Shavkat Mirziyoyev


Shavkat Miromonovich Mirziyoyev Mirziyoyev, Uzbek Cyrillic: Шавкат Миромонович is an Uzbek politician who has served as President of Uzbekistan and Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Uzbekistan since 2016. Previously he was the Prime Minister of Uzbekistan from 2003 to 2016.
Following the death of President Islam Karimov, he was appointed by the Supreme Assembly as interim president of Uzbekistan on 8 September 2016. He was subsequently elected as president in the December 2016 presidential election, winning 88.6% of the vote, and was sworn in on 14 December 2016.

Life and career

In 1981, Mirziyoyev graduated from the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Melioration. He holds a Candidate degree in Technological Sciences.
He served as governor of Jizzakh Region from 1996 to September 2001, then as governor of Samarqand Region from September 2001 until his appointment as prime minister in 2003. He was nominated as prime minister by President Islam Karimov on 12 December 2003, and approved by the Uzbek parliament. He replaced Prime Minister Oʻtkir Sultonov. His deputy was Ergash Shoismatov.
Mirziyoyev and Han Myeong-sook, the Prime Minister of South Korea, met in Tashkent on 25 September 2006. They signed several agreements, including one deal in which Uzbekistan will send 300 tons of Uzbek uranium ore to South Korea every year from 2010 to 2014. The deal bypasses U.S. companies that acted previously as middlemen for South Korean imports of Uzbek uranium ore. Han also met with President Islam Karimov and parliament speaker Erkin Xalilov. Han and Mirziyoyev boosted cooperation in the energy, agriculture, construction, architecture, and information technology sectors. Trade between South Korea and Uzbekistan increased by nearly 40% between 2005 and 2006, to $565 million.
According to a 2017 report by Human Rights Watch on forced and child labour in the cotton sector of Uzbekistan, during his time as prime minister from 2003 to 2016 Mirziyoyev "oversaw the cotton production system, and as the previous governor of
Jizzakh and Samarkand, he was in charge of two cotton-producing regions. The 2016 harvest, when Mirziyoyev was acting president and retained control over cotton production, continued to be defined by mass involuntary mobilization of workers under threat of penalty." The report states that during a 2015 conference call with local authorities and farmers, Mirziyoyev said “Go to the homes of farmers in debt, who can’t repay their credit, take their cars, livestock, and if there are none, take the slate from their roofs!”

Presidency

A member of the Samarkand clan, he was considered to be one of the leading potential successors to Islam Karimov as President of Uzbekistan. Mirziyoyev was reported to have friendly relations with Karimov's wife, Tatyana Karimova, and National Security Council chairman Rustam Inoyatov.
After the death of Karimov was announced on 2 September 2016, Mirziyoyev was appointed as head of the committee organizing the funeral of the President. That was taken as a sign that Mirziyoyev would succeed Karimov as president. On 8 September 2016, he was appointed as interim president of Uzbekistan by a joint session of both houses of parliament. Although the chairman of the Senate, Nigmatilla Yuldashev, was constitutionally designated as Karimov's successor, Yuldashev proposed that Mirziyoyev take the post of interim president instead in light of Mirziyoyev's "many years of experience". There were expectations that Mirziyoyev would repair Uzbek relations with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He started to settle a long-running border dispute with Kyrgyzstan, and regular flights between the capitals of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were set to resume in January 2017 for the first time since 1992.
The electoral commission announced on 16 September that Mirziyoyev would stand in the December 2016 presidential election as the candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Mirziyoyev won the election, held on 4 December 2016, with 88.6% of the vote according to official results, defeating three minor candidates. The election was described by The Economist as a sham; the paper wrote that Mirziyoyev's bent was as authoritarian as that of Karimov and that state media claimed the choice was between Mirziyoyev, chaos, or Islamic radicalism. It also claimed that the three opponents were only on the ballot to keep up the appearance of pluralism. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said the election lacked "a genuine choice," pointing to instances of ballot box stuffing and proxy voting.
On 12 December 2016, Deputy Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov was nominated to take over from Mirziyoyev as prime minister. Mirziyoyev was sworn in as president on 14 December, vowing to "continue the work of my dear teacher, the great statesman Islam Karimov", while also promising "many changes in the cabinet". Aripov was confirmed as prime minister by parliament on the same day; a cabinet reshuffle followed on 15 December. On 6 March 2017, he made a state visit to Turkmenistan; it was his first foreign trip after the election.
In the three months following the death of Islam Karimov, Mirziyoyev began to hint at reforms to longstanding policies that had held back the Uzbek economy and isolated the country internationally, so many analysts believed that Mirziyoyev would be a better president than his predecessor.
However, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development noted that "The people of Uzbekistan play no part in political decision-making processes. So far, no parliamentary or presidential election held in the post-Soviet era has been considered as either free or fair by the international community... Given the sensitive political situation in Uzbekistan, development cooperation activities there are implemented as far away from government circles as possible." However, the positive results of his rule are visible. Uzbekistan created more than 336,000 new jobs in 2017. The volume of exports increased by almost 15 percent. In 2018, the total financial indicator of exports is expected at 12.1 billion US dollars. He initiated the project of "Tashkent City", intended to attract foreign investors to Uzbekistan. Mirziyoyev promised to resume negotiations with the World Trade Organization on joining the organization in 2018. On several occasions, he sharply criticized the administration and officials in the presence of media.
On 22 December, the first time in the country's history, Shavkat Mirziyoyev made an appeal to the parliament. His speech lasted for four hours. He said:
Mike Pompeo meets with the President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev, at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., on 17 May 2018.
Some analysts think Mirziyoyev wants to enter in history as a reformer. He removed most of Karimov's officials and urged government to employ "new, young people who love their country." After a year of in office, Mirziyoyev is increasingly moving away from his predecessor's policy, which is especially visibly in his active foreign policy. He visited all the Uzbek regions and big cities to get acquainted with the implementation of the projects and reforms which he had ordered. Many analysts and Western media compared his rule with Chinese Deng Xiaoping or Russian Mikhail Gorbachev; his rule has been quoted as being an "Uzbek Spring".
In May 2018, Mirziyoyev was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize by Olimzhon Tukhtanazarov, who is a representative of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. By the end of that year, he had been named the "Asian of the Year of 2018" by the Asia Journalist Association.
In August 2019 he closed the notorious Jaslyk Prison.

