Monthly archives: November 2004

IRIN News – UZBEKISTAN: Interview with Craig Murray, former UK ambassador

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IRIN News – UZBEKISTAN: Interview with Craig Murray, former UK ambassador

ANKARA, 18 Nov 2004 (IRIN) – While a mission from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) is touring Central Asia, Uzbekistan, long criticised by the international community over its poor human rights record and the practice of torture, is cracking down on independent Muslims following the terrorist attacks earlier this year and the situation is not likely to improve, Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Tashkent, told IRIN in an interview on Thursday.

Murray, who served in Central Asia’s most populous country for more than two years, said that the Uzbek government was giving very few economic opportunities to its 25 million odd population, a situation likely to cause more violent reaction to the government’s harsh policies.

QUESTION: Human rights abuses in Uzbekistan have been well documented by international organisations, but what additional information do you have to add to the picture based on your experiences as British ambassador in Tashkent?

ANSWER: I am not sure I can add much to the excellent documentation by groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Pen and Forum 18 not to mention the report by Theo van Boven, UN special rapporteur on torture.

I would, however, like to see more work done on the absence of economic freedom. In particular, the system of internal movement control means that those born on state farms – 60 percent of the population – are effectively serfs.

The widespread use by the state of forced child labour in the cotton harvest also should be highlighted further. This is one area [where] I would like to see the UN take a much more active role.

Where I could help on the ground was in interpreting events. For example, the US has praised certain areas of so-called progress in reform, such as the abolition of censorship or the abolition of two counts of the death penalty.

In fact, censorship is total, and while two redundant counts of the death penalty were abolished – genocide and armed aggression against another state, neither of which had ever been used – at the same time the definition of treason was expanded to include a wide range of opposition activity. The net result was that the death penalty was more, not less, active.

Q: Can anything be done by the outside world to challenge the culture of human rights abuse you have referred to on a number of occasions, both while serving as ambassador and since?

A: I think the outside world has a certain leverage because Uzbekistan is party to a great many international treaties and conventions she does not respect – the UN convention against torture being one obvious example.

Furthermore, Uzbekistan is a member of a number of organisations – including the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) – which have basic commitments to values, which Uzbekistan does not respect. Indeed, President [Islam] Karimov openly rejects so-called Western values and democracy, which are in fact universal.

So far only the EBRD has grasped the nettle of dealing with a state which fails to respect its fundamental values, but I feel that is an excellent example. It no longer will lend to Uzbekistan, except in certain highly specialised circumstances.

Q: Do you feel the West’s policy of constructive engagement with Tashkent had produced any positive results or do you feel it has stalled reform?

A: The economy of Uzbekistan is getting worse and repression gets harsher and harsher. I do not see, therefore, how the West can claim engagement has worked. I recall a meeting this year where the US Ambassador said the US had many full-time advisers in Uzbek economic ministries. I said that left two choices – either their advice was not being followed, or they were giving rubbish advice.

With its extraordinary economic policy of clamping down on private economic activity and closing its borders to trade, I think aid from the US, Japan and the ADB in particular has been essential in propping up the Karimov regime.

Equally important has been the fulsome political support for Karimov from all the senior figures in the US administration, from Bush down. To support such a vicious dictatorship can never be right and as the Tashkent regime tortures innocent Muslims, US support for him can only increase hatred for the West in the Islamic world.

Q: The jury is still out on who was responsible for the March bombings in Tashkent and Bokhara, the authorities were quick to label the attacks as the work of religious extremists. Now hundreds of young Uzbeks are being branded Islamic radicals and tried accordingly. What, in your view, was behind the bombings, and are we likely to see more such attacks?

A: Growing poverty, lack of economic opportunity and the absence of any democratic opportunity for change, or even any opportunity to express their views peacefully, has driven many young people to despair in Uzbekistan. This is made worse as many have seen family members unjustly imprisoned and tortured.

We cannot therefore be surprised that some are driven to violence. I condemn violence completely, but a regime as brutal and kleptocratic as Karimov’s will always provoke some violent reaction.

