Gulnara Karimova (pictured above), the glamorous daughter of Uzbekistan’s president, used to be one of the more powerful people in Central Asia. But now, in secret recordings obtained by the BBC, she says she and her teenaged daughter are being treated “worse than dogs” and need urgent medical help since she has fallen out with her dictator father President Islam Karimov. The BBC news correspondent Natalia Antelava on 21 August reports on this exceptional story. Natalia Antelava reports that in March 2014, she received and authenticated a handwritten letter from Karimova, in which she said she and her daughter had been placed under house arrest and now the short audio recordings were smuggled out of Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan has a history of human rights violations and Karimova has fully played her role in this sorry state of affairs (see e.g. https://thoolen.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/daughter-of-uzbek-dictator-loses-defamation-case-in-paris/. Stroehlein of Human Rights Watch (which will publish next month a report on wrongfully imprisoned people in the country) is understandably cautious when it comes to Karimova’s recent concern for human rights in Uzbekistan, since it follows a decade-long period when the woman known as “Googoosha” wielded immense power in the country. “She almost certainly had top-level regime access to critical information regarding serious and systematic rights abuses in Uzbekistan, and she has had many opportunities to hand that information over to journalists and human rights groups,” he says . “She hasn’t.”
2008 MEA Laureate Mutabar [see earlier posts on her case: https://thoolen.wordpress.com/tag/mutabar-tadjibayeva/] was imprisoned in far worse conditions and not only denied medical treatment but even tortured [for a good video portrait see: http://vimeo.com/43344019]. This does of course not justify the treatment given to Karimova but helps to put things into perspective.
July 29, 2017 at 16:58
[…] in 2014 on the fate that had befallen Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the former Uzbek dictator [https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2014/08/22/how-the-mighty-fall-in-uzbekistan-gulnara-karimova-asks…], I now feel that I should follow-up by referring to media reports (Reuters Almaty) that she is in […]