The Real Nepo Babies of Central Asia

In mid-August, Sardor Umurzakov, who had served as head of the Uzbek presidential administration since July 2022, was dismissed and the post abolished. A week later, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev issued a raft of decrees, which served to reorganize the presidential administration. At the top of the list was his daughter, Saida Mirziyoyeva, under the unassuming title of “assistant to the president.”

Once again a leader in Central Asia had looked first to his family to fill a critical government position. 

Last year, the phrase “nepo baby” went viral as a reference to the children of celebrities who also rose to stardom, with the implication being that their fame is at least in part built on their parents’ industry connections. (The word “nepo” here is shorthand for “nepotism,” the practice of handing out jobs to relatives.)

In Central Asia, nepo babies are all too common – only they appear in politics as well as in entertainment. What do these nepo babies tell us about Central Asia and Central Asian politics?

First a review of the real nepo babies of Central Asia. We won’t be able to get to all the cousins and in-laws, but here’s a brief rundown.

In Tajikistan, we have Rustam Emomali, the son of Tajik President Emomali Rahmon. He has served as the chairman of the National Assembly, the upper chamber of the Tajik parliament, since April 2020, and as the mayor of Dushanbe since his January 2017 appointment by his father. Rustam is widely expected to become president whenever his father tires of the position and/or judges the moment ripe for the switch. Meanwhile, his older sister, Ozoda Rahmon, has served as head of the presidential administration – a post akin to chief of staff – since January 2016.

In Turkmenistan, Serdar Berdimuhamedov, the eldest son of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, succeeded his father as president in March 2022. It marked the first dynastic succession of power in modern Central Asia. In early 2023, however, the Turkmen government was reorganized in such a way that Gurbanguly, as head of the People's Council, was once again the top authority in the country. Serdar, however, remains president.

Kyrgyzstan is a curious case. It has churned through by far the most leaders in the region, and nepotism featured prominently in the complaints aired by the protesters who drove the country’s first two presidents out of power. Subsequent Kyrgyz presidents seemed to learn the lesson, but current President Sadyr Japarov is testing the nepotistic waters.

The children of Kyrgyzstan’s first president, Askar Akayev, found themselves in plush positions: Aidar Akayev, for example, was appointed chief advisor to the Minister of Finance in 2001 and headed both the Kyrgyz Olympic Committee and the Boxing Federation in 2004 and 2005. In 1999, he even married Aliya Nazarbayeva, the youngest daughter of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. (It didn’t last long; they separated in 2001). By the spring of 2005, both Akayev’s son Aidar and his daughter, Bermet Akayeva, had been “elected” to the Jogorku Kenesh, Kyrgyzstan’s parliament. The election, seen as rigged by many, triggered the revolution that swept Akayev from power.

His successor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, railed against Akayev’s nepotistic regime but didn’t listen to his own speeches. He appointed his son Maxim to head the Central Agency for Development, Investment, and Innovation in November 2009 and within five months was himself hounded from power. The older Bakiyev ended up in Belarus and Maxim in the U.K., where he claimed political asylum and as of 2012 reportedly lived, according to Global Witness, in a 3.5 million pound Surrey mansion “purchased by an ‘anonymous company’...linked to an alleged money-laundering scheme used to funnel state funds out of Kyrgyzstan.”

Kyrgyzstan’s next three leaders – interim President Rosa Otunbayeva (2010-2011), President Almazbek Atambayev (2011-2017), and President Sooronbay Jeenbekov (2017-2020) – generally took note of their predecessor’s problematic nepotism and their families stayed relatively out of the spotlight.

For example, when Atambayev was arrested in 2019, local media outlet 24.kg ran an entire story on the fact that one of his sons (he has 10 children from two marriages), Seytek Atambayev, didn’t want to comment publicly. Some of Atambayev’s other children had done so, which is not necessarily surprising. One of his daughters, Aliya Shagieva, began her comment by noting: “I have never interfered in politics…” before criticizing the state for detaining her father. His youngest son, Kadyr Atambayev, seems to have political ambitions and he became a local councilor in Bishkek in 2021; however, that feat was hardly assisted by his father being in prison.

For Jeenbekov, politics was a family game. His younger brother, Asylbek, had his own political career. When Sooronbay was serving as governor of Osh from 2012 to 2016, Asylbek was serving as speaker of parliament. When Sooronbay was elected prime minister in April 2016, Asylbek resigned from his post.

