STRANGE STATESMEN
’Stan by your Strongman
Central Asia, the land of the ’Stans, is obscure to most outsiders, with the entire expanse merging into one giant Generikhstan, a backwards, post-Communist ‘Borat Country’ of scant importance to the wider world. This cartoon image is not wholly fair, however. In reality, this vast, arid, yet resource-rich region occupies an increasingly crucial space between rival major nations like China, Russia, Iran and India, with its huge oil and natural gas reserves poised to play an ever-larger role in geopolitics over coming decades, hopefully bringing wealth to some currently very impoverished people. Yet the area’s proximity to those rogue ’Stans, Afghanistan and Pakistan, provides obvious potential for disaster should energy prices continue their recent fall and Talibanstyle Islamic fundamentalism ever take root there, while Vladimir Putin’s clear territorial designs to restore the old USSR’s sphere of influence in the region provide further cause for caution. The Great Game of Kipling’s Kim continues to be played in the ’Stans, and the most commonly chosen way of keeping a lid on things is to have pitiless strongmen in charge, whose repressive ways do win some genuine support among populations resigned or realistic enough to realise autocracy is at least preferable to anarchy. While often appearing absurd to Western eyes, these Little Emperors seek to make themselves seem indispensible to their own subjects (‘citizens’ really isn’t the right word) by concentrating all State power in private hands and creating extreme personality cults which do not hesitate to depict them as being almost akin to gods on Earth.
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LIFE WITHOUT THE LOCAL GODMAN HAS BECOME UNTHINKABLE
TAJIKISTAN: THE SUN OF GOD
Consider Tajikistan, led since independence from the USSR in 1992 by President Emomali Rahmon – or ‘President Emomali Rahmon, Founder of Peace and National Unity – Leader of the Nation’, as he now officially has to be referred to every single time he is mentioned. A Sunni Muslim himself, Rahmon would prefer it if his people worshipped him, not Allah, and has placed numerous strict restrictions upon the faithful, banning beards, Arabic-sounding names, and the attendance of women and children at mosques. Instead of the Koran, Rahmon wants subjects to read his own books, whose passages must be recited on all radio stations by actors with “good reading voices”, providing comfort for those with eyesight too poor to study such tomes directly. Pregnant women reading his 464-page Wise Thoughts and Sayings of the President of Tajikistan, Founder of Peace and National Unity ensure his thoughts shall be passed on to babies “through a mother’s milk”. Hailed as “the King of Kings of our times”, “the Shadow of God” and “the rising sun of Tajiks’ happiness” in poems and songs like Interior Minister Ramazon Rahimzoda’s You Are Worthy, so beloved is Rahmon that, to mark 25 years of unimpeachable rule in 2017, one newspaper renamed itself The Blessings of the Leader. Life without the
2 local godman in Tajikstan has now become literally unimaginable for most. The problem is that one day even deities like Rahmon have to die – and, once revealed as having been mere mortals after all, will it be a case of après moi, la deluge? Given their collective motto is l’etat c’est moi, succession-planning is an ever-present problem for the ageing Strongmen of the ’Stans; a number of solutions have been advanced of late, some more plausible than others.
KAZAKHSTAN: LONG LIVE THE GLORIOUS LEADER!
The ideal potential solution to the conundrum is to ensure your Dear Leader can never pass away in the first place, which means devising some special means for him to become immortal or at least live to a ripe old age. This is the chosen strategy in Kazakhstan, where Nursultan Nazarbayev served as President between 1990 and 2019, before ‘stepping down’ to allow a handpicked successor to take the reins in public as he retreated into the shadows to rule from behind the scenes and eat yoghurt. Kazakhstan is the world’s ninth-largest country and possesses massive oil and gas reserves, which Nazarbayev cannily exploited to strike lucrative deals with multinational energy giants, thus allowing him to indulge his many whims – such as creating an entirely new capital, Astana, from scratch, and toying with renaming the country ‘Kazak-Eli’ or ‘Kazakh Nation’, thinking the ’Stan suffix held negative connotations abroad. Other petro-dollars have been pumped into science. In 2010, Nazarbayev reached the age of 70, and his thoughts began turning towards death – namely, how he didn’t want it to ever happen to him. Nazarbayev is not insane enough to think he is literally immortal, but delay is life, as Lord Salisbury said, and every extra year that can be squeezed from a
bottle is precious to him. That same year, the President announced that a new scientific research establishment in Astana (since renamed Nur-Sultan, in the Immortal Leader’s honour) was to be called Nazarbayev University (you can see a pattern emerging here), and that its focus was to be on “rejuvenation of the [human] organism” – the organism in question being himself.
