KARIMOVA
Fashion show is off.
Murderous tyrants are out of fashion — in New York, at least.
IMG, the producer of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, canceled Gulnara Karimova’s Lincoln Center runway show following The Post’s story on her complicity in the human-rights abuses of her father, Islam Karimov, who as dictator of Uzbekistan has killed, tortured and enslaved thousands of his countrymen for more than 20 years.
“As a result of concerns raised, we have canceled the Guli show on September 15th,” an IMG spokesman said yesterday.
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Karimova, once described by US diplomats as “a robber baron” who is “the single most hated person in the country,” didn’t respond to requests for comment yesterday.
But sources said the fascista fashionista, unaccustomed to giving in to protesters, at first refused to cancel her show.
“IMG canceled it on its own,” according to a fashion insider.
Event sponsor Mercedes-Benz has come under fire for Karimova’s show, as the German auto giant has a long, controversial relationship with her father that includes years of alleged bribes and kickbacks for lucrative government contracts for trucks, buses and luxury cars, as well as a joint-manufacturing venture.
Mercedes insisted yesterday its cozy relationship with Uzbekistan had nothing to do with Karimova getting the show.
“We have no influence on the contents of the fashion show or the program itself,” said Han Tjan, a spokesman for Mercedes. “We’re just sponsoring. If you’re the sponsor of the football game, you can’t decide who is playing.”
Human-rights groups cheered the move by IMG but still plan to demonstrate next week against Karimov’s abuses, which have included rounding up more than 1.5 million citizens nationwide — many of them children — to pick cotton every summer.
“Everyone had to go to the fields and pick cotton,” and families who didn’t meet minimums were forced to pay fines, Uzbek native Elena Muranov, who now lives in the United States, told The Post. “I remember my father could never collect enough cotton, therefore I would help him so that he wouldn’t have to pay.”
Retailers, including Macy’s, Gap and Walmart, have boycotted Uzbek cotton to protest the practice.
Karimova, who sang a duet with Julio Iglesias and booked Sting for a concert in the Central Asian nation in 2009, has long played key roles in her father’s repressive government, including as ambassador to the United Nations.
Her Fashion Week disaster comes at an inopportune time for her father, who once had thugs boil a political foe alive.
President Obama has been weighing a plan to lift restrictions on arms sales and other privileges to Uzbekistan, according to a Washington source.
“They want to use the Uzbek roads, the airports, the transportation networks to get into Afghanistan,” the official said. “Since the raid on Osama bin Laden, they’re having trouble doing it from Pakistan.”