Islam Karimov
Islam Karimov ran Uzbekistan for twenty-seven years and defined stability as the absence of anyone able to oppose him. He was an engineer and then the republic's Gosplan chairman, and became party first secretary in 1989 after ethnic riots in the Fergana valley. He declared independence in August 1991, won an election that December against a single permitted opponent, and never lost one. The Tajik civil war on his southern border from 1992 shaped everything that followed. It was fought partly along the fault line between post-communist governments and Islamist movements, it killed perhaps a hundred thousand people, and Uzbekistan intervened on the government side. He drew from it the conclusion that any organised religious politics was an existential threat, and acted on it: mosques were closed, imams were licensed, and men were imprisoned for wearing beards or praying outside approved hours. The economy stayed close to the Soviet model. Cotton remained a state monopoly harvested by conscripted labour, including school and university students, on a scale that eventually produced an international boycott of Uzbek cotton. In May 2005 security forces fired on a crowd in Andijan after an armed jailbreak; estimates of the dead run from under two hundred officially to several times that. He refused an international inquiry, lost Western support and turned east. The Aral Sea, drained by the irrigation his cotton policy depended on, largely disappeared during his rule. He died in office in 2016 with no designated successor, and his own prime minister took over.
- Lived: 1938 CE – 2016 CE
- Nationality: Uzbek
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
