In a celebrated assessment of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: "He may be a son-of-a-bitch but he's our son-of-a-bitch". No modern political leader has fitted that description more aptly than Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov the dictator of Uzbekistan who has died aged 78.
It is now 77 years since FDR made this remark and in that space of time the technology of repression has advanced considerably although some of Karimov’s methods of dealing with opponents, such as having them boiled alive, had a distinct medieval flavour. There is little doubt that he was a far greater son-of-a-bitch than Somoza. His support in the war in Afghanistan, and his willingness to allow his territory be used for “extraordinary rendition” was seen as more important than his consistent crushing of human rights at home.
Uzbekistan’s strategic position along Afghanistan’s northern border was judged vital by the United States and their allies so he was courted by western officials including Nato’s then secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. The two men are still pictured on Nato’s website with the message dated March 2016 which reads: “Uzbekistan is actively developing relations with Nato and has identified a broad range of areas for dialogue and practical co-operation through its Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme (IPCP). This IPCP forms the basis of its co-operation with Nato and includes, for instance, the development of armed forces and countering modern security threats.”
In 2002 the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, broke ranks and began to speak out about the regime’s repression, torture and censorship. He was dismissed by the Foreign Office in 2004.
Born in the ancient city of Samarkand, a Unesco world heritage site studded with impressive medieval Islamic monuments, Karimov spent much of his very early years in an orphanage. He rose through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to become the local party boss and on the dissolution of the USSR took over as president of an Independent Republic. His early orphanage years led to speculation that he may not have been an ethnic Uzbek but a member of Samarkand’s large Tajik-speaking community. These suspicions were not expressed publicly in a country where the conversations of locals and foreign expatriates are under constant surveillance. For foreign residents an “Irish Bar” in Tashkent is reputed to be the main listening point of the security services.
The official Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) report on last year’s presidential election campaign in which Karimov won more than 90 per cent of the vote the speaks for itself. The electoral legal framework “did not provide for the holding of democratic elections”. The media was “constrained” and most importantly President Karimov ignored a constitutional provision which allowed presidents to serve no more than two consecutive terms. He simply ran for a third successive term and won.
In a country in which loyalty to local clans, three major and four minor, can be stronger than loyalty to the country itself, Karimov managed, by every means open to him, to hold the population together. His security service was omnipresent and the basic unit of Uzbek society, a type of parish council called the Mahalla, was turned into the eyes and ears of the state. Nothing went unnoticed and Karimov made his loyalty to the state abundantly clear, letting people know that they would be severely punished if they stepped out of line.
The most dramatically repressive event of his reign was the massacre in which hundreds of Muslims were killed by his forces in the city of Andijan in the fertile Fergana valley in 2005. As a result, the US later withdrew from its airbase in Karshi-Khanabad but a Nato presence remained near the city of Termez on the Afghan border. Russia and China have also wooed Karimov’s Uzbekistan on a commercial and economic rather than military basis and Spain won a major contract to provide the Afrosiyob high-speed rail link between the capital Tashkent and Samarkand with an extension planned to the ancient city of Bukhara.
The level of Russia’s current relationship with Karimov’s regime was shown when it was represented at his funeral by Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev rather than President Vladimir Putin. The most notable person missing from the funeral in Samarkand was Karimov’s daughter Gulnara Karimova who disappeared from public view in February 2014 and is believed to be under house arrest. He is survived by her, by her sister Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva and his widow Tatyana Karimova.