BHHRG

No-one inside Uzbekistan and few outside is the answer to the first part of this question if you believe the Western media, and almost everyone in Uzbekistan opposes the regime according to the same interpretation. The idea that “Everyone”, or at least everyone in Uzbekistan apart from his henchmen opposes the President is simplistic propaganda. Things are much more complicated than anti-Karimov propaganda suggests. There is a lot of evidence that Uzbek society is not as unanimous as glib media reports of The People versus The Tyrant suggest.
The Russian Central Asian analyst, Andrei Grozin, argued that the Karimov regime had structural supports as well as opponents: “The system that has developed since Uzbekistan gained independence is not a superstructure, which is not inherent to Uzbek society. The regime would not have maintained itself on guns alone and on the will of Islam Karimov, if it did not have the wide support of considerable groups of society. I am very skeptical about democratizing Uzbekistan and the Fergana Valley in particular. Mass consciousness there is for the large part is not disposed towards modernization. Values accepted worldwide are often not applicable here.”[1]