[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 65 (Tuesday, May 11, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E807-E809]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              BATTLE ROYAL

                                 ______
                                 

                       HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, May 11, 2004

  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. 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

[[Page E808]]

     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

[[Page E809]]

     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.''

                          ____________________