Sting - The fee helped salve my conscience.

Sting plays concert for daughter of 'boil your enemies' dictator

Enemies of the 72-year-old dictator have been shot in the street and a former British ambassador to the ex-Soviet state even accused him of boiling alive his political opponents.

Yet according to reports by two of the few remaining independent Uzbek media organisations, Sting, 58, accepted up to £2million to sing for Gulnara Karimova, the despot's glamorous daughter and anointed heir.

Uznews.net and Eurasia.net claim the former Police frontman sold out the National Opera House in the capital, Tashkent, in October last year. Tickets went for £1,400 - 45 times the average local monthly salary.

Ex-Communist official Karimov, who came to power in 1989, has locked up 6,000 people who have dared to question his rule.

In 2005, the army slaughtered hundreds who protested against poverty and corruption in the city of Andizhan. And thousands of children are used as slave labour in huge state cotton plantations.

Sting issued this rather piss poor statement.

'I supported wholeheartedly the cultural boycott of South Africa under the apartheid regime because it was a special case and specifically targeted the younger demographic of the ruling white middle class.
'I am well aware of the Uzbek president’s appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment. I made the decision to play there in spite of that.
'I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular.
'I seriously doubt whether the President of Uzbekistan cares in the slightest whether artists like myself come to play in his country, he is hermetically sealed in his own medieval, tyrannical mindset.'

Hopefully, the fee of up to £2 million has made salved Stings conscience. I am sure that those languishing in the prisons or used as slaves on the plantations will be really impressed at his support for them. 

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