Just Six Months Until We’ll Know if Karimov Is Really A Dictator Or Not

Tolkun at neweurasia.net has written an excellent roundup of the excitement brewing over the forthcoming presidential election in Uzbekistan.

In any other democratic country (Uzbekistan is declared to be democratic), there would be hot political debates among candidates for presidency and pre-election campaigns going very actively all over the country. But not in Uzbekistan. No one in this country seems to care about it. No one, except few independent journalists and human rights activists (who didn’t leave the country yet) dare to speak about this already “tabooed” topic.

Oh. There is some fun speculation about Gulnara Karimova (who loves beating up old men for tea), and ways about how Karimov might hold on to power—including the sad fact that the muted international reaction to Nazarbayev’s “President 4EVA” reforms have created something of a precedent for him to rewrite the Constitution so he’ll no longer be staying in office 11 months past the expiration of his term.

Still—I find Uzbekistan’s Presidential race/farce much more interesting and far less tedious or frustrating than the years-long campaign in the U.S.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.