Uzbekistan heads to the polls on Sunday for presidential elections, but the results are a foregone conclusion: President Islam Karimov will be re-elected. Uzbekistan’s ruler since its days as a Soviet republic, Karimov has spent the last 24 years consolidating his power in the most brutal of ways: boiling dissidents, carrying out violent crackdowns against the political opposition, and even placing his own daughter under indefinite house arrest.
And while Sunday’s elections might not matter on their own, they come at a time when Uzbekistan once again finds itself at the center of a geopolitical chess game between China, Russia, and …read more
Source: Foreign Policy
