29 August: Municipal workers clean Tashkent's Independence Square ahead of Independence Day in Uzbekistan. (c) AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.This article originally appeared in Fergana News. We are grateful for permission to translate and repost it here.
On Monday afternoon, according to our sources, Islam Karimov, the 78-year-old leader of Uzbekistan, experienced clinical death, and was later (possibly) wired up to an artificial blood circulation apparatus. This happened a few days before 1 September, the country’s main public holiday of Independence Day.
And this year, 1 September is no ordinary anniversary — it marks a quarter century of the republic’s existence. Today’s Uzbekistan was born 25 years ago as the successor to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, and for all those 25 years it has been ruled by president Islam Karimov, a former Soviet Communist Party and Economic Planning official.
