“This is blood money, mafia money,” Uzbek activist and independent journalist Umida Niyazova, who fled the country in 2008 after serving four months in jail for reporting on the regime’s abuse of power, told AOL News. “He might as well have performed in Burma or North Korea.”
In October, Gulnara Karimova, daughter and heir-apparent to tyrant Islam Karimov, hired the former Police front man to headline an arts festival in Tashkent, the central Asian nation’s capital. Tickets at the event went for more than $2,000, about 45 times the average Uzbek’s annual salary.
Sting — whose own fortune is estimated at $277 million — happily accepted the offer, even though he’s a high-profile supporter of Amnesty International, which routinely condemns Karimov for torturing, murdering and enslaving his people. (Amnesty International did not respond to AOL News’ request for an interview.)
Amnesty isn’t alone in condemning Karimov, who has ruled the country since 1989. In 2004, the U.S. State Department revealed that some of the regime’s opponents were dispatched by “immersion in boiling water,” while others were beaten to death in front of their wives, children and mothers.
And the dictator came in for heavy criticism from Western governments in May 2005, after his troops opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in the city of Andijan. Local authorities said that 187 people, mostly police officers, died in the incident, while human rights groups say about 500 civilians perished in the crackdown. Many bodies were reportedly tossed in mass graves.
The tyrant’s daughter, Karimova, makes a handsome profit from this repression, says Niyazova — who now heads the Berlin-based Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights. Her wealth largely comes from the country’s vast cotton plantations, where an estimated 2 million children, pulled out of school and away from their families, work as forced laborers. Producing cotton in this arid nation comes with a high environmental cost, too: The Aral Sea — once the world’s fourth largest lake — has lost 80 percent of its volume over the past 50 years, a process that has accelerated since Karimov began siphoning it off to irrigate his desert plantations.
Sting told the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper that he was familiar with all of these crimes when he signed up for the gig. “‘I am well aware of the Uzbek president’s appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment. I made the decision to play there in spite of that,” he said. “I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular.”
Niyazova, who has written an open letter to the singer, politely says, “This is not a strong argument. He knows where the money he was paid came from.”
Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan and a fierce critic of the regime, used considerably stronger language in a blog post. “This really is transparent bollocks,” Murray wrote. “He did not take a guitar and jam around the parks of Tashkent. He got paid over a million pounds to play an event specifically designed to glorify a barbarous regime. Is the man completely mad?”
Murray also attacked the rocker for attending a Tashkent fashion show promoting Karimova’s range of jewelry for Swiss firm Chopard, where he was photographed sitting next to the dictator’s daughter. “To [sit] next to a woman who has made hundreds of millions from state forced child labor in the cotton fields is pretty sick,” Murray said.
If Sting wants to rebuild his humanitarian reputation, Niyazova says, he needs to start passing that money back to its rightful owners, the Uzbek people. “He should spend this money supporting democratic institutions in Uzbekistan; he could fund independent journalists and film societies,” she says. “As a person who supposedly cares about other oppressed people, this would be the right thing to do.”