What of Kyrgyzstan’s current president, Japarov, who came into power in 2020 straight from a prison cell? Japarov had been among those who criticized Akayev and Bakiyev for their nepotism. In a recent interview, however, Japrov confirmed that his son, Rustam Japarov, was “supervising” construction of a resort complex on Issyk-Kul which was sold to his friend for a pittance when the previous owner fled Kyrgyzstan under a cloud of suspicion. 

Rustam, according to his father, “is looking for and attracting investors. They trust him.” It’s not clear what qualifications Rustam has, besides being his father’s son. He has appeared on the sidelines of various politically significant events, such as attending the 2022 Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Samarkand.

Japarov also recently admitted that reporting from Kloop, an independent Kyrgyz media outlet known for its corruption investigations, about the involvement of his relatives (as well as those of security service head Kamchibek Tashiev) in the Barca Academy project was essentially true. Kloop is now facing closure by the state anyway, with prosecutors filing a lawsuit against the outlet shortly after its report on the Barca Academy dropped, alleging “most of the publications are purely negative, aimed at discrediting representatives of state and municipal bodies.”

Then there’s Kazakhstan, which is an especially interesting case for the rampant nepotism that characterized the nearly 30-year Nazarbayev era. President Nursultan Nazravayev has no sons, but three daughters: Dariga, Dinara, and the briefly aforementioned Aliya. Entire books could be written on the Nazarbayev family’s nepotism, but for the purposes of this article it’s worth noting a few things. First, at the time of Nazarbayev’s resignation in March 2019, the then-chair of the Senate, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, acceded to the presidency as constitutionally mandated. Dariga was immediately elected chair of the Senate, placing her second-in-line to the presidency.

Dinara is married to Timur Kulibayev, one of Kazakhstan’s richest men and together they control a significant portion of the Kazakh banking sector. Aliya, after her failed marriage to Aidar Akayev, married Dimash Dosanov, a prominent figure in the oil and gas industry in Kazakhstan. In 2019, Kulibayev held a variety of positions, including as head of the Atameken business lobby; Dosanov was general director of KazTransOil, the largest oil pipeline company in Kazakhstan. And Dariga’s alleged husband, Kairat Sharipbayev, was chairman of QazaqGaz, the country’s national natural gas pipeline operator.

The Nazarbayev family network began to fall out of favor as Tokayev asserted himself in the presidency. Dariga was dismissed from the Senate in May 2020. The January 2022 events, which saw protests across Kazakhstan serve as a veil for a murky struggle between Kazakhstan’s powerbrokers, struck a death-knell for the Nazarbayev family’s prominence. In the weeks and months after, Nazarbayev’s relatives came under extraordinary pressure. One nephew, Kairat Satybaldy, was sentenced to six years on embezzlement charges. And the three sons-in-law “resigned” from their cushy posts.

Tokayev, so far, seems to have taken a path closer to that of Kyrgyzstan’s post-Bakiyev, pre-Japarov presidents. Parts of the constitutional referendum passed in June 2022 specifically targeted nepotism risks by banning relatives of the president from holding government positions. Tokayev is divorced and only has one son, an oil entrepreneur living in Geneva who allegedly operates the Abi Petroleum Capital oil company with his cousin, Mukhamed. There have been some allegations of corruption, namely the Tokayevs funneling money through Switzerland and employing various other methods to offshore their wealth. 

Tokayev did appoint his brother-in-law, Temirtai Izbastin, ambassador to Bulgaria in 2021. That said, Izbastin has served in the Kazakh Foreign Ministry since the 1990s and Bulgaria is hardly a cushy diplomatic post, making the appointment interesting but not as fascinating as the infamous career of Uzbekistan’s Gulnara Karimov.

Uzbekistan’s Nepotistic History – And Future?

Uzbekistan’s nepotistic history has its own distinctive features. The country’s first president, Islam Karimov, famously grew up in an orphanage. His family was far smaller than the vast network of Nazarbayev relations or Rahmon’s family enterprise. And for Karimov, nepotism wasn’t a problem until it very much was.

Gulnara Karimova is perhaps the most famous nepo baby in Central Asia, as much for the absurd high as for the dramatic fall from grace. Her career spanned the full spectrum, from ambassador to pop star to telecommunications scammer. A 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable once referred to her as “robber baron.” 

It all became too much for Karimov when news broke in 2014 that Swiss prosecutors were investigating Karimova as part of a money laundering and bribery investigation involving Nordic telecommunications firms operating in Uzbekistan. By the end of the year she was under house arrest. Her father’s death in 2016 only worsened her position: Gulnara was tried on various corruption charges and jailed; her assets and properties, valued in the many millions, around the world have been seized, and the Uzbek government has pursued efforts to repatriate the funds.

