Uncertainty in Uzbekistan as president’s death confirmed

Islam Karimov ended his more than 25 years of rule in the Central Asian nation with no clear successor lined up.

Uzbekistan's president Islam Karimov gestures during a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Ufa, Russia, on July 10, 2015. Reuters

Moscow // Uzbekistan’s president Islam Karimov died on Friday, the government announced.

“Dear compatriots, it is with huge grief in our hearts that we announce to you the death of our dear president,” a state TV presenter said, reading an official statement.

Earlier on Friday, the government had confirmed officially for the first time that Karimov, 78, had suffered a stroke last Saturday.

Authorities said Karimov, 78, was pronounced dead at 8.55pm local time.

The funeral will be held in Mr Karimov’s home city of Samarkand on Saturday as the country begins three days of mourning, the statement said, with Uzbekistan now facing its greatest period of uncertainty in its post-Soviet history.

Karimov ended his more than 25 years of rule in the Central Asian nation with no clear successor lined up.

Loyalist prime minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev will head the committee charged with organising Karimov’s funeral, suggesting that he could be in line to take over the presidency.

However, there was speculation that senior government insiders had started jostling to claim leadership.

In theory, the head of the senate, Nigmatulla Yuldashev, should step in until elections can be held, but analysts dismissed him as a water-carrier.

Instead, the front-runners to take over long term are Mr Mirziyoyev, known as an enforcer, and deputy prime minister Rustam Azimov.

The country’s powerful security chief Rustam Inoyatov, who has held the post since 1995 and is seen as a key player behind-the-scenes, is 72 and has a reputation tainted by violent suppression of protesters.

Amnesty International (AI) said Karimov’s death would mark “the end of an era in ­Uzbekistan, but almost ­certainly not of the pattern of grave human rights abuses”. “His successor is likely to come from Mr Karimov’s closest circle, where dissenting minds have never been tolerated,” AI’s Denis Krivosheev said.

Karimov’s elder daughter Gulnara, a flamboyant figure formerly seen as a potential heir, dropped out of the running after she was placed under house arrest in 2014.

The socialite business magnate fell from grace after a family feud burst into the open as she accused her mother and younger sister of sorcery, compared her father to Josef Stalin and assailed Mr Inoyatov on Twitter for corruption and harbouring presidential ambitions.

Born on January 30, 1938, Karimov was raised in an orphanage in the ancient city of Samarkand.

He studied mechanical engineering and economics and rose up Communist Party ranks to become head of Soviet ­Uzbekistan in 1989.

His regime has repeatedly been accused of rights abuses – including torturing opponents and using forced mass labour in the lucrative cotton industry.

Most seriously, the authorities have been accused of killing hundreds of protesters in the eastern city of Andijan in 2005.

After international criticism over the alleged massacre, which Karimov’s ­regime rebuffed, his government shut down an American military base that had been used to supply operations in neighbouring Afghanistan since 2001.

The wily veteran played Russia, China and the West against each other to keep Uzbekistan from total isolation and continued to receive limited aid from the United States.

Despite economic growth figures of eight per cent, critics said Uzbekistan’s economy was in a dire situation with a corrupt elite in control of most of its industry.

* Agence France-Presse