I believe that the March bombings were carried out by young Muslims. But I have researched this carefully – I personally visited all the bomb sites within a couple of hours of the blasts. I have spoken to witnesses and families of both alleged perpetrators and victims. From this I know that the young activists were very heavily penetrated by the Uzbek security services and there is a reason to believe this was an agent provocateur operation – which is probably why ordinary policemen, not political figures, were attacked.

The extreme repression of the Uzbek regime means that often underground radical Islam is the only opposition to Karimov that young people encounter, so it looks to them an attractive option. The west should transfer all the resources it spends on the Karimov regime into promoting a democratic alternative – for example by funding analogue television programming in from powerful transmitters in neighbouring countries, and through very substantial funding and training for the democratic opposition. Otherwise

more violence is inevitable.

Q: Despite its size and resources, Uzbekistan remains one of the poorest of the countries that used to make up the Soviet Union. What are the causes of this poverty and what impact is it having at a grassroots level, particularly in rural areas?

A: Uzbekistan has taken the worst features of the Soviet command economy and ratcheted up the pressure still further to ensure that only a tiny minority of the elite reaps major economic benefits and maintains political control.

Increasing poverty is measurable in poor diet, increasing health problems, decreasing literacy, especially among females, and a sharp decline in ownership of consumer durables. Rural families often have lost all household goods now to buy food. The result is rapid radicalisation of the population. I predict increasing agrarian tension and violence in the next 12 months.

Q: In a recent speech in London you spoke about the alarming levels of heroin now transiting through Uzbekistan, why do you think that is and what are the consequences for the country if the trade is not curbed?

A: Uzbekistan is not just a transit country, but heroin usage is also rapidly increasing. Among young people in Samarkand and Bokhara in particular – on the transit route – it is epidemic. Consequences include increasing crime and HIV. In these towns youth unemployment is about 60 percent (the Uzbek government says 0.5 percent!).

The major problem is that senior members of the regime are personally engaged in narcotics trafficking, rendering useless all the money the West and the UN is spending on equipment and training for Uzbek customs.

Government vehicles and the vehicles shuttling back and forth between the regime and general [Rashid] Dostum [in northern Afghanistan] carry the narcotics – and these vehicles are not stopped by customs. The small amount of interception of private smugglers might be characterised as eliminating the competition.

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“Selling Our Souls for Dross”

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Sobaka’s Notebook

by Cali Ruchala

It began ordinarily enough for what’s being billed a merchant’s revolt: a dispute about taxes, about trade, about “contraband.” Only, in Uzbekistan, “contraband” is broadly defined as any product which might sustain a citizen’s life, when the citizen is not related to Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov.

Over the last three years, since I was last in the country, the Uzbek authorities have been receding back to their Bolshevik roots. Ordinary trade – the buying or selling or trading of milk, or clothing, or foodstuffs on a person-to-person basis – has been all but outlawed, with just enough negligence to ensure that their millions of rather wretched citizens somehow find a way to get by. Bazaars were closed in November 2002 to weed out “corruption.” It did no such thing but it ensured that these potential dens of espionage and anti-Karimov activity were suitably smaller and easier to monitor when they were re-opened.

Payments once made in cash are now forced through the state-controlled banking sector. Since the government oversees the flow of money, it often arbitrarily obstructs or delays ordinary transactions as a crude way to fight inflation. It’s not helping. Since August, anecdotal evidence has it (since the official predictions always promise sunshine), prices have gone up by as much as 25% across the board.

In Kokand, they finally had enough. If it had happened in 1984 rather than 2004, the US embassy in Moscow might have released a circular sternly drawing attention to the misery of the Uzbek people under Communism. But since Uzbeks now blanch under our kind of totalitarianism, hardly a word was uttered by our sentinels of freedom and other Yale graduates about the November 1st riots which began in the troublesome Ferghana Valley and soon spread in a wave of looting and hurled stones across the country.

Those stones, to a romantic, might be said to be the first blows that will knock the arrogantly evil Islam Karimov r?gime off its pedestal. Thanks to the almost insane policies of the Americans for the last decade, however, what replaces it will almost certainly be as awful.