In the wake of that legacy, Saida Mirziyoyeva’s service in and around the Uzbek government comes with a different flavor – but at the end of the day it’s still nepotism. In 2019, she took on her first important post, working as the deputy director of the Information and Mass Communications Agency under Komil Allamjonov; in 2020 she became deputy chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Public Fund for Support and Development of the National Mass Media, also under Allamjonov. Indeed, the two often move in tandem. 

Allamjonov previously served as Mirziyoyev’s press secretary. Although the Public Fund for Support and Development of the National Mass Media is registered as an NGO in Uzbekistan, the fact that its board’s two most prominent members came directly from a government agency, and one is the child of the president, suggests a significant government connection.

In November 2022, Mirziyoyeva was appointed head of the communications department for the presidential administration. Less than a year later, in late August of this year, she was made an “assistant to the president.” That understated appointment was first among a long list of appointments made in the presidential administration (including Allamjonov as head of the Information Policy Department), and so Mirziyoyeva is widely believed to now be the head of the presidential administration. RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service, known locally as Ozodlik, reported that she is viewed as the “second person” in the government after the president; Uzbekistan, importantly, does not have a vice presidential post. 

Ozodlik previously reported that as many as 20 relatives of the president have government posts now, including his daughters, nieces, nephews, sons-in-law and their relatives. Mirziyoyev’s youngest daughter, Shaxnoza Mirziyoeva, is first deputy director of the National Agency for Social Security. His two sons-in-law, Otabek Umarov (Shaxnoza’s husband) and Oybek Tursunov (married to Saida) have important posts or connections. Umarov is reportedly the de facto head of Mirziyoev's presidential security and has his own business dealings, of course. Tursunov served a stint as head of the presidential administration but now is typically characterized as an important businessman. His father, Batyr, is first deputy chief of Uzbekistan's State Security Service.

The details are difficult to tease out as there is a high degree of self-censorship when it comes to reporting on the president’s family. It is viewed, not surprisingly, as a sensitive subject. And so, paradoxically, while Saida Mirziyoyeva has worked in largely media-oriented positions, and spoken on the importance of journalism in Uzbekistan (as has President Mirziyoyev), her father does not like that journalism to be sicced on his own family.

Why Do Central Asian Leaders Turn to Family?

Why is nepotism seemingly so rampant in Central Asia? Cultural norms bear some of the responsibility here but only by providing a fertile soil. As in many places around the world, Central Asian culture revolves closely around the family unit – not the narrow nuclear family of parents and children, but the wider family network that extends from sisters and brothers to cousins and in-laws. This, when combined with the weak rule of law that is also common across Central Asia, is what produces the prime conditions under which nepotism flourishes. 

Corruption is poorly policed in Central Asia, in no small part because it is key to the operations of the region’s autocratic governments. When certain people get rich, they don’t bother making a political fuss and don’t complain about the system that enriches them. Sometimes they get greedy, and those who previously enabled their corruption temporarily put on their anti-corruption crusader caps to clean the slate. This is arguably what happened to Karimova, a situation exacerbated by the fact that her father was not known to be a kind or forgiving man. 

This is also what happened to Rakhat Aliyev, Dariga Nazarbayev’s first husband. He served in a variety of European ambassadorial posts up until 2007 when he dramatically fell from grace. He acquired Nurbank, a Atyrau-based bank, in January 2007 and shortly thereafter two of the bank’s managers went missing (their bodies were found in 2011). While that mystery began to bloom, in February 2007, he was suddenly appointed ambassador to Austria and left Kazakhstan. In May, he was dismissed from his post, after criticizing Nazarbayev for essentially making himself president-for-life, and in June, Dariga divorced him. Accusations of money-laundering and murder rolled in thereafter. Aliyev lived on the run in Malta for a few years before being arrested in Austria in 2014. In 2015, he died in prison, reportedly by suicide. It’s a dark lesson in crossing a powerful family.

Without the restrictions that necessarily come with the rule of law, and amid the family-oriented milieu of Central Asia, it makes perfect sense to appoint family members to key posts or give friends lucrative contracts. Families can be messy, as noted above, but in the end it’s all about loyalty. Loyalty is necessary in an autocracy because the leader’s power is undergirded only by the perception that he is powerful and has at his ready disposal the tools of the state: all the guns and all the butter. A Central Asian president, try as he might, cannot run the entirety of the government on his own. He needs trusted bureaucrats to carry out his policies and cater to his whims. He needs loyal underlings. And who is more loyal than family?