Presidential offspring in Central Asia often follow similar development patterns.
It has become standard, for example, for the children of the region's leaders to cultivate an uncanny knack for business, but also to branch out into sport and now also philanthropy.
Uzbek President Islam Karimov's daughter, Gulnara, is mainly famous for her fashion sense, entrepreneurial skills and diplomatic nous, but she has also attempted in recent years to cast herself as the country's arch-philanthropist.
British singer Sting's performance in Tashkent, for instance, was ostensibly organized by Karimova to raise money for "various charitable projects and grants programs," as her own official site explains. That performance turned into such a major PR disaster, however, attracting negative coverage from international media, that Sting was forced to issue a hasty statement describing Karimov as being "hermetically sealed in his own medieval, tyrannical mindset.”
Sure enough, that rebuke led to Sting's songs being banned from the local airwaves. Not that Karimova was fazed by all the sniping, as her site eloquently attests: "Contrary to attacks of some media, it was not blah blah blah, but a real charity concert." Now it's the turn of Tajikistan's rising star Rustam Emomali, son of President Emomali Rakhmon, to show what he can do on the charity front. According to a Tajik First Channel news bulletin (via BBC Monitoring) on Monday, the dashing scion took time out of his busy schedule fighting smuggling to mark the spring Novruz holiday by giving humanitarian aid to disabled children in the capital, Dushanbe. Footage showed the lucky disabled tots doing their finest Tiny Tim impressions and thanking Emomali for their gifts of flour, rice, vegetable oil and clothes.
Emomali is no stranger to generosity, of course. While serving as head of a government entrepreneurship-promotion agency, last year he donated two new houses to flood victims in a disaster-stricken town in southern Tajikistan.
In what capacity Emomali would have been distributing this largesse at the orphanage or, for that matter, who was paying for the donations is information not divulged in BBC Monitoring's account of the bulletin.
Whatever the answer to those questions, this careful nurturing of Emomali's public profile will do him no harm should he ever aspire to higher office.
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