Throughout the 1990s, the Americans had very little to do with Uzbekistan. Central Asia was, as the policy wonks and professional freedomologists told us, “in transition”. This was a good enough alibi to shell a parliament with tanks, as Boris Yeltsin did. And so it provided enough political cover for Islam Karimov to outlaw the peaceful opposition and drag his dissidents through the jails or across the borders of the country. The “old opposition,” as they’re even now being called today, is mostly based in Europe now, as none of the countries bordering Uzbekistan feel quite secure enough to harbour their neighbour’s enemies.

Since then, we’ve seen a never-ending comedy of fixed elections, referenda extending the president’s term, and other initiatives invariably supported by an overwhelming majority. The government of Uzbekistan controls the four legal opposition parties, and the head of the Central Election Commission feels smug enough to state that “there is no opposition in Uzbekistan,” and that “the elections will be democratic, irrespective of the opposition’s participation.” The essential contradiction between his two statements notwithstanding, these can be taken as essential truths in Uzbekistan. For like George Orwell’s Oceania, when the government of Uzbekistan says things are true, it makes them true.

AMERICA: PARTNER IN TORTURE?

The methods by which lies are made true in this proud ally in the War on Terror, this essential cog in the Machine of the Willing, might seem gratuitous, but a lurid description is necessary.

The body of one dissident, Muzafar Avazov, was photographed after he had died in government custody at Jaslyk prison. The Department of Pathology at the University of Glasgow, studying photographs of his body, determined that he had been boiled to death. He had been immersed in a vat of some kind of boiling liquid, and not merely scalded. The pattern of his burns revealed a tidemark scalded onto his body, with heinous burns below.

One could go on, but reputable organizations have entire folios filled with accounts such as this (check out the one about Fatima Mukadirova – Avazov’s mother – who was imprisoned after her son’s story became public). Karimov has declared war against his own impoverished people. That’s bad enough in and of itself, but it’s shocking that the United States is reaping the “benefits” of this closeted murder of an entire nation.

Article IV of the UN Convention Against Torture obliges all signatories to pursue criminal charges against torturers. Uzbekistan is certainly in violation of this, since torture is undeniably a state strategy to keep Karimov and his clan on top. The question is, how much of this information garnered by torture is being passed on to the West, and how seriously are we taking it?

According to rogue British Ambassador Craig Murray, who has been repeatedly lambasted by the Karimov regime for his frank assessments, the information is “useless.” Nevertheless, according to a memo of his which was leaked to the press (in the West: there’s of course no free press in Uzbekistan to speak of), “Tortured dupes are forced to sign confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe – that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.

“This is morally, legally and practically wrong. We are selling our souls for dross.”

For memos and speeches such as this, in October 2004, Murray was suspended from his post. The Uzbek government had presented a list of some 18 accusations against the British ambassador, from seducing virtuous Uzbek visa-seekers to driving his Land Rover down a flight of stairs. It’s a pathetic joke, but what is alarming is that the US or UK would take anything Karimov’s toadies say seriously.

Try as they might, they can’t muddy the issue. According to Murray’s memo, these “confessions” were passed on to Britain’s MI6 by way of the CIA. The Agency had them because they’ve developed a sickeningly cozy relationship with Karimov’s apparatus of repression – just as they had with the Shah of Iran’s SAVAK.

It hardly matters if they’re in the same room, holding down the poor wretch while Karimov’s men work him over, or if they hold the rope that lowers him into the vat of boiling liquid (metaphorically speaking, you understand). If the boys from Langley are walking away all smiles with the product of this industrious labour, we’re not just partners in the terror of this despotic khan, but we’re actually treating confessions made under torture as serious intelligence. The ramifications are tremendous – the naivete, appalling.

And, anyway, as they told us after the horrors of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal were revealed, we’re against this sort of thing, right? I mean, Bush looked in the camera’s red eye and told us he does not condone torture.

So why – according to our chief ally’s ambassador – are we eagerly reading through confessions of no doubt farcical al-Qaeda plots which have been obtained by boiling people alive?

