Mr. Speaker, the Washington Post recently published a very interesting and revealing story by Peter Baker that describes how the authoritarian government of Uzbekistan has allowed a personal family dispute with an American citizen from New…
Mr. Speaker, the Washington Post recently published a very interesting and revealing story by Peter Baker that describes how the authoritarian government of Uzbekistan has allowed a personal family dispute with an American citizen from New Jersey to spill over into the realms of international diplomacy. The problem has gotten so bad that the government of Uzbekistan is now abusing one of the most important international institutions used to fight crime and apprehend terrorists--the Interpol Red Notice system.
Mr. Mansur Maqsudi is an American citizen who lives in New Jersey. Shortly after Mr. Maqsudi asked his wife Gulnora Karimova--who happens to be the daughter of Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov--for a divorce in July of 2002, she left their home in New Jersey to Uzbekistan and illegally brought along their two young children (both of whom are American citizens). In defiance of a U.S. custody order and a U.S. arrest warrant against Ms. Karimova, Mr. Maqsudi has been denied the right to visit his children for more than 2\1/2\ years.
The vendetta waged by the Government of Uzbekistan against this American citizen has grown into far more than a mere child-custody dispute. Three of Mansur's family relatives in Uzbekistan were--and still are--imprisoned on nebulous charges. Despite their eligibility for a general amnesty, they remain in captivity. Twenty-four other relatives were deported from Uzbekistan at gunpoint in the middle of the night in the dead of winter into a war zone in Afghanistan.
Then his family's businesses in Tashkent were expropriated and seized without just compensation (or any compensation in some cases). Flimsy criminal charges were then filed against him, his brother, and his father (all of whom are American citizens). Most outside observers of Uzbek politics, including the U.S. State Department in testimony before Congress, have concluded that these charges were political and not supported with valid evidence.
The Uzbek government then placed all three U.S. citizens on the Interpol Red Notice list. Fortunately, the U.S. Government has studied these cases and decided not to act on any of them because the evidence was so weak. However, when any of those listed travels abroad, they are subjected to the risk of arrest and even possible extradition to Uzbekistan. Instead of focusing law enforcement efforts on apprehending real criminals and terrorists, the bogus Red Notices issued by Uzbekistan are now diverting scarce police attention towards the furtherance of a personal family feud.
This is an outrage, Mr. Speaker. I urge the Executive Branch of our Government to make it clear to Uzbek President Karimov that his country's status as an ally in the War against Terror does not give him carte blanche to totally disregard the 2002 bilateral agreement between the United States and Uzbekistan and abuse the rights of American citizens.
The Interpol Red Notice system is a critical element in the War on Terrorism. And yet here, the Government of Uzbekistan is pulling at the loose threads which make up the fabric of an entire international system that has worked well for years. The end result of Uzbekistan's actions will cause more governments around the world to question the legitimacy of other countries' Red Notice submissions. Countries will now have to decide which arrest warrants to obey, and which warrants to ignore. To the extent that member countries fill the system with garbage warrants that are purely political and violate Article 3 of the Interpol Constitution, it undermines the respect and reciprocity that are at the very heart of Interpol's effectiveness. Interpol is far too important in the fight against drug traffickers, terrorists, and criminals to allow it to be undermined by autocratic regimes who want to harass their political and personal enemies around the world.
I believe the issues at stake in this family dispute go way beyond child custody and divorce. The very heart of a major international institution that is vital to the War on Terrorism is being openly challenged. Nations that flagrantly violate Article 3 of the Interpol Constitution--like Uzbekistan is doing in this particular case--need to pay some kind of diplomatic penalty for doing so. If countries can undermine Interpol at will and without penalty, reproach, or criticism, what is to prevent the system from being flooded with political Red Notices issued by repressive regimes against their enemies? How do we avoid nations refusing to honor each others' requests?
[From the Washington Post, Apr. 13, 2004]
Battle Royal--The Daughter of Uzbekistan's President Took Her Children
and Ran, Opening a Custody War That Has Entangled Two New Allies
(By Peter Baker)
Moscow.--The day she left for good, she packed up her
things and decamped from their New Jersey home with her two
children, two nannies, two bodyguards and a driver.
