Islam Karimov: Ex-Soviet strongman who dominated Uzbekistan

Lambasted for brutally crushing dissent, Uzbekistan's President Islam Karimov kept a stranglehold on power for over 25 years - even at the expense of his own daughter.

The veteran leader, 78, who died on today several days after suffering a stroke, played Russia, China and the West off against one other to avoid total isolation as he steered his strategic state out of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He was to be buried tomorrow in the ancient city of Samarkand, his hometown, state television said.

"Islam Karimov has been the state for over quarter of a century, ruling with an iron fist," Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, told AFP.
 

"The last 25 years have been known largely for repression - that's his legacy."

Karimov's authoritarian rule came under fire over accusations of heinous rights abuses, most prominently over bloodshed in the city of Andijan in 2005, but the most serious threats to his reign came from far closer to home.

In a court drama with echoes of Shakespeare, the former Soviet apparatchik - at the helm since 1989 - had his eldest daughter put under house arrest in 2014 during a family feud in which she compared him to brutal Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

The spectacular fall from grace of Gulnara Karimova - a pop-singing, corruption-tainted socialite once seen as a possible heir to her father's throne - appeared to show just how far Karimov was willing to go to keep his iron grip on power.

Karimov, long the subject of rumours about his ill health, has now left no obvious successor in a country that has never held an election judged free and fair by international monitors.

He won Uzbekistan's first elections after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and last March cruised to his fifth five-year term with over 90 per cent of the vote.

"Without a strong government there will be chaos in society," Karimov warned ahead of the poll.

Born on January 30, 1938, Karimov was raised in an orphanage in Samarkand. He studied engineering and rose up the Communist Party ladder to become head of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1989.

Like the authoritarian leader of neighbouring Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Karimov led his country through the transition from the former USSR without any major challenge to his rule.