THINGS FALL APART

Uzbekistan’s Islamic threat, of course, is now real. Like his lies, Karimov has made them real. His government’s persecution of ordinary Muslims, the “old opposition” and whatever chutes rise out of the mud of his police state has forced dissent underground – down where the real Islamic nasties live. Islamic fundamentalism, which was almost unknown to the vast majority of Uzbeks until a few years ago, is being looked at as a real alternative – a better one, at least, than what Muzafar Avazov had to suffer.

The Karimov r?gime is fond of manipulating the United States by claiming that the Islamic movement in its country is in bed with al-Qaeda. If you listen carefully, however, you’ll also hear them say the same about the “old opposition,” the shattered Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (now stripped down to less than two hundred stragglers marooned in Western Pakistan), and the unknown, mysterious elements responsible for bombings in March and July 2004. Exaggerating the threat, inflating its importance, and conflating it with al-Qaeda has been Karimov’s stock in trade – no less important than his forgery of economic data and restrictions on any form of free enterprise – for security in his increasingly radicalized country. But now the threat is real and, thanks to Karimov, growing by leaps and bounds.

And if we can read any significance in the bombing of the Israeli and American embassies in July, they hate us just as much for what we’ve done to prop up their true adversary.

Meanwhile, Uzbekistan – and not Belarus, which is now America’s favourite post-Soviet whipping boy – is a grotesquerie of economic reform. Collective farms still function – the managers have merely given short-term leases to their tenants, who occupy the social and economic space of sharecroppers in the old American south. Vast sectors of the economy remain in government hands, and what’s been privatized has actually been “privatized” – placed in the trusty but incompetent hands of members of Karimov’s political clan. There is, in fact, not one area in which Uzbekistan has honestly moved forward since independence. This is pretty clear: yet the discontents within Uzbekistan are finding their only receptive audience in the underground.

On December 26th, Uzbeks will be rounded up to vote again, and the official tallies will once again fall completely out of whack with reality. The United States dreads these blasphemies of liberty almost as much as Karimov does. For a few days, they’ll have to issue statements of “concern” about the way Erk, Birlik, and the other parties of the “old opposition” were prevented from participating, about flagrant irregularities, and so on. You can almost hear the testiness in the State Department spokesman’s voice as he assures a few bored reporters that the Department will take this all into consideration when they dole out this year’s aid bonanza – a fantastic hunk of change by regional standards which is being cannibalized at a ferocious pace into Karimov’s private bank accounts.

And anyone who might be impetuous enough (or unpatriotic enough) to remind the sentinels of freedom of these matters later will suffer the fate of Craig Murray.

Uzbeks, unfortunately, already voted – with stones. If they wish to carry it any further, or somehow survive the repression which will inevitably follow, they’ll have to go underground, where others rule.

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The Guardian – UK allies among worst abusers of human rights

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The Guardian – UK allies among worst abusers of human rights (by Richard Norton-Taylor)

Buyers of British arms and Britain’s close allies in the “war on terror” are named as being among the worst abusers of human rights in a government report published yesterday.

States identified include Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The US and Russia are also mentioned.

The 310-page annual human rights report published yesterday by the Foreign Office praises the role of Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Tashkent, in speaking out about human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, although Mr Murray has been suspended on full pay and faces a disciplinary hearing for gross misconduct.

The report praised Mr Murray for publicising the case of Fatima Mukadirova, whose son was tortured to death with boiling water in 2002. “We believe this played a significant role in bringing the case to the attention of the international community,” the FO report says.

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said yesterday he could not comment on the case.

The report was due to have been released on September 16, but was postponed after the Beslan school massacre in Russia. Mr Straw said yesterday that he delayed the publication “in order to reflect the horror of that attack and the wider implications of terrorist attacks”.

The report now emphasises the threat from terrorists. Mr Straw said that the casualties in Iraq since the end of April last year were the “direct responsibility” of terrorists as well as insurgents.