On a table she left a note for her husband. She mentioned
an old movie playing on cable--``The War of the Roses,'' the
1989 dark comedy featuring Michael Douglas and Kathleen
Turner as hate-driven spouses whose divorce turns into an
orgy of revenge. She jotted down the time the show would air
and pointedly suggested he watch.
Whether that was prophecy or threat, a war soon broke out.
It turns out that divorcing Gulnora Karimova, known as ``the
Uzbek princess,'' is no simple matter. Her father is Islam
Karimov, president of Uzbekistan and autocrat nonpareil, who
rules over a repressive Central Asian country where prisoners
have been boiled alive. He also happens to be a key ally in
America's war on terrorism.
Karimova took the kids in 2001 and has been ducking an
arrest warrant issued by a New Jersey judge ever since,
hiding out in Moscow, where she knows officials won't cross
her father. As for her husband, Mansur Maqsudi, an Afghan
American businessman, he has learned the price of crossing
his powerful father-in-law. Since Maqsudi and his wife split
up, the Uzbek government has effectively taken away his Coca-
Cola bottling plant, imprisoned three of his relatives and
deported 24 more of them at gunpoint to war-torn Afghanistan.
``She said if I do divorce her she was going to destroy my
family, destroy my business and make sure I could never see
my kids,'' Maqsudi, 37, says by telephone from New Jersey.
``And if you look at it, that's exactly what happened.''
Karimova, 31, offers the mirror-opposite interpretation.
She only stayed with Maqsudi so long, she says, because she
feared he would use a breakup against her family politically.
``He said that it would be a huge scandal and all this would
come to your father and his name would be abused,'' she says.
``I never want to disappoint my father.''
This tabloid drama threatens to complicate U.S. relations
with its important new friend in a volatile region. The State
Department, Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service,
Interpol and various courts, embassies and congressional
committees have all been drawn into the fray. Teams of
American lobbyists have been recruited to fight the ground
war. As New Jersey Superior Court Judge Deanne M. Wilson said
at a court hearing last year, ``This is not just a garden-
variety custody case.''
The allegations fly back and forth--kidnapping, tax
evasion, forgery, smuggling, embezzlement, blackmail, money
laundering and fraud. She accuses him of illegally selling
Saddam Hussein's oil. He accuses her of shipping Uzbek girls
to prostitution rings in Dubai. She describes him as a
moralistic Muslim who once warned her she would burn in Hell
for wearing a bikini. He depicts her as a spoiled rich girl
who partied until the middle of the night, stumbling home
drunk.
``It was a simple question of divorce,'' she says, in a
considerable understatement, ``but it was politicized from
the very beginning.''
No Fairy-Tale Romance
She slips into the restaurant, statuesque and fashion-model
thin, wearing boots a bit too stylish for the Russian snow
and a skirt
a bit too short for the Russian winter. Her bodyguard, tall
and imposing, checks out the room in an instant, then
discreetly disappears.
She rarely does interviews. Only after months of
negotiations brokered by her father's foreign minister does
she finally agree to talk, in hopes of rebutting the most
sensational allegations flying around Washington that can
only hurt her father's ties with the world's only superpower.
In person, Gulnora Karimova does not come across as the
hardhearted, domineering figure her husband's partisans
depict. ``That's not me,'' she insists over tea. Speaking
softly, she presents herself as a Harvard-educated diplomat
and businesswoman, albeit one with a black belt in karate.
She tells the story of her marriage and its collapse from the
standpoint of a hurt woman.
The two met at her birthday party in Tashkent, the Uzbek
capital, in July 1991. Karimova was turning 19. ``The world
had just opened up for me,'' she recalls. ``I'd just
graduated from school and started the university, and
everything was sort of pink skies.'' Mansur Maqsudi was 24,
an Afghan native who immigrated to the United States as a
child and became a naturalized citizen. ``He was from a
different world, he spoke a different language,'' she says.
