Shavkat Mirziyoyev

Mirziyoyev was born on July 24, 1957 in the Jizzakh Region of the Uzbek SSR. Some media outlets alleged that he was really born in the village of Yakhtan in the Leninabad Oblast (now the Sughd Region) of Tajikistan, and even unconfirmed claims that he was allegedly a Tajik. After an investigation by several journalists, it was revealed that Yakhtan is the native home of Mirziyoyev's grandfather on his father's side, and that Mirziyoyev himself is an Uzbek, and not a Tajik.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] His father, Miromon Mirziyoyevich Mirziyoyev, worked as a physician for most of his life until death. He worked as the head physician of the tuberculosis dispensary in Zaamin. Urunbek Yakubov, a cousin of Miromon, being a veteran of World War II, became a Hero of the Soviet Union in April 1945. Shavkat's mother Marifat, died at a young age from tuberculosis, which she contracted in the Zaamin tuberculosis dispensary, where she worked as a nurse. After the death of his wife, Miromon Mirziyoyev married a second time to a woman from Tatarstan.[7][12]

In 1981, Mirziyoyev graduated from the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Melioration. He holds a Candidate (Ph.D.) degree in Technological Sciences.[13] He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. In early 1990, he was elected as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR's last from the a district in Tashkent.

He served as governor (Hakim) 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.[3] 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.[14]

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 was to 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.[4]

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!”[15]

Mirziyoyev with Nursultan Nazarbayev at the 2018 SCO summit in China

Mirziyoyev with Vladimir Putin

Mirziyoyev with members of the Uzbek diaspora in the United States

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.[16]

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.[17] That was taken as a sign that Mirziyoyev would succeed Karimov as president.[13] 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".[18] 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.[19][20]

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.[21]

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.[22]

On 12 December 2016, Deputy Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov was nominated to take over from Mirziyoyev as prime minister.[23] 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;[24] a cabinet reshuffle followed on 15 December.[25] On 6 March 2017, he made a state visit to Turkmenistan; it was his first foreign trip after the election.[26]

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.[27][28]

However, the German 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."[29] However, the positive results of his rule are visible. Uzbekistan created more than 336,000 new jobs in 2017.[30] 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.[31] He initiated the project of "Tashkent City", intended to attract foreign investors to Uzbekistan. Mirziyoyev promised to resume negotiations with the World Trade Organization (WTO) on joining the organization in 2018. On several occasions, he sharply criticized the administration and officials in the presence of media.[32]

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.[33] He said:

Some people tell me that I did not know about everything in country when I was a prime minister? I knew everything, but the environment was bad. Now I am talking about it openly, even if some people do not like it. Several years the so-called ‘rats’, ‘the children of some people’ did much to spoil the country's investment fund. Corruption is implicated in many investment projects, and in some projects, it is 50%. Corruption was also in transport policy, both internal and external.

U.S. Secretary of State 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".[34][35]

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.[36] By the end of that year, he had been named the "Asian of the Year of 2018" by the Asia Journalist Association (AJA).[37]

In August 2019 he closed the notorious Jaslyk Prison.[38]

He has two sisters, a half-brother, and sister. Mirziyoyev is married to Ziroatkhon Hoshimova and has two daughters, a son and five grandchildren.[52] 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.[53]

Since coming to power, Mirziyoyev has used the Qibray District to a new residence for himself, which could potentially include a presidential highway,[54] and an interior that is decorated with Argentinian marble slabs and Swarovski crystals.[55]

• Order "Mehnat shuhrati"[56]
• Order "Fidokorona hizmatlari uchun"
• Order of Danaker (Kyrgyzstan)[57]
• Honored Citizen of Seoul (South Korea)[58]
• Prize “For Merits to Eurasia” (Turkey)[59]
• Order of Friendship (Kazakhstan)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Shavkat Mirziyoev.

• Government of Uzbekist'on Official Website
• Жаноб Президент, a 2018 documentary on Mirziyoyev commissioned by the Press Service of the president of Uzbekistan
• Official account in Instagram