Yesterday’s report refers to “serious human rights violations”, including torture, by Russian officials in Chechnya. But it also says that “the UK recognises the genuine security problems faced by the Russian government in Chechnya and the north Caucasus”. It refers, too, to “abductions, torture, mine-laying, assassinations and looting carried out by Chechen militants”.

The report says there has been no significant improvement in human rights in Saudi Arabia, where it estimates that the authorities executed 52 people last year. Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest markets for British arms.

The report describes the abuse of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad as “shameful”. It also reiterates the government’s position that the remaining four British detainees at Guant?namo Bay should be returned to Britain. But it questions statements by the five others who have returned that they were abused there.

Amnesty International yesterday contrasted the report’s strong words condemning torture with what it called the “creeping acceptance” of the practice by the UK.

The government’s failure to fully incorporate the UN convention against torture into British law had left the door open for the authorities to rely on evidence obtained through torture by foreign agents, said Amnesty.

The thinktank Saferworld said it appeared that the government was failing to apply its own stated human rights criteria when licensing arms exports. It pointed to recent signficant arms sales to Indonesia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Nepal, all criticised in yesterday’s report.

“The report highlights the disparity between the government’s human rights and arms export policy,” said Paul Eavis, director of Saferworld. “The government risks undermining other important human rights work it is has achieved in the international arena unless changes to export controls are made.”

Mr Straw said yesterday that the government kept to EU and national guidelines and its arms export control policy was one of the most transparent and effective in the world.

Key points

?”Torture is abhorrent and illegal and the UK is opposed to [its] use under all circumstances”

?Abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq is “shameful”

?”There has been no significant improvement in human rights in Saudi Arabia”

?Abuses by law enforcement officials in Russia include torture and racism. Militants in Chechnya carry out torture, abductions, mine-laying and assassinations

? Israel’s policy of targeted assassination is illegal. The Palestinian Authority does not act to stop terrorism with sufficient energy

?Significant problems remain with security forces in Indonesia over the abuse of human rights

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Amnesty International – Uzbekistan: Britain’s ambassador was right to speak out

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Amnesty International – Uzbekistan: Britain’s ambassador was right to speak out (by Carlos Reyes-Manzo)

The news that Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has been removed from his post after speaking out about torture in Uzbekistan is stunning. I, for one, had allowed myself a small cheer when Mr Murray started denouncing horrifying human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. Here was a diplomat prepared to break with the usual protocol-driven reticence.

According to Amnesty International, people are routinely tortured under Uzbekistan’s authoritarian President Karimov. Mr Murray has been posted to represent British interests in Tashkent. Should he have denounced the fact that his hosts allowed people to be boiled to death? Should he have complained that Uzbek detainees are tortured into false confessions and secretly executed? Or look the other way and keep quiet?

Actually, I suspect most career diplomats would have found a convenient third way. Report it back to London, but keep quiet publicly. His superiors might well have said that Uzbekistan is now a strategically important partner in the “war on terror”. And that we have to accept that Karimov is dealing with an insurgent terrorist threat. Interrogations will be rough, but necessary.

Mr Murray appears to be made of different stuff. His recent complaints have focused on the question of whether the Foreign Office and MI6 are receiving information from torture in Uzbekistan filtered through the FBI. And if so, what would they do with it? This seems to have riled his FCO superiors and brought about his removal. He sees himself now as a “victim of conscience”. Who is the principled party here?

Under international law information extracted from torture is legally inadmissible in a court. The UN’s convention against torture expressly forbids the use of torture “evidence”. It is effectively dirty information and must be discounted. However, in a little-noticed ruling in August, the Court of Appeal decided that while information obtained by torture was inadmissible in UK courts, this was only the case when directly procured by UK agents or in whose procurement UK agents have connived.

Amnesty International denounced this alarming view as “giving a green light to torturers” around the world. I agree. Yet this appears to be the FCO’s current position. If we don’t do it ourselves then information we get from foreign torture chambers is okay.

When I was tortured under Pinochet’s military junta in the 1970s, I looked to countries like Britain to resist the barbarity of Pinochet’s methods. Britain was a safe haven from torture for me and has been my home now for many years. However, I am increasingly distressed at the UK’s apparent new-found “flexibility” over torture.

