Sanjar Umarov tweeted the other day that this video helped keep him sane when he was enduring the torture and deprivation of prison in Uzbekistan.

The clip has one of those tunes by a sentimental Russian boy-girl band, and yet, once Umarov tells you that this was his inspiration, it takes on a very different tone. And then listening again, you realize that it does have some nice hooks.

Kitschy maybe, but about running away… sailing far, far away from the horror of that prison, and inspiring Umarov to keep enduring until finally he was released and permitted to rejoin his family in the US.

Thinking about Umarov's ordeal, I recalled seeing his testimony first-hand when he spoke in Congress last summer and I was able to ask him questions. It was one of the most searing and riveting accounts I had heard, and I have heard many.

And then I thought of this other video getting some play these days — also in the vein of Soviet kitsch – should it have a name like EurA-Pop or something, like K-Pop  from Korea?

It's by Gulnara Karimova, the Daughter-zilla of Uzbekistan's tyrant, President Islam Karimov, who uses his pet name for her — GooGooSha — as her stage name.

The assassin-like character in the video with the red sash steals the show, jumping and racing and doing impossible stunts against the stunning backdrop of Bukhara's ancient buildings. Meanwhile Goo — who is getting awfully long in the tooth to be playing video-star ingenue, with pouting overpainted lips and plunging neckline — is only an irritant while you wait for the thrilling character to re-appear. The song is insipid and this isn't a hit, despite having billboards painted in New York and probably all sorts of artificial pumping. The lyrics are unintelligible because they're ungrammatical — and who's going to remember them anyway? "I don't want to lose it." Er, didn't you already, you hag?

In the video, the Dictator's Daughter — a French journalist sued by her sister for libel won the right to use this term about Karimova — dressed in something that looks like a costume from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane rides around in a big black car with fancy license plates reminiscent of either a KGB-mobile coming to get you or maybe just one of those big, scary rides the siloviki fancy.

As uznews.net put it, the video is a "gift for chroniclers of Karimov's dictatorship" because of all the possibilities for metaphors and likely the lavish budget involving famous director Avi Cohen. The "assassin" turns out to be Daniel Ilabaca, an athlete and a parkour expert from Britain.

Gulnara is also back again with Style Week, which this year is for some reason hideously called — in transliterated Russian — "Shoot Me" and is supposed to feature photography, but inevitably recalls the horrible Andijan Massacre in 2005 where hundreds of people were gunned down by government troops.

There's a whole industry of pundits eager to trash Gulnara, so I don't need to continue here. They show up opportunistically, however, when they need news copy or an "action" that symbolizes their campaign against the jailing of an AIDS activist Maxim Popov or the exploitation of children as labourers in Uzbekistan's cotton fields.  They get especially catty when GooGoosha, a very easily loathable character, teams up with something the progs also loathe, like Komen, the breast cancer organization that got itself in the lefty social media wringer by daring to decide to withdraw funding from Planned Parenthood because they felt the abortions it commits were controversial. Komen got browbeaten and bullied into restoring the funding and suffered — but not before picking up Karimova along the way for some unknown reason and running some campaign with her in Uzbekistan. Sigh.

But the problem with those who make fun of GooGooSha is that they don't stay the course. They don't *keep* reporting on her. Through the fashion shows. Through the magazines. Through the trips to Paris. Through the perfume she's launching. And then really do some investigative work to determine whether in fact she really did squirrel away the millions from state business coffees to enrich herself and her family. It's always so opaque — and she was just reportedly caught in some caper involving MTS — which was getting kicked out of Uzbekistan the way it was from Turkmenistan.

Yes, Karimova is an easy punching bag and writes the gag lines herself with her antics. Indeed, she is a part of the regime of her daddy the dictator because she holds official positions as the ambassador to Spain and also the UN organizations in Geneva.  But what are people going to do about the prisoners who remain behind in the dungeons Umarov left?

It's been nearly a year since Human Rights Watch issued a big report on Uzbekistan's beleaguered lawyers and their clients in prisons and they haven't been writing much about the prisons or other human rights issues in Uzbekistan since then; there was a report on the anniversary of the Andijan massacre in May; a letter on child labor in June and a few other statements — probably because their researcher was kicked out of there last year and it's hard to get information. Even so, given that the hits just keep on coming from that awful place, with people arrested and tortured and imprisoned unfairly all the time and human rights defenders like Gulshan Karaeva harassed surely more could be done particularly in terms of advocacy.

Yes, I know, it's very hard to keep trying to tell the same story over and over again when it doesn't change and also when you can't get fresh information. But as I pointed out, more could have been done with the NATO summit in Chicago, and US officials go to Central Asia frequently and Uzbeks come here for events like the UN General Assembly.

My complaint about all the international NGOs involved in campaigning on the cotton issue is that they have unnecessarily and unreasonably focused only on child labor (i.e. under age 14), possibly under the theory that this was more fixable or would gain more sympathy. The Uzbek government has only gotten more clever about both hiding the presence of younger children and in fact rounding up older students and adults like doctors and nurses to go and work in the fields. The focus should be on all persons forced into the agricultural system which has rightly been called the largest organized, state-sponsored forced child labor system in the world, and if you consider the adults, likely largest of any forced labor system anywhere. Much  more work should be done on getting the ILO to step up and approve a Commission of Inquiry. Yes, I realize that this has complications and the Commission would never gain entry. But it's something that has to be done to address this intractable problem in Uzbekistan through an institution that Tashkent still has some lingering respect for since Soviet days.

And there's probably a lot more that could be done for prisoners but it's just not a popular topic, both within the HRW pantheon and the larger world of NGOs. For HRW, other topics like Israel can get a lot more enthusiasm, or topics get adopted like youth in solitary confinement in America — who are in fact worthy of advocacy as my source indicated here — but who have good lawyers and domestic human rights groups to take care of them.  Uzbeks don't. The problems of people in Eurasia belong to the basics of human rights work that groups like HRW and Amnesty long since left behind in the name of becoming more "relevant".

I've always felt that it is unfortunate that human rights is a business, that it has to go in cycles of grant-giving, fund-raising, international meetings and their time-tables, and inevitably focuses more on the US than those more responsible for the problem closer to the scene like Russia and even the EU, that Nobel prize-winner that keeps the peace but had so much trouble seeing its way clear to compelling all its businesses to cease doing business with Tashkent.

I wish it was possible to build a movement, even just a little one, even just a silly Facebook group called If You Don't Have a 100 Rubles Have 100 Friends, and just do what you can for people and try to advocate and try to build human bridges to these distressed populations — without the notions of narrow mandate but with an idea that it is possible to create centers of people who refrain from violence and extremism while they fight for human rights. Something like the original idea for Amnesty International, which is of course long gone now.