Karimov still calls the shots!

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan: Uzbekistan’s strongman leader Islam Karimov has kept a stranglehold on power in the Central Asian state for a quarter of a century, even at the expense of his own children.
Long lambasted for brutally crushing dissent by rights groups, the former Soviet apparatchik — in power since 1989 — has reportedly placed his eldest daughter under house arrest after a bitter family feud, with her compared him to Stalin.
The spectacular fall from grace of Gulnara Karimova — a pop-singing, corruption-tainted socialite once seen as his possible successor — has shown just how much her father intends to maintain his vice-like grip on power.
The usually severe and unsmiling Karimov even danced at recent Nowruz new year celebrations to quash rumours of his ill health at 77.
“Without a strong government there will be chaos in society,” Karimov told a small group of voters ahead of a weekend presidential election he won with more than 90 percent of the vote.
“The time will come when we will give full freedom to our citizens,” he added. But accordingly to observers, that time is still some way off.
“Uzbek society lacks democratic traditions,” Kamoliddin Rabbimov, a political analyst from the country currently living in exile in France told AFP.
“Stability and control over society relies on the capacity of the regime to use violence.” Ironically for a leader whose family has given him so much trouble, Karimov was raised in an orphanage in the ancient city of Samarkand, before studying mechanical engineering and economics and rising up Communist Party ranks to become head of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1989.
Like the authoritarian leader of neighbouring Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, he led his country through the transition from the former USSR without any major challenge until the palace power struggle within his own family emerged in 2013.
The reported arrest of the once untouchable Gulnara Karimova, 42, in late 2013 came after a war of words played out in the international media during which she accused her mother and younger sister of sorcery, and assailed the country’s security chief on Twitter for harbouring presidential ambitions.
She has since been kept under house arrest as prosecutors probe her and business associates over connections to a “criminal gang”, her London-based spokesperson said.
Formerly a fixture at Western fashion events, and capable of luring the likes of Sting and Gerard Depardieu to Uzbekistan, Karimova is also under investigation in Europe over allegations she extorted some $300 million from Scandinavian telecoms firm TeliaSonera for access to the Uzbek market.