LAK
(Own name: Lak, earlier: Ghazi-Qumuq)

An indigenous North East Caucasian people of some 120.000 who live primarily on pastoral land in Mid-Dagestan, with a third of their number in the capital Makhachkala. Approximately 10 per cent are seasonal and migrant workers in Kasakstan and Central Asia Traditionally, the Lak worked as traders and artisans in semi-urban settlements with market plans and mosques in the mountains. Beginging in the fourteenth century the Ghazi-Qumuq Khanate was a relatively independent Islamic century high cultural and religious prestige. It weakened considerably and finally dissolved during the seventeenth century, when it became the subject of the Turkic-Persian-Russian contest for supremacy in the region. Lak territory came under Russian rule in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Lak were first voluntarily and then forcibly moved from the high mountains to the pasture lands of mid-Dagestan. In 1994, following the deportation of the Chechen, part of Chechnia was given to Dagestan and the Lak we moved into the houses deserted by the Chechen. In order to prevent a violent conflict over the question of rehabilitation, the Dagestan government has decided to offer new settlements to this group of Lak, close to Makhachkala, in an area claimed by the Kumyk.

Note: This information is taken from "The North Caucasus: Minorities at a Crossroads" written by Helen Krag and Larsh Funch.