Let me be clear about torture. It is an abomination. Nobody can describe the pain. Nobody can truly describe the real horror of torture.

I was arrested in front of my wife and two small children in Santiago in 1974 by members of SICAR (Servicio Inteligencia Carabineros). I was blindfolded and taken to a secret detention centre under a car park under the presidential palace, La Moneda. I was tortured there for three months before being transferred to another torture centre known as “La Casa del Terror” (The House of Torture) at no.33 Calle Londres. Three more months of torture followed.

For me, there were two mental stages. The first was shock: I was in shock and my mind was frantically working, getting ready for what was coming. The second stage was acceptance: acceptance that I would die, but die with dignity.

Whether or not I’d given my tormentors information and whether or not that information was truthful, it can only be right that such material never surfaces in a court of law. As a matter of fact, most information beaten out of people in police cells is pure rubbish. People will confess to anything and denounce anybody if pushed to the limits of endurance.

Craig Murray’s fear that the FBI is passing information from torture victims to UK officials is, in my experience, highly likely to be borne out. After surviving torture and time in a Chilean concentration camp, I was exiled to Panama. But I was later picked up by Chilean and Panamanian police and interrogated and beaten all over again. On this occasion, interrogations were also carried out by a CIA agent. If, then, intelligence services collaborated against the “communist threat”, they are doing it now in the “war on terror”.

The huge intelligence failures over Iraq have certainly alerted us to the dire uncertainties attaching to secret “intelligence”. How much more questionable if the information derives from blood-spattered torture victims?

When Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, I hoped we were at a turning point in the fight against torture. Putting Pinochet on trial was vital, not just to me, but for thousands of survivors of torture still alive in Chile and around the world. Britain had, it seemed, taken a brave step in allowing his arrest and detention. The promise seemed to be: no more immunity for torturers.

Pinochet escaped justice here, but may still be tried in Chile. His London arrest was a marker laid down at the feet of the likes of Uzbekistan’s President Karimov.

On 9 October, the trial of an Afghan warlord suspected of orchestrating torture in Afghanistan opened at the Old Bailey. This is ground-breaking as it tries him for alleged torture in a separate country. It’s a real step forward.

Torture is recognised as an international crime and perpetrators can and should be prosecuted in courts far away from the original scene of the crime.

But, contrast this with the fact that simultaneously people in Britain may currently be detained indefinitely under anti-terrorism measures partly on the basis of blood-stained information. Foreign nationals are even now being held indefinitely without trial at top-security prisons at Belmarsh in South London and Woodhill in Buckinghamshire. They have been “certified” as suspected terrorists by the Home Secretary David Blunkett and the special proceedings to justify these measures are the very ones over which the Court of Appeal gave its green light on the use of “third party” torture material.

The fearful symmetry, then, is contained in the fact that we may be locking people up here based on information tortured out of British nationals in places like Guantanamo Bay.

We are at a fork in the road. We go either with Mr Murray and reject torture in all its forms; or we equivocate, look for justifications, and decide that Donald Rumsfeld has a point when he distinguishes between “abuse” and “torture”.

In the year of Abu Ghraib and international intelligence failures, we need to break with torture forever. Allowing the virus of torture “evidence” into our legal bloodstream is something we must resist. Anything else and the torturers have won.

Carlos Reyes-Manzo now lives with his family in London. He is an award-winning human rights photo-journalist.

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Speech to Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs)

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Chatham House – The trouble with Uzbekistan

THE TROUBLE WITH UZBEKISTAN

Speech by Craig Murray

British Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan, 2002-04

Chatham House, Monday 8 November 2004

This speech is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the speaker and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of the speech.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is most kind of you to come here on an early November evening to hear me talk about a part of the World that, for reasons I will endeavour to explain, merits greater attention than we are apt to give it.

Let me first apologise for the comparative informality of my dress. I had not anticipated being in London just now, and my suits still hang in a wardrobe in Tashkent, vainly awaiting my return. As I expect may become clear as the evening progresses, part of my heart remains there too.

