Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s strongman President Islam Karimov, has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons lately. But in the pages of one magazine – her own glossy published in Uzbekistan – she’s a superstar.
A recent copy of Bella Terra, a Karimova project that publishes articles and interviews on style and fashion (and which also has a website), is packed to the gills with material promoting the president’s daughter and her fashion label, Guli.
The December 2012/January 2013 issue of the Russian-language magazine is devoted to the Style.uz event, which Karimova (dubbed “the princess of Uzbekistan” in a promotional interview that recently came to light) organizes in Tashkent every year. Style.uz is a jamboree of fashion shows and cultural events that attracts the Tashkent glitterati and a handful of foreign B-list celebrities.
From the magazine we learn some fascinating facts about Style.uz: This year foreign visitors lauded Uzbekistan’s famed hospitality a full 1,467 times; 76 bottles of hairspray were used in the hairdressing competition; and 10 parachutes could have been made from the 1,050 meters of silk and adras (a silk and cotton mix) used in one fashion event.
But for the most part the magazine gets down to the serious business of promoting Karimova (who is also known as Googoosha, her stage name when she is in her pop star persona).
In recent months, Washington and its NATO allies have been discussing what matériel to bequeath Uzbekistan as a thank you for its help getting them out of Afghanistan. Tashkent has made it clear it has a long wish list. And there’s no time like the present: Tashkent says it is already battling Afghans on the border.
About 10 Afghan citizens attacked Uzbek border guards on March 14 “and attempted to seize weapons,” the State Border Protection Committee told the private 12news.uz website and others. The skirmish occurred after some 30 Afghans “ignored the Uzbek border service’s lawful demands” to leave the Aral-Paygambar Island on the Amu Darya river that separates Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
"With the aim of ensuring its own security, the border duty, after repeated warning shots into the air, was forced to use weapons against the assailers. As a result of the armed encounter, four Afghan citizens received gunshot wounds, three of whom died afterwards. The other violators of the border escaped into their territory. The wounded citizen of the neighboring country has been provided with urgent medical assistance," the border service, which operates under the National Security Service (SNB, former KGB), said.
Violations of Uzbekistan's border by Afghans have been on the rise in recent months, the border service told 12news.uz: "There have been 22 cases of border violations and a total of 106 Afghan citizens have been detained since the beginning of 2013." The two countries share a 137-kilometer border.
State television in Uzbekistan has launched an attack on regional print and broadcast journalists in the Ferghana Valley for allegedly blackmailing entrepreneurs.
This week, O’zbekiston TV’s Oramizdagi Olgirlar (“Scroungers Among Us”) described cases of alleged extortion involving journalists from Namangan and Andijan regions. The report – posted on the station’s website on March 14 – featured interviews with alleged victims and other journalists condemning the "scroungers.”
"Such sleazy people should not be working in this profession," veteran journalist Gulomjon Akbarov said.
The 35-minute program pointed the finger at a magazine called Vatan Kozgusi (“Mirror of the Motherland”), alleging its journalists used fake press cards bearing the logos of international organizations such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). It then cheered a court’s decision to jail the magazine’s chief editor, Ravshon Jumayev, for 10 ½ years for allegedly distributing his publication without registration. (The report did not mention him in connection with the blackmail allegations.)
EurasiaNet.org can find no reference to Jumayev elsewhere in the Uzbek press. Still, some Uzbek journalists may feel a bit threatened by the tale. Critical journalists have a tendency to disappear behind bars in Uzbekistan, a country that placed 164 out of 179 in Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 Press Freedom Index.
The Uzbek president's eldest daughter, Gulnara Karimova, has rarely broached the idea of succeeding her aging father, Islam Karimov – at least publicly. But the idea has cropped up repeatedly in an interview that appeared this month with a celebrity publicist.
Las Vegas-based Peter Allman, whose website describes him as “Celebrity Interviewer To The Stars and Emcee,” set the sycophantic tone right from the start: "My special guest is a visionary, very talented, very politically oriented young lady. I call her 'the princess of Uzbekistan,' if you will," he said in his introduction to the 38-minute-long exclusive, recorded on the sidelines of the Golden Guepard Tashkent International Film Forum last autumn, and since March 7 available on YouTube.
After a long chat about Karimova's charitable and creative work, Allman compared Karimova – who is also known by her stage name, Googoosha – to the late Princess Diana: "I've talked to many people. When I first met you I told you that I thought you'd be princess of Uzbekistan, meaning, like, Princess Diana was to Great Britain. And I see that you, as I imagine, have a very good soul and care about people, and that's very important."
Then he slid into the six-million-dollar question. In Allman’s “vision” Karimova would be a great president: “What are your feelings about that?"
Karimova – appearing in a black business suit and dangly silver earrings – giggled and said, in English, "this is funny," adding that both her opponents and supporters call her "princess," which is "striking for me because I'm not trying to do it for sort of career or for PR."
Alcoholism – a scourge across the former Soviet Union – is no joke. But Uzbekistan’s state-run television has turned it into one with a sexist, pseudoscientific report this week.
The message is, basically: It is unbecoming for women to drink.
"It is worth saying a lot of pleasant words about females, the owners of grace and charm. However, you now can face an unpleasant situation that does not suit an Uzbek woman. For instance, we can see women and girls drinking alcohol during weddings and parties in cafes and restaurants. We will focus on this topic today," said the announcer, in a BBC Monitoring translation of a program that appeared March 11 on O’zbekiston Channel Number One.
