Expressing grief over the death of Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov, President Barack Obama has said that the United States remains committed to its partnership with the central Asian nation.
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Uzbeks mourn the Islam Karimov in Tashkent on Saturday.
He did not choose an heir, but Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been designated mourner-in-chief – seen as an indication that he may take over.
State television in the tightly-controlled nation earlier reported that the coffin arrived by plane in Samarkand accompanied by Karimov’s widow and daughter.
Police had cordoned off most of the centre of the city and were not letting ordinary citizens or cars through.
(AP Photo). People hold flowers as they gather along the road to watch the funeral procession of President Islam Karimov in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, early Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016.
“When we found out about his death, all my family – by wife, my son’s wife, the children – we were all crying, we couldn’t believe it”, one local man, 58, told AFP, refusing to give his name.
“His pass away is a great loss of the Uzbek people. He made our country free and developed”.
At dawn, a black Mercedes van carrying the body of Karimov, who died of a stroke aged 78, drove slowly along Tashkent’s main thoroughfare.
After the majority Muslim republic gained independence in 1991, Karimov launched simultaneous battles against Western culture and Islamic fundamentalism, stamping out radical groups at home.
In a letter smuggled to a BBC journalist in 2014, Gulnara, the older daughter, alleged she was being held under house arrest by her father’s security officials after her family ostracized her.
Karimov, long the subject of rumours about his ill health, has now left no obvious successor in a country that has never held an election judged free and fair by worldwide monitors.
Alexei Pushkov, the pro-Kremlin head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s parliament, responded on Twitter that Obama was “mistaken if he thinks the new chapter is going to be written in Washington”.
Karimov, the former communist boss, ruled Uzbekistan for 27 years at the center of a tight inner circle and ruthlessly applied the country’s security and intelligence forces to keep a firm lid on dissent.
Islam Karimov ruled for more than a quarter of a century so his death could well start a battle for power.
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He has always been lambasted by critics for brutally crushing dissent – most prominently the deadly 2005 response to protests in the city of Andijan, where government forces were accused of killing hundreds of demonstrators. He became the first Secretary of the party in Uzbekistan in 1989.