That may sound a touch romantic, but you would need a serious deficit in the soul department not to be touched by the country. It is the land of the Oxus and the Jaxartes, where Alexander the Great was entranced by and married Roxanne and held court for the longest period of stationary rule anywhere in his short life; where the Greek state of Bactria flourished for many centuries after his passing, producing art of rare beauty.

It is the land of Tamburlaine, the wrack of whose mighty monuments still stand and whose tomb is still there, to bring us face to face with the reality of legend. It is the land of the sweet airs and delicious fruits of the Ferghana valley, for which Babur ever pined as he rode off into exile to conquer India and found the Mughal dynasty.

It was also, of course, the very centre of Islamic culture. I had not realised that the scientific advances which I learnt at school were brought by the Moors into Europe, had in fact originated in a great cultural flourishing in Central Asia. The great medic, Avicenna, and the inventor of Algebra and other mathematical advances, both hailed from Uzbekistan, not to mention the astronomy of the Emperor Ulugbek, the elegant remains of whose observatory are for me the most arresting of all the wonders of Samarkand. This same golden period saw great advances in architecture, which spread, throughout the Islamic world. Sadly centuries of earthquake and the almost equally devastating heavy-handed restoration of the Soviet period, disastrously still continued by UNESCO, have left little of the original. But there is still much to thrill the soul.

Samarkand has long held a place in the British poetic imagination that is difficult to explain. A more recent layer of romance was added by the Great Game, of which Bokhara, Khiva and Samarkand are perhaps most redolent to British minds today. To imagine myself in the footsteps of Alexander Burnes, to wander the outside the Ark of Bokhara speculating where lie the decapitated corpses of Stoddart and Connolly, and how to honour them, these were to me great private joys.

The British Embassy itself has its own romance. It was the Kerensky family home, birthplace of Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, who led Russia from February to October 1917, in that brief dawn of hope when Russia might have entered mainstream European history and economic development. It was he who proclaimed Russia a Republic in September 1917. I used to hold conversations with Uzbek dissidents in my office and wonder what other whispered words those bricks had heard. Somewhere inside the building Kerensky’s brother Nikolai was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1922.

The Uzbeks today are a hard-working people, greatly hospitable to strangers. Sadly they are living in a period of decline; economic decline, decline in standards of living and population decline. You will find that this short lecture is devoid of statistics; partly this is because I never remember them, and partly because there simply are no reliable statistics on Uzbekistan. Government sees statistics as largely an instrument of propaganda.

Furthermore this remains a command economy driven by production targets. These are virtually always met on paper, which is the important thing. The situation in the real world is quite different.

I may quote from the current US State Department background note on Uzbekistan, from which I will be quoting further during this talk, it states, “The government claims that GDP rose 4.1% in 2003; however the US Government does not think it was greater than 0.3%”. The Uzbek government figure is outrageous; the US government figure is not, but still I believe an overestimate. Based on what we know of industrial production, of the cotton crop and prices and with an estimate of other crops, I would say in 2003 GDP fell by approximately 2 per cent.

Figures are made difficult by the fact that much state production, specifically in the important minerals sector and including gold, is a state secret. I would give my 2 per cent calculation a margin of error of 2.5%. So State Department could be right.

You can extend this dispute over true figures beyond GDP to almost any other economic statistic – inflation, incomes, money supply etc. Uzbekistan is largely a state controlled and non-transparent economy where it is easier to feel than to measure what is happening.

But the dispute over statistics is significant. At numerous meetings I have taken issue with the IMF in particular over their willingness to accept compromise statistics much too close to the Uzbek government’s figures. I think I am right in saying that that in 2003, for example, they accepted a GDP growth figure of 2%. But if the IMF keeps, as they do, year on year publishing a figure that is over-optimistic by three or four per cent, after a very few years the cumulative effect is a figure on GDP per capita for Uzbekistan which is profoundly wrong.

Similarly, a World Bank report on comparative living standards in Uzbekistan between regions and over time was of very limited value because it was based entirely on extensive analysis of Uzbek government provided figures. International institutions have a great deal of difficulty in dealing with a member state that practices a policy of deliberate dishonesty.

