Uzbekistan Bans 'Naming Streets after People'

Ex-Soviet Uzbekistan has banned naming towns, villages, streets and parks after historically "insignificant" people under a new law signed by President Islam Karimov, state-run media said Friday.

The state-run newspaper Khalk Suzi published the text of the law, banning the naming of streets, airports, terminals, and other places after political leaders.

However, crucially, it said an exception exists for "persons who left a deep mark in Uzbekistan's history", without giving further details.

Officials explained that the aim of the law was to halt the widespread habit of some local officials to name places and streets after their own relations.

"In recent years there has been a strange fashion across the country for rich or middle-level officials to try to preserve names of their ancestors in history by naming streets or schools after their fathers, even though they were insignificant persons in terms of national history," an Uzbek official, who declined to give his name, told AFP.

"So it is a very good and timely adopted law," he said.

The Uzbek parliament adopted the law "On Naming of Geographic Objects" in August.

Karimov signed the law on Thursday.

In the last two decades after Uzbekistan became an independent nation, authorities have changed most of the Soviet-era names from the period of what official media calls "a colonial Russian occupation."

But the spate of renaming has long proved a source of controversy.

One regional governor, for example, named a cemetery after his mother.

A family named a public school after its head of the family who worked there as a teacher.

In Uzbek capital Tashkent, a street named after Uzbek scientist Giyos Umarov was renamed after Umarov's son Sanjar became an opposition leader, jailed in 2006 and upon his released fled to the U.S. in 2010.