Your yearly Uzbekistan roundup

[Cain]

Ah, Uzbekistan.  Probably one of the most authoritarian and corrupt regimes on earth...and, once again, our bestest buddies.

When not boiling political dissidents to death, torturing "detainees" for American and British intelligence, using child slavery to pick cotton and killing hundreds of people for no apparent reason, Islam Karimov likes to take a more relaxed view of the world.

For example, those kewl blogger kids...while the media in Uzbekistan is state controlled by any reasonable definition of the term, Karimov loves those foreign bloggers who talk up his regime.  So much, in fact, that he is willing to offer all expenses paid trips to Tashkent, plus a thousand dollars in cash to US bloggers willing to blog about Afghanistan without mentioning any of the above unpleasantness.

The astute ones among you will notice in that link that this is being organised with some consultants called Atlas International Partners.  All three of their principals are deep in the national-security complex.  Is that because there is some sort of national security dimension to showing Islam Karimov's regime in a good light?  Of course there is.

Negotiations for opening a new airbase in Uzbekistan are nearly complete.  In March, Mr Hopey also negotiated the use of Uzbekistan as a transit route to supply Afghanistan based forces.

Not wanting to be left out, the European Union has jumped in on the show, lifting the arms embargo it had in place on the country for a few years.  I guess this means no more strangling Jewish officials, they can just go back to shooting people who take part in "unlicenced religion".

And, to end things on a light note, Sting has performed for the Uzbek kleptocracy.   Presumably the destruction of the Aral Sea by Uzbek businesses - most of which are run by Islam Karimov's daughter, the delightful Gulnara Karimova (that is, delightful when she isn't ordering the assassination of opponents or trafficking Uzbek girls to Dubai as part of the sex-slave trade) - does not bother the environmental crusader Sting, who set up the Rainforest Foundation in 1989, after seeing the destruction of the Amazonian rainforests first hand.  Good old Sting, eh?

[Kai]

I never knew. 

[East Coast Hustle]

Verwirrung oughtta take that offer.