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[url]http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/rock-star-sting-slammed-over-concert-for-uzbek-tyrant-karimovs-daughter/19438751
Sting Slammed Over Gig for Tyrant’s Daughter
LONDON (April 14) — He’s won awards
for his human rights work and praise for
defending Brazil’s threatened rain forests.
But British rock star Sting has now been accused
of dumping his morals for money after
it emerged that he was paid $1.5 million
to $3 million to play a secret concert for the
daughter of Uzbekistan’s brutal dictator.
“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 prodemocracy
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 Berlinbased
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.”
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