“We send our condolences and share the pain of the Uzbek people”, Prime Minister Yildirim said.
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A respected opposition website posted pictures of cemetery workers in Samarkand, the president’s hometown, digging a fresh grave in a prominent location.
People stand along a road to pay the tribute to the memory of Uzbek late President Islam Karimov as a mourning motorcade drive by in Tashkent, Uzbekistan September 3, 2016.
“Islam Karimov leaves a legacy of a quarter century of ruthless repression”, said Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. It gave no other details.
His younger daughter, Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, said in a social media post Monday that he had been hospitalized in the capital of Tashkent after a brain hemorrhage August 27.
Political analysts do not consider Yuldashev to be a long-term successor to Karimov.
How the power vacuum is filled in Uzbekistan is of urgent concern to Russian Federation, the United States and China, all powers with interests in the volatile Central Asia region, where Uzbekistan is the most populous state.
Karimov, 78, had served as authoritarian president of ex-Soviet Uzbekistan from the moment it became independent from the Soviet Union.
Worldwide critics, including Human Rights Watch, said voters had no real choice in the elections because the government restricts opposing political activity.
Uzbek opposition blogger Nadezhda Atayeva told the Associated Press on Friday that Uzbek authorities appear to be cracking down on communication channels since the official announcement Friday about the president’s health. Neither is known to be seeking a public role. Meanwhile, the country’s chief power broker is secret police chief Rustam Inoyatov.
An estimated 1 million Russians still live in Uzbekistan, though the population of more than 31 million is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.
The former US Ambassador to Uzbekistan, John Herbst, believes groups such as IMU will attempt to exploit the transition but doubts they’ll be successful.
Karimov portrayed himself as guarantor of stability and bulwark against radical Islam on the borders of Afghanistan, crushing fundamentalist groups at home. “If a child of mine chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head”. The United States in turn agreed to start the sale of non-lethal military goods to his regime.
In the wake of worldwide criticism over the alleged massacre, which Karimov’s regime rebuffed, Tashkent shut down a U.S. military base used to supply operations in neighbouring Afghanistan since 2001. The ensuing power vacuum and leadership scramble will lay bare the true nature of the indeterminate Russia-China nexus.
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Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Medvedev said the Kremlin has not been informed of Karimov’s possible death. The State Department’s 2015 human rights report on Uzbekistan said security officials reportedly killed “at least 187 unarmed civilians” in an event that has been described as the biggest attack on demonstrators since Tiananmen Square in 1989.