“As for the medicine of the future, people of my age are really hoping all of this will happen as soon as possible,” he told students at the institution’s official opening. Earlier, he had urged parliament to “offer me an elixir of youth and energy” that would enable him to go on ruling “until 2020”, which he has anyway, by all accounts. “Anti-ageing medicine, natural rejuvenation, immortality,” Nazarbayev once mused. “That’s what people are studying nowadays.” They certainly are in Kazakhstan, where in 2012 the University announced its first tentative step towards creating an elixir of youth – a Yakult-style probiotic liquid-yoghurt drink called ‘Nar’, or ‘Nourishment’. Like Yakult, Nar alone will not lend you eternal youth, but the novel “symbiotic bioproduct” would “improve digestion and the absorption of nutrients” into the body, so at least it was a start. “It’s just one of the factors” needed to make a man Methuselah, one scientist admitted, so in 2017 Nar was improved with “probiotic micro-organisms” to become ‘H P Wellness Elixir’, an “innovative food product” launched by Nazarbayev personally. Lauding Kazakhstan’s immortality research institutes as “our analogue of the SiliconValley”, the President’s words were backed up by PR revealing that “daily intake will relieve adults of many age-associated intestinal diseases.” In March 2020, the University revealed the next pillar of their extreme longevity plan – drinking horse milk, which could potentially reduce the risk of cancer, regulate blood-pressure and even treat TB. More easily digested than cow milk, it could be given to babies to promote a lifetime of wellbeing. As Nazarbayev himself still carries the official title Yelbasy, or ‘Leader of the Nation’, even though he is now past 80, he must have been imbibing gallons of the stuff.
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UZBEKISTAN: NOT WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE
In 2016, Islam Karimov, who had led Uzbekistan with a rod of iron since 1989, ably demonstrated the potential for chaos when a ’Stan strongman breathes his last by lazily dying on the job from a brain hæmorrhage, aged 78. Foolishly, he had not been drinking enough Nar. Karimov had put some thought into succession-planning, however; it was thought that his daughter Gulnara was poised to take over one day, but in 2013 they had a major falling-out over a wide-ranging financial scandal. Karimov knew how to deal with most opponents – he had them shot or boiled alive in hot water, although this latter form of execution was curiously always recorded on deathcertificates as being due to “an accident with a kettle”. “I am prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people [personally] … in order to save peace and calm in the republic,” Karimov once boasted, but Gulnara’s own head proved too difficult to remove, perhaps for sentimental reasons. Long-indulged, the glamorous Gulnara had her finger in many pies; her Twitter account billed her as a “poet, mezzo soprano, designer and exotic Uzbekistan beauty”. A Harvard-educated UN diplomat, screenwriter, businesswoman, fashion designer (whose spring 2012 collection was pulled from NY Fashion Week after it emerged her nation’s cotton had been picked by child slave-labour) and pop star under the name ‘Googoosha’, this spoiled 40-something infant performed duets with Julio Iglesias and Gerard Depardieu, with her single Round Run being played in “more than 100” nightclubs in the US. Uzbekistan is not as oil or gas-rich as Kazakhstan, though, so Gulnara’s whims were not quite as sustainable as those of President Nazarbayev, leading to her being labelled as a “robber baron” who had single-handedly created her own personal budget deficit in the nation’s finances. Googoosha’s family appear to have complained to her father about this, with Gulnara going online to accuse her mother and sister of frequenting sorcerers, or even of being witches themselves. In 2013, as her businesses folded, she recklessly began criticising her father’s carelessness with kettles, comparing him to Stalin. Gulnara was then quickly sent to the gulag of long-term house-arrest, where in November 2016 it was widely reported she had died from poisoning. The rumour turned out to be untrue, but uncertainty as to her fate was widespread at the time.
4 Here Gulnara took after her father, who, earlier that August, had also occupied an ambiguous position of life and death simultaneously. In his final moments, Karimov really was like Stalin with, as one headline said, “doctors just too scared to tell Uzbek despot that he’s dead”. For several days following his hospitalisation with a hæmorrhage, the Uzbek public were left in confusion about Karimov’s status, with TV showing special soothing features about fruit and vegetables to keep worry at bay. Turkey’s friendly PM was first to let Schrödinger’s Cat out of the bag by announcing the tragic news that Karimov had died during a live domestic broadcast of a Cabinet meeting. Forced into action, the Uzbek government now quickly proclaimed that “With enormous sorrow in our heart, we inform you of the death of our Dear President.” Official nervousness stemmed not from the