnic group over generations of war and migration. Their founding national myth is the Epic of Manas, a 500,000-line poem that is 12 times the size of The Odyssey and claimed by some to be one of the few examples of oral literature preserved in its original form for nearly a thousand years. It tells of a heroic warrior, Manas, as he united the Kyrgyz and smote enemy invaders upon the steppe. It's a tale that...
...migration of a significant population of Russians as well as the dilution of Kyrgyz culture. New tree-lined urban centers like Bishkek as well as spas along the land's salt lakes became popular destinations for Russians escaping the industrial grimness further north. As in elsewhere in Central Asia, Cyrillic is the adopted script and vodka shops abound...
...Soviet policy of gerrymandering borders to better control populations of ethnic minorities has left the independent states of Central Asia a mess of territorial disputes. The populous and staunchly Muslim Ferghana Valley, where Osh lies, had been fragmented over the decades by Moscow and, after 1991, fell within the borders of independent Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. This has led to all sorts of confusion and conflict. Bloody riots in Osh in 1990 between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marred the run-up to independence; political spats over everything from border troop movements to the sensitive issue of water access blow...
Initially, Kyrgyzstan stood out among the newly independent Central Asian republics for its sound, multi-party democratic system. While its neighbors returned to authoritarian rule, built on networks of patronage run by Soviet apparatchiks of old, Kyrgyzstan became relatively open, buoyed in particular by an outspoken civil society. However, by the mid-1990s, Askar Akayev, president since the republic's inception, took an autocratic turn. He shielded business monopolies owned by friends and family and cracked down on journalists who pried into allegations of corruption - all the while, Kyrgyzstan's economy floundered, its Soviet-era industry and agriculture withering away...