Early Life and Career
Karimov, placed in an orphanage in Samarkand at birth, grew up to study economics and engineering at school. He became an official in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, becoming the party's First Secretary in Uzbekistan in 1989. On March 24, 1990 he became President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. Karimov's election to the Uzbek Communist Party resulted after his predecessor Rafik Nishanov failed to quell inter-ethnic clashes and instability in the Fergana region. He declared Uzbekistan an independent nation on August 31, 1991 and subsequently won Uzbekistan's first presidential election on December 29, 1991, with 86% of the vote. The election was called unfair, with state-run propaganda and a falsified vote count, although the opposing candidate and leader of the Erk (Freedom) Party, Muhammad Salih, had a chance to participate. Karimov permitted the participation of the opposition organizations Birlik ("Unity") and the Islamic Renaissance Party until his efforts to consolidate power over Shukrullo Mirsaidov, a former Communist Party elite who had originally supported Karimov's rise to the Party presidency. The period of political thaw was brief; Karimov began to complicate the registration process of opposition parties during elections. As Birlik grew in strength as a "popular movement", it was denied the ability to register as a "political party" without the required 60,000 signatures. The Karimov government allowed Birlik one day to gather these signatures, 25,000 of which they rejected. Karimov effectively took authoritarian measures to block any meaningful opposition.
Read more about this topic: Islam Karimov
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Pray be always in motion. Early in the morning go and see things; and the rest of the day go and see people. If you stay but a week at a place, and that an insignificant one, see, however, all that is to be seen there; know as many people, and get into as many houses as ever you can.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The terrible thing about terrorism is that ultimately it destroys those who practise it. Slowly but surely, as they try to extinguish life in others, the light within them dies.”
—Terry Waite (b. 1939)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)