Foreign policy

Mirziyoyev's foreign policy is much more open than the policy of his predecessor. Uzbekistan was practically under international isolation after the Andijan massacre in 2005 and Karimov rarely travelled outside of Central Asia and other CIS states. Mirziyoyev promised to conduct an active foreign policy at the beginning of his tenure. During the first 10 months, Mirziyoyev visited Kazakhstan four times, Turkmenistan three times, Russia two times, as well as China, Saudi Arabia, United States, Turkey and Kyrgyzstan. At the different occasions, he met the presidents of Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bulgaria, Belarus and the King of Spain. During the CIS Summit in Tashkent in November 2017, he met 8 Prime Ministers of foreign countries. One of his most significant foreign policy achievements is the gradual improvement of relations with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. On 5 September, just 3 days after the anniversary of the death of his predecessor, he made a historic visit to Kyrgyzstan. That was the first state visit of an Uzbek President to this neighboring country since 2000. On 19 September, he addressed the UN General Assembly for the first time. In 2018, a large number of foreign leaders visited and or are expected in Uzbekistan, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko whose visit took place in September and was his first state visit to the country in 24 years. In March 2018, he made a visit to Tajikistan, which made him the first Uzbek president to conduct a state visit to Dushanbe since 2000.
Mirziyoyev has also taken an important role in Afghanistan by offering to host peace talks between the government and the Taliban since March 2018. During the week of 6–10 August 2018 a Taliban delegation visited Tashkent, at the request of Mirziyoyev, to discuss issues including transport, power and peace in Afghanistan. Shavkat Mirziyoyev attended the Vibrant Gujarat international investment summit as a key guest, being the first Central Asian leader to participate as a partner in the summit. In early 2019, it was announced that Mirziyoyev plans to visit 36 countries in official visits planned for throughout the year.
In March 2019, Mirziyoyev held a telephone conversation with Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had resigned from office that day. In it, he expressed regret to the ex-president, saying that he was a "great politician".
During a visit to Abu Dhabi in March 2019, Mirziyoyev came away from his talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed over 10 billion dollars in infrastructure, alternative energy and agriculture deals, as well as deals in other spheres.

Personal life

His father, Miromon Mirziyoyev, worked as a physician for most of his life until death. He worked as the head physician of the tuberculosis dispensary in Zaamin. He also has two sisters, a half-brother, and sister. Mirziyoyev is married to Ziroatkhon Hoshimova and has two daughters, a son and five grandchildren. His eldest son-in-law, Oybek Tursunov, is the current head of the Mirziyoyev's presidential administration, while his younger son-in-law, Otabek Shahanov is the head of the presidential security services.
Since coming to power, Mirziyoyev has used the Qibray District to a new residence for himself, which could potentially include a presidential highway, and an interior that is decorated with Argentinian marble slabs and Swarovski crystals.

Awards