POWERFUL UZBEK PRESIDENT DIES AFTER BRAIN HAEMORRHAGE
Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov, who died on Friday at the age of 78 after suffering a brain haemorrhage, saw himself as the protector of his Central Asian nation against militant Islam.
But to his critics, Karimov was a brutal dictator who used torture to stay in power in the former Soviet republic of 32 million for 27 years.
Under his rule, Uzbekistan, a country of 32 million people straddling the ancient Silk Road that links Asia and Europe, became one of the world’s most isolated and authoritarian nations.
Karimov regularly warned of the threat posed by militant Islamists to the stability of the vast, resource-rich Central Asian region. “Such people must be shot in the head,” he said of Islamists in a speech to parliament in 1996.
“If necessary, if you lack the resolve, I’ll shoot them myself.” But his critics accused him of exaggerating the dangers to justify his crackdowns on political dissent Karimov, who steered Uzbekistan to independence from Moscow in 1991, tellingly chose Tamerlane, the 14th century Central Asian ruler and conqueror with a penchant for mass murder, as the country’s national hero. He brooked no dissent, stubbornly resisted pressure to reform the moribund economy and jealously guarded Uzbekistan’s independence against Russia and the West.
In a typically feisty rebuff to Western calls to respect human rights, Karimov said in 2006: “Do not interfere in our affairs under the pretext of furthering freedom and democracy, Do not...tell us what to do, whom to befriend and how to orient ourselves.”
Uzbekistan’s ties with the US and the European Union were frozen after Karimov’s troops brutally suppressed a popular uprising in the eastern town of Andizhan in May 2005.