The combination of state control and lack of transparency makes possible corruption on a grand scale. I have called the Uzbek government a kleptocracy, and I believe that is the correct term. A look at the massive state mining operation is instructive. Uzbekistan is the World’s seventh largest producer of gold. Gold, uranium and other minerals are produced by the Navoi based state kombinat. The sales of the products of this company have no bearing on its revenues. It receives a budgetary allocation from central government. The gold and uranium produced are sold on the international market; the quantity of output and the revenue from sales are both secret. The revenue goes not to the company but to the Ministry of Finance, into the secret bit of the state budget. I am informed by sources in a position to know, and whom I trust, that ten per cent of the sales revenue is diverted into bank accounts under the personal control of President Karimov. This is the principal source of his own fortune.

The bulk of the nomenklatura are kept happy with wealth from what Uzbekistan calls its “White Gold”, cotton. This is grown by state collective farms and sold to state trading companies through which it comes to the international market. While there is corruption at the trading level in particular, here money is spread to the party cadres through a more institutionalised system of transfer pricing. The collective farm obtains very little indeed, and the managers largely take what it does receive. The state trading companies, for example, were last year paying for cotton at 4% – yes 4% – of the farm gate price in neighbouring Kazakhstan, where production has been privatised.

This of course opens the way for great rewards to the state trading companies, whose headquarters are pictures of opulence compared to the squalor of the farms, and whose staff amongst the most pampered of the elite. This transfer pricing also provides the bulk of revenue to state budgets. This pays for the sheets of blue plate glass that now cloak the exterior of crumbling Soviet offices throughout Tashkent.

Sixty per cant of the population of Uzbekistan is based on the State farms. I visited a farm in Kitab, last year, which had 12,000 hectares and 16,000 employees. They were paid 2,000 sum – that’s two dollars – a month each in salary. They also had a small vegetable patch per family, which they lived on.

I visited that farm because I received an appeal for help from a small farmer. In 1995, when there was a brief start to liberalisation, three brothers had leased eleven hectares from the collective farm. The collective now wanted it back. In consequence one brother had been murdered, another was in jail on a charge of selling his apples privately and not to the collective. The third had come to Tashkent to find me. I went down there and found that the collective had chopped down all the brothers’ apple trees and that their 82 year old mother, who tried to defend the farm, had been knocked to the ground and beaten with sticks. She showed me her terrible bruises.

Let me now say something about private farming. Uzbek government propaganda claims there is a vibrant private farming sector. This is not so. There are no property rights in Uzbekistan. Farmers have been able to lease plots, typically eleven hectares, from the state farms on long leases. But they are told what they must grow, on which bits of their land, down to the last half metre. They are told how much of it they must produce, to whom they must sell it and what price they will get for it. They then face a struggle actually to get paid. I visited a collective of small farmers near Samarkand, with whom DFID had previously done work on marketing, which in the event they were not allowed to put into effect. They had been instructed to grow largely wheat in 2003. They had fulfilled and delivered their quota, but been told they would be paid not in money but in fertiliser.

Furthermore they had to collect the fertiliser from a plant in the Ferghana valley, something they could not possibly afford to do. When I last saw them, the prospects looked bleak for the continuation of this private venture.

British American Tobacco is the largest foreign investor in Uzbekistan. They deserve congratulation on their efforts to improve the lot of the farmers who supplied them and to encourage real private enterprise. But they face continual difficulties. They were allowed to pay only 40 per cent of the price of the tobacco to the farmers; sixty per cent had to go to the local authority and the collective farm in theory in return for services to the farmer, in fact largely for peculation. They were trying hard to increase the farmers’ share to 50%.

Following the measures to restrict economic activity still further last year, they were not allowed to pay the farmers in cash, only be bank transfer. This caused great difficulty for the farmers; with physical access to banks a real obstacle. But even worse, as indeed faced by all Uzbek bank customers on a regular basis, they found they could not get their money from the bank.

Banking in Uzbekistan is a state