I see GooGoosha is in the Google alerts again -- this time for fashion faux paux -- didn't your mother ever tell you never to mix print patterns?! And gosh, all those bangles! Too much look! And that fangirling of the Chanel logo *cringe*. You have to wonder -- did she get a fee for that? Would Chanel be that tacky? (No, but she would be -- she seems to be channeling Brighton Beach at Tanya's on the boardwalk on a Friday night).
The fashion editors at stylebistro.com seem to have independently decided that the dictator's daughter looked awful aside from her reputation as an apologist for her country's tyrannical system.
But is every story about Gulnara contrived? Yes, indeed it is. That's because -- as I said -- she's the dictator's daughter -- and the grotesquely excessive spoiled children of these grotesquely brutal regimes are going to get ink every time they make a move.
Dictator's daughter -- the reason why we keep repeating that phrase is that a French journalist almost got sentenced to a heavy fine over using that legitimate phrase in France, he had to spend months in court trying to extricate himself, before a French judge finally ruled that essentially, the truth defense won out (although it was more about technicalities as to dates and such). That means journalists everywhere should continue to express solidarity and go on using that phrase boldly.
She is a dictator's daughter; Karimov is a dictator. Among the many sudden and strange editorial directives I got in the last month at EurasiaNet, I was instructed to stop using this phrase, although in fact in my last piece about the daughters, I didn't use it, in fact.
That's funny, because I thought we were supposed to lay it on thick about Gulnara -- I thought that was the line at EurasiaNet. Everybody else at EurasiaNet did. Every single Gulnara story was tied to every single other aspect of Uzbekistan whether it fit or not -- Gulnara could have been riding one of my NDN elephants.
I always thought it was completely outrageous to conceive of her as a possible successor to her father. It was so greatly a misreading of this country, of Central Asia, of clans, of the level of hatred of her, that it just didn't make sense. It seemed to be one of those gazetnyye shtampy (newspaper cliches) that my Soviet journalism professor Alexander Sergeyevich at LGU taught us about.
But is it warranted to bang on Gulnara when she goes day-tripping in the West among the fashion shows and celebrity balls and charity galas? Absolutely. Not only is she the dictator's daughter, she represents the state -- she's ambassador to Spain, and ambassador to the UN agencies in Geneva. She is a state symbol -- and deliberately so, as part of a state-constructed propaganda campaign.
Rumour has it that Gulnara is angling to become ambassador to the United Kingdom. That sounds completely crazy. The tabs would never let that one go, and I can't imagine it could possibly happen. Craig Murray had this rumour out for awhile on his blog and there was supposedly even a real estate deal going through and even permission for bodyguards to tote AK47s. It doesn't seem to be happening. I queried the UK Twitter accounts -- they had nothing to say. I leave this to Craig Murray to pursue. Stranger things have happened.
Gulnara's star seems to be sinking since the break-up of Zeromax. Nobody really knows why it broke up, but it seemed to have something to do with the way the firm was used as the family's personal piggy bank -- or maybe their "compensations" were even legit, for their "consulting" and "advice" to these companies or their influence-peddling -- that's common -- but it just got too expensive to maintain after Kazakhstan raised its tariffs on gasoline and started hurting the Uzbek gasoline market -- that's my guess. This is a squeeze on Karimov by Putin and Nazarbayev for Uzbekistan not playing with the Customs Union perhaps.Plus probably a lot of other even more important factors like the global recession, construction costs, energy costs.
A claim has been made that after human rights activists raised with Gulnara at a charity ball in Cannes t, that he was quietly released. OK, he was, consecutively, after that intervention. But the pressure that made that possible was created by thousands of people petitioning and many other interventions all over the place, including quietly by the US and (hopefully) international NGOs and UN agencies (although they seemed very timid about this case involving someone who helped their programs and publications, after all).
While Popov was released, he has had to remain silent, is still forced to work at a state job and have his wages garnished and cannot work in his NGO field as he would wish. So that's not really being free and it's only a partial victory.
Trying to raise the cotton issue with Gulnara is much more complex. You could possibly offer her a quiet meeting in lieu of a picket at her next fashion show, but a more complex "ask" like "tell your dad to let in the ILO" may not work, and would likely only lead to things like "a meeting with diplomats about a possible ILO trip but not in Uzbekistan". So it would be better in that case to do the picket, and keep raising awareness and the cost of using forced child labour and not doing anything about it as promised.
Maybe GooGooSha isn't as evil as the lurid tabloids have painted her, but she's still pretty evil, repping that awful Uzbek regime of her dad's. That makes her an obvious surrogate advocacy target and human rights groups are absolutely justified in directing protest at her.