It wasn't much of a romance. They met in person only one
other time before they got married, the night he asked for
her hand. Maqsudi insisted their parents negotiate the
marriage, she recalls, and declined at first to share a drink
to celebrate. They married in Tashkent a month later, in
November 1991, followed by a reception she now describes as
``quite boring.'' A week later, they went to New Jersey,
where they married again.
As she was starting a new life, so was her homeland.
Uzbekistan was emerging from the wreckage of the Soviet Union
as an independent state, and her father, the republic's
Communist boss, made a seamless transition to president of
the new nation within weeks of Karimova's wedding.
An arid, cotton-producing country where Tamerlane once
ruled a mighty empire, Uzbekistan with its 25 million people
is the most populous and politically muscular of the five
Central Asian states. Tashkent still feels Soviet, a well-
ordered, uninspiring capital filled with drab, boxy apartment
buildings and barely a taste of the dynamic new economy of
far-away Moscow.
Under President Karimov, it has also become a terrifying
place for some people, particularly observant Muslims who
eschew government-controlled mosques. While Gulnora Karimova
was at Harvard in 1999, a radical group called the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan set off bombs in Tashkent that killed
16 people. Her father's secular government cracked down on
political Islam, targeting even ordinary Muslims whose only
crime appeared to be wearing a beard as a sign of faith.
About 7,000 people remain in prison for political or
religious beliefs, and often they are beaten, choked, raped
and punished with electric shocks, according to the State
Department's human rights report. A U.N. special rapporteur
has concluded that ``torture or similar ill treatment is
systematic.'' Human Rights Watch has found ``human rights
abuses on a massive scale.''
At the notorious Jaslyk prison camp, built for religious
prisoners in a desert where temperatures rise to 120 degrees,
two men were submerged in boiling water and killed in 2002.
The 62-year-old mother of one was arrested after protesting
her son's death and sentenced to six years of hard labor for
``attempted encroachment on the constitutional order.'' After
an international outcry, Uzbekistan released her in February
just hours before a visit by Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld.
Rather than snuff out Islamic extremism, however, Karimov's
tactics may have only radicalized more young Muslims. A
series of suicide bombings and other attacks two weeks ago
left 47 people dead, a wave of violence tied by the
government to al Qaeda-trained Uzbeks.
Karimova offers no apologies for her father. ``He came from
the strong old system with his own views, with his own
standpoint and with his own rules of the game. So you can
argue about new vision, new ability, but he is a professional
and I prefer to think about him as a professional,'' she
says. ``Some people might like it, some people might not. But
in the situation where we are geopolitically and
geographically . . . you have to be strong to be able to
rule.''
Meet the In-Laws
The newlyweds split their time between New Jersey and the
presidential residence in Tashkent. A year after the wedding
they had a son, Islam, named for his grandfather. A few years
later, a daughter, Iman, came along.
Maqsudi's place in the presidential family certainly didn't
hurt his expanding business empire. Soon he was running the
lucrative Coca-Cola bottling factory in Uzbekistan as well as
other enterprises.
But from the beginning, there were problems with the in-
laws.
Two or three times a week, she says, they would go to his
mother's house, where Karimova found traditional Afghan
family life stultifying. ``It was really difficult because I
was from a small family and used to more open relations, and
in their family it's more like, if this one talks, you are
not supposed to talk, that one is a relative of this
relative, you are not supposed to speak with the aunt.''
At New Year's, the most festive holiday in former Soviet
republics, the Maqsudis barely celebrated. ``They sat on the
floor and ate on the floor,'' she says. When midnight came
and no one got excited, ``I sat and cried next to the TV.''
If she found his family too quiet, he found hers too noisy.
``When you argued with him,'' Maqsudi says, referring to
President Karimov, ``the loudest would win the argument. It
wasn't about facts, it wasn't about arguments. It was about
who could shout the loudest.''
As he describes it, the Karimovs were flush with power and
money. In the office next to the president's bedroom, Maqsudi
says, was a five-foot safe. He walked in once, Maqsudi says,
and ``I saw the first lady sitting on the floor counting a
lot of cash.''
