Harriet Alexander. The Telagraph

Uzbekistan dissents break into first daughter's house to 'reclaim' artefacts

Exiled Uzbek dissidents broke into Geneva home of President Islam Karimov's daughter, publishing images of items allegedly taken from the Uzbek national museum

Gulnara Karimova (left) and an item allegedly taken from the Uzbek national museum 

By Harriet Alexander

7:55PM GMT 05 Jan 2014

The daughter of the president of Uzbekistan has been accused of looting treasures from the country’s national museum to furnish her palatial home in Switzerland.

Gulnara Karimova, 41, had been based on the banks of Lake Geneva as her country’s ambassador to the United Nations. But Sefer Bekjan, a 53-year-old Uzbek dissident, accessed the house with a key he claims was given to him by housekeepers and spent a week living there and documenting its contents – some of which he claims were stolen.

Among the items photographed and published on Mr Bekjan’s blog are gold and silver jewellery, ornate hand-woven oriental rugs, a silver Mercedes and a black Bentley, and an 18th century, jewel-encrusted Koran.

He also claimed to have uncovered more than 60 museum artworks, including rare paintings by celebrated Uzbek artists.

Mr Bekjan took photographs of himself in the evidently empty, dust-sheeted villa, holding aloft a still life entitled “Pomegranate,” by Lev Reznikov, who died in 2003.

Reznikov’s son Igor said the painting had been sold to the Uzbekistan Art Museum in 1990. “It’s a museum item,” he said. “It should be in a museum. When my father sold it, it was clear that he was selling it to a museum.
“So I think it’s the museum that should answer for how this picture ended up [in Geneva]. If the museum didn’t need it any more, if they just wanted to get rid of it, then I’m the first person who would be happy to have it. It’s my father’s work.”
Radio Ozodlik, an opposition radio station broadcasting under Radio Free Europe, said that a former high-ranking official with the Uzbek culture ministry confirmed that the original paintings had vanished from state collections “under pressure from Opa” – a reference to the Uzbek word for “big sister”, as Ms Karimova is commonly known among the Uzbek public.
Ms Karimova, a divorced mother-of-two viewed until recently as a potential successor to her 75-year-old dictator father, has recently endured a very public fall from grace.
As a fashion designer, diplomat, pop singer and businesswoman she was one of Uzbekistan’s most high profile individuals, but she now believes her mother and sister are part of a plot to discredit her.
She took to Twitter to vent her fury in November after Uzbek television and radio stations imposed a media blackout, and accused unspecified enemies of trying to poison her with mercury. She also castigated her father’s feared security service in an interview with The Guardian last month, and made allegations of corruption against a number of senior figures in the Uzbek regime.
Radio Ozodlik said last week that Ms Karimova had accused the security services of giving Mr Bekjan the key, in an effort to further blacken her name.