The Fall of the House of Guli

When did Gulnara Karimova’s reign come to an end? Was it the day she posted a photograph of herself doing a Yogic dog on Twitter, or quivered over the fate of slave children in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan during an on-line spat with the European Director of Human Rights Watch? Was it that weird period near the New Year when she scored a duet with Gerard Depardieu and then found herself accused of trying to bribe a Swedish telecoms company that wanted to enter the Uzbek market? Was it when her own beloved father finally moved in on her empire of assets, disbanding her network of micro-oligarch cronies, personal assistants and bodyguards? Or was it the day she publicly accused her sister and her mother of practicing witchcraft and engaging in Satanic rituals? Or, to ask the same question in a different way, what was your favorite moment?

I am not gloating. For a start: who really knows what is going on here? An extraordinary family meltdown has become entwined with the future (the fate) of a fairly strategically significant Central Asian state in a way that harks back to a pre-nationalist era of clan exiles and blood feuds. But, also, there is more to this peculiar case than mere melodrama. Gulnara is the best and worst of a bad bunch: certainly the most enigmatic and extreme (and entertaining) member of the Karimov family. Her wildness, her inability to know when too much is too much, makes her uniquely dangerous for her family and their associates and subjects, but also more engaging for external spectators. Her father is a clever and scheming butcher and her sister — the witch! — a canny GONGO queen and sharp-operating real estate hustler. Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva has kept relatively clean over the last two or three years, but you will notice that she turned up in the Bilan rich list this year, not Gulnara.

The trouble with Gulnara is that she did not want Uzbekistan — she was not content with glorying over her own patch, although it was a good wealth resource and gave her somewhere to go and something to do when the rest of the world began to freeze her out. Gulnara wanted the world. She was not tribal in a particularly ethnocentric or clannish way: her tribe, the one she probably believes she still belongs to, is the trans-national super-rich elite. Her mistake has been to sin against the façade they pay tribute to with words and charitable donations — the respectability of human rights, democracy and discreet transactions. Gulnara, if she could — and she knew she could never divorce herself from her country which conferred some semblance of legitimacy and revenue however queasy this made her European pals feel — would have stayed content and busy in her Zurich-New York-Tashkent axis forever, or until she actually got bored herself or finally got the chance to be President.

This became a problem: she wasn’t, after all, smart enough. Not, it turns out (and this was obvious as far back as 2011) as clever as Lola, who remained safely inside her own circle of Russian and Ukrainian and Uzbek millionaires and musclemen. Based on a patchwork of cronies and her father’s apparent goodwill, Gulnara started to take the Presidential rumors seriously. It was during this last crazy year that anybody paying attention to Uzbekistan from the outside got any sort of confirmation from the (admittedly rather lovely) Mouth of Guli that she was, in fact, contemplating the top job. To slip into it, perhaps, like one of her attractive fabric ikat dresses. Predictably, this got the background machinery going, the murky sub-state of security and regime fixers who saw a somewhat different future for the country. A different kind of nightmare for everybody else — a less colorful and chaotic alternative, one would imagine.

So for the moment, it seems, Guli’s dim hope of succession is over. There is no reason to believe, in this broiling, whip-lash vicious security state, that she is even physically safe. Her security detail has fled the country. Her business associates are on trial, locked up and in exile. Her domestic organizations are now under investigation and her international bank accounts are being frozen. She is the subject of French, Swiss and Swedish probes for money-laundering and bribery. Worst of all, her TV stations have been closed down and her pop songs and fashion galas wiped from the Uzbek airwaves, which they had dominated for so long. But a moment is not forever, and inter-familial feuds can be deep and terminal, or fickle and conditional. Some observers believe that the whole thing is a deep game anyway, a counter-move by the family to put state rivals off-guard. These rumors pay testament to Gulnara’s own mercurial character: is she as wild as we think, or is she as smart as she thinks? In twelve months time I expect we will finally know for sure. This channel is worth watching.