The Despot's Apprentice by Brian Klaas

Author:Brian Klaas
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

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TAKE YOUR KIDS TO WORK DAY

From 1989 until his death in 2016, Islam Karimov ruled the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan as a ruthless dictator. To improve his public relations with the international community, Karimov sought to soften his image. Instead of being seen as a bloodthirsty autocrat (which he most certainly was), why not try to make people see him as a doting father instead? Karimov began to project his eldest daughter Gulnara as an extension of his personalist regime. She was just seventeen when her father ascended to power.

Gulnara stood by her father’s side as he turned the newly independent Uzbekistan into a totalitarian state, a terrifying autocracy where dissent ensured either a death sentence by torture or a one-way ticket to a barbaric jail cell. Karimov’s regime engaged in forced child labor, in some years systematically pushing children into backbreaking work picking cotton.1 In 2003, an inquest initiated by Western governments found evidence that two dissidents had been tortured and then boiled alive.2 Karimov had the “compassion” to return the disfigured, boiled corpses to their families, a gesture that was somewhat undercut by the fact that family members could plainly see that the fingernails of their loved ones were missing—haunting clues of unspeakable torture.3

Gulnara Karimova was supposed to be the regime’s velvet glove. She was Ivy League-educated, a comfortable fixture amongst the American cultural and economic elite. Back in Uzbekistan, she sought to promote various causes. She organized a marathon for charity. She was a patron of the arts. She launched a new micro-credit project for rural women in farming. To outsiders, she was the heart that her father sorely lacked. And everyone seemed to hope that she could restrain her father’s most brutal and misguided impulses.

But while Gulnara was promoting the image of a socially conscious philanthropist filled with compassion, she also took advantage of her position as a despot’s daughter. She gallivanted with pop stars and celebrities. She organized a concert for Sting in Uzbekistan. Karimova even became an Uzbek pop star herself, cashing in on her powerful connections to create slick music videos and forge a carefully crafted glamorous cult of personality. She used the stage name GooGoosha, her father’s pet name for his favorite daughter. The music video of her first hit, Unutma Meni (“Don’t Forget Me”) takes place in a surrealist dreamscape as a baby blue sports car floats toward a golden city in the clouds. The imagery clearly resonated with her family’s rise over the oppressed people, completely divorced from the daily realities of hardship created by her father’s authoritarian kleptocracy.

In the process, the dictator’s daughter became fabulously rich. According to documents published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Karimova amassed an estimated $1 billion from telecoms and other businesses in exchange for political influence with her father.4 With all that wealth secured, she also moved into the world of fashion and jewelry. In March 2009, the dictator’s daughter rolled out a new jewelry line called GULI, which she then turned into a broader brand selling clothes and interior design items.

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