During a trip to London, he says, Karimova decided to buy
$230,000 worth of jewels. ``I told Gulnora this is very
expensive,'' he says. ``She said she could buy them herself .
. . She unzipped her bag and pulled out a few hundred
thousands dollars, cash. I was shocked. I asked her, `Where
did you get this?' She said, `Oh, it's from my mother.' ''
For all the money, Karimova grew restless. ``I was crying
nonstop,'' she says. ``Imagine, you sit all day alone, and
with my very active life, when I used to go not just to the
university but for languages, sport--I was dying.'' That's
not how Maqsudi remembers it. ``She would come home at 3 in
the morning, sometimes drunk. Sometimes she wouldn't remember
where she was.''
Finally, she enrolled in Harvard for graduate studies on
Central Asia. She says she had to persuade him to let her go
back to school. He says he hoped ``it would have a positive
impact'' and end her partying ways, but it didn't. They
fought over other things. ``I was not supposed to swim in the
pool with my son because I was in a separate swimming suit,''
she says, meaning a bikini. ``And he was, like, `If you ever
enter this swimming pool, you are not my son. And she will be
burnt [in Hell] and you be burnt.'. . . He would make my son
swim in a T-shirt.''
Maqsudi angrily denies this. ``Was she drunk that morning
when you saw her?'' he asks. ``Was she sober? Honestly, these
comments are so ridiculous, they don't deserve a reply.'' He
says he objected to his wife's skimpy swimwear only when the
hired help was around. ``Gulnora was swimming with a G-
string, not even a bathing suit, and these two bodyguards
were lying there sunbathing.''
But he rejects the implication that he is a religious
fundamentalist. To prove it, Maqsudi e-mails pictures of his
son scampering around outside without a shirt and another
showing his wife in a virtually see-through shirt, noting her
visible nipples. ``I go to tailgate parties on Sundays to New
York Jets football games,'' Maqsudi adds. ``That should cover
that.''
In the summer of 2001, they were in Tashkent and preparing
to head back to New Jersey, but the end was near. ``The last
months we were completely leading our own lives,'' she says.
``It was clear that we were strangers by that time.''
``That,'' he says, ``was when all hell broke loose.''
the breakup
Maqsudi knew it was serious when his wife's bodyguards had
him pinned against the wall. It was July and Karimova was
furious. She had taken the children to Six Flags Great
Adventure amusement park in New Jersey in a chauffeured car
from the Uzbek U.N. delegation, only to discover at the
ticket booth that her husband had canceled her credit cards.
``When I came back home, he was there having tea as always in
a big room with a happy face looking at us,'' she recalls.
``I said that we could not carry on. That was the end.''
Maqsudi acknowledges suspending the credit cards. ``Every
time Gulnora and I would have an argument, her retaliation--I
guess she learned it from watching TV--she would put $20,000
to $30,000 in shopping charges on the credit cards.''
As the fight escalated, he says, her bodyguards blocked him
from leaving. ``They had me cornered in a room and Gulnora
was threatening, saying whatever she could at the time. She
was throwing things around the room.'' He managed to bolt,
spent the night at his mother's house and came home for a few
hours the next morning to play with the children while
Karimova slept. ``That was the last time I saw the kids,'' he
says. A few hours later, she telephoned from the airport as
she and the children were leaving the country.
He says it was child abduction and a New Jersey court
agrees. She denies it. ``He knew perfectly that I was leaving
with the kids,'' she says. He considered her note about ``The
War of the Roses'' a threat. She says she only meant they
should avoid the craziness that consumed the movie
characters. ``I wrote it with tears,'' she says. ``It was a
very personal letter.''
Within days, Maqsudi's Afghan emigre family in Tashkent
felt repercussions. A cousin and an uncle were arrested and
thrown into prison. Maqsudi's businesses were raided, workers
at his Coke plant harassed, the firms eventually confiscated.
By October 2001, another uncle was behind bars. His parents
were strip-searched at the airport.
Then one night in December, security forces raided three
family houses and rounded up 24 relatives at gunpoint,
including
Maqsudi's 85-year-old grandmother, an Uzbek citizen. The
relatives, nearly all women and children, were driven 13
hours to the Afghan border and dumped on the other side.
