Shavkat Mirziyoyev
Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been president of Uzbekistan since September 2016, when Karimov died after twenty-seven years and the prime minister of thirteen took the succession the constitution had given to the senate chairman. Having been Karimov's enforcer, he opened the country Karimov had closed. The currency was made convertible in September 2017 after a decade of a black-market rate twice the official one. The exit visas were abolished, the borders with the neighbours reopened and the flights to Dushanbe resumed after twenty-five years. The forced labour of children and adults in the cotton harvest ended, which the international boycott of Uzbek cotton was lifted for in 2022. The security service's chief of twenty-three years was dismissed and jailed, the political prisoners released and the notorious Jaslyk prison closed. The foreign journalists were let in and the local ones let out of jail, the tourists doubled, and the state's factories and banks put up for sale. The limits were shown at Nukus in July 2022, when a draft constitution's removal of Karakalpakstan's right to secede brought the region into the streets and the police killed twenty-one. He was born in Jizzakh in 1957, studied irrigation engineering at the Tashkent institute, taught there and ran its Komsomol. He was governor of Jizzakh and then of Samarkand in the 1990s, where his methods with the farmers were remembered. He was Karimov's prime minister from 2003 to 2016, the man who ran the cotton. The election of December 2016 gave him eighty-eight per cent against three candidates from parties the state maintains, that of 2021 eighty. The referendum of April 2023 on a new constitution that reset his term count and lengthened the term to seven years let him win a third in July 2023 with eighty-seven. The parliament has no opposition and the press has a line. The neighbourhood policy, peace with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over the borders and the water, the trans-Afghan railway begun with the Taliban, and the gas sold to China and bought from Russia when the winters bit, has made him the region's convener. His daughter runs his office, and his son-in-law's businesses are the ones that have grown.
- Lived: 1957 CE – ?
- Nationality: Uzbek
- Roles: president, politician