One narcologist told the program that women become addicted to alcohol twice as quickly as men do, and that women are ten times more difficult to treat for alcoholism than men are. The program warns that women who drink while pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with birth defects.
That last point is widely accepted. But while many studies have found women more vulnerable than men to the effects of alcohol, a Harvard-sponsored report, among others, says women are just as treatable as men for alcoholism.
Overall, the program seems more concerned about Uzbek women's image than their health.
Russian hydrocarbons giant Lukoil is upping gas production in Uzbekistan. But as that gas is shipped abroad, local shortages are prompting Uzbek consumers to double their intake of dirty coal.
The private Uzdaily.uz website reported this week that Lukoil boosted gas production to about 4.3 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2012, up from 2.6 bcm the year before. Output at the Khauzak-Shady-Kandym-Kungrad field jumped by 24.2 percent and production at Gissar, which started operating in late 2011, reached almost 1 bcm.
Uzdaily.uz said Lukoil plans to extract 4.4 bcm this year, 5.2 bcm next year and 8.2 bcm in 2015. Uzbekistan's total gas production stayed roughly level at 62.9 bcm in 2012, according to government stats cited by RIA Novosti.
One might think all this gas would help ease Uzbekistan’s chronic energy shortfalls. But growing gas exports seem to be contributing to widespread shortages and an increasing reliance on coal.
Citing a source at the state-run Uzbek Coal company, Tashkent’s mildly critical independent Novyy Vek weekly reports that, across the country, residents doubled coal consumption last year. Uzbek Coal projects consumption to jump by almost 300 percent to 2.4 million metric tons by 2020. Uzbekistan produced about 3.9 million metric tons of coal in 2012.
The U.S. intelligence community believes that the greatest threat facing Central Asia is internal, rather than emanating from Afghanistan, in contrast to recent statements by State Department, members of Congress and Pentagon officials who have lately been emphasizing Afghanistan-based Islamist threats to the region.
In an annual ritual, the U.S. director of national intelligence delivers the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community to the Senate, and the current director, James Clapper, did so Tuesday morning. Obviously such a report can make the world sound like a very dangerous place (Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, calls it the "World Cup of threat inflation"). But the section of the report dealing with The Bug Pit's beat is remarkably sober. While last year's report emphasized the threat to Central Asia from Afghanistan, this year's makes no such mention, instead focusing on the region's internal dynamics:
Gulnara Karimova, daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, has finally broken her long silence about allegations that she is connected to two corruption cases being investigated in Europe, complaining to Swiss magazine Bilan that her “enemies” are taking advantage of the situation to undermine her reputation and griping that the “attacks” are distracting her from her charitable work.
In the interview published March 7, Karimova launched a fierce attack on Russian telecommunications company MTS (which left Uzbekistan last year amid a furious dispute with Tashkent) and its former director, Bekhzod Akhmedov, once believed to be Karimova’s right-hand man.
Akhmedov is a central figure in two European corruption investigations: a money-laundering probe in Switzerland and a Swedish investigation into allegations that Nordic telecoms giant TeliaSonera made dubious payments to enter Uzbekistan’s telecoms market in 2007 – a probe which forced the resignation of CEO Lars Nyberg last month.
According to company correspondence filed with a Swedish court, TeliaSonera officials negotiating with Akhmedov (who was head of their rival MTS at the time) to enter the market believed he was “the telecom representative of Gulnara Karimova.”
Karimova has no official role in Uzbekistan’s telecoms sector; officially, she is Uzbekistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, and she is also a fashion designer and a pop diva under the stage name Googoosha.
Forget gas and coal and cotton. Labor migrants are Uzbekistan's number-one export. And new data show their earnings jumped in 2012.
Russia’s Central Bank says migrant labor remittances sent from Russia to Uzbekistan totaled $5.7 billion in 2012, up 32.6 percent over 2011, when the figure was $4.3 billion. With Uzbekistan's 2012 GDP worth $35 billion (that's the official sum figure converted on the black market), remittances from Russia alone account for the equivalent of 16.3 percent of the economy (if you’re using Tashkent’s official exchange rate, they’re equivalent to 12 percent of GDP).
The Russian Central Bank figures only include official transfers (wired to Uzbekistan via Western Union-type money transfer systems), not cash carried home by migrants. And the figures are only for Russia. So, overall, remittances probably play an even greater role in the Uzbek economy.
Gas and other energy exports earned Tashkent $5.03 billion in 2012, according to government statistics. (Cotton earned $1.25 billion.)
The question of whether, or how, to give military aid to Uzbekistan is probably the hottest question among Central Asia policymakers in Washington these days. The U.S. has agreed to leave some equipment behind for its partners in Central Asia after its forces withdraw from Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan has made clear that it has high expectations for the sort of equipment that it will get. But some in Washington are concerned that giving military equipment to Uzbekistan would only abet the misrule of President Islam Karimov, who heads one of the most repressive governments on the planet. This question will undoubtedly be at the top of the agenda this week when a large delegation from Uzbekistan, headed by Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Komilov, visits Washington.
Publicly, the U.S. says it can provide military aid to Uzbekistan while still respecting human rights. At a recent congressional hearing, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake said that "the approach we have taken with Central Asia helps proactively strengthen the region’s capacity to combat terrorism and counter extremism, while encouraging democratic reform and respect for human rights.” But Blake didn't provide specifics. And It's easy to say you can give military aid while respecting human rights, but the devil is in the details. Meanwhile, behind closed doors there are discussions about expanding donations or sales of U.S. military equipment to Uzbekistan.