``They said, `None of you will live in this country. This
is our country,' '' Maqsudi says.
Karimova denies any involvement and says that officials may
have simply taken advantage of the moment because Maqsudi's
family had long flouted passport requirements. ``Most of his
relatives--and there were a lot of them--did not have proper
papers,'' she says. If it were her choice, she added, ``I
could have deported them later. I would have been much more
sophisticated.''
Both of the estranged spouses went to court. An Uzbek judge
granted Karimova a divorce, while a New Jersey jurist granted
one to Maqsudi. Maqsudi faces arrest if he sets foot in
Uzbekistan and Karimova if she sets foot in the United
States. Since both warrants are filed with Interpol, neither
can safely travel to Europe. ``A civilized divorce,'' Danny
DeVito's character says in ``The War of the Roses,'' ``is a
contradiction in terms.''
the larger relationship
In recent months, both sides in the Uzbek divorce war have
enlisted lobbyists and lawmakers in Washington to hurl
charges and deflect countercharges. Karimova's camp accuses
Maqsudi's firms of import-export shenanigans and various
illegal practices. The most sensational allegation is that
Maqsudi family companies snipped oil from Iraq while Saddam
Hussein was in charge.
One key witness for Karimova, however, was former Maqsudi
employee Farhod Inogambaev, who has since fled Uzbekistan and
recanted his statements. ``Everything was lies,'' he says now
in an interview from New Jersey.
After her separation from her husband, Karimova sent for
him, Inogambaev says, and told him, ``Forget about Mansur.
Now let's do business together.'' Afraid for his family, he
says, he went to work for her. She sent over men to have him
swear out affidavits against her estranged husband. ``I
blindly signed, I blindly typed whatever they said. I just
wanted them to leave me.''
Not only does Inogambaev now disavow the charges, he also
alleges that Karimova siphoned tens of millions of dollars
out of Uzbekistan through various channels, including her own
Citibank account. And he claims that she took over a tourism
firm that arranges visas for Uzbek travelers and used it to
control the flow of Uzbek prostitutes to Dubai.
Karimova dismisses the allegations, calling them ``more
than crazy and more than stupid,'' and contends that
Inogambaev only ``says that for money.''
Maqsudi's Washington lobbyists, led by Richard A. Zimmer, a
Republican former congressman from New Jersey, have gained
some traction. Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) raised the
Interpol arrest warrant against Maqsudi during an October
hearing, calling it ``an abuse of power by the Uzbek
president.'' In February, Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.)
asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to look into the
prostitution allegations, saying, ``We ought to be following
it up very rigorously.''
On the other side, Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) has taken up
Karimova's cause, requesting that Attorney General John
Ashcroft investigate allegations made against Maqsudi in
Uzbekistan.
Asked about the case in private, uncomfortable U.S.
officials decline to say much. For the record, they call it
``an international child abduction case'' and say they have
told Tashkent ``that these issues are unnecessary irritants
in the U.S.-Uzbek relationship,'' according to a written
State Department response to congressional inquiries last
year.
Uzbek officials appear no more eager to talk about it.
``It's a very complicated issue, and I think we should be
very sensitive in touching this very delicate issue,''
Foreign Minister Sadyk Safayev said in an interview in
Tashkent last fall. The two countries' relationship has
burdens enough. The United States wants to keep the military
base it opened in Uzbekistan after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001. Yet under increasing pressure from human
rights groups, the Bush administration warned recently that
it may cut off financial aid if Karimov's record does not
improve.
It's possible the question may ultimately fall to his
daughter. Analysts in Tashkent suspect that the 66-year-old
president is ill and speculate that Karimova is positioning
herself to succeed him. Others assume she is setting herself
up in business with assets abroad in case the family has to
flee.
Maqsudi believes that his ex-wife has the ambition to try
to take over the country. ``She's tasted power and what power
can bring in Uzbekistan,'' he says. ``At times I would say to
her, when we would have arguments, `You're drunk with your
father's power.' They don't want to relinquish or give up the
power they have.''