07.19.2008

G'town resident to speak at UN event

Gulam Umarov, the Germantown man whose father is a political prisoner in Uzbekistan, has been invited to speak next week at a United Nations conference on "prisoners of conscience."

The event, in New York City, will focus attention on Sanjar Umarov, the Uzbek dissident whose extended family lives in the Aintree Farms section of Germantown.

The elder Umarov has been held since he was arrested in October 2005 for a variety of financial crimes that his family maintains are a pretext for silencing him.

The elder Umarov, founder of the opposition political party Serkuesh Uzbekistonim (Sunshine Uzbekistan), favors democratic, free-market capitalism for the resource-rich former Soviet republic.

A former physicist-mathematician with ties to Mississippi State University, Umarov returned to Uzbekistan to become an oligarch with interests in oil, cotton and telecommunications.

His party is the main opposition to the government of President Islam Karimov.

-- Bartholomew Sullivan

SOURCE: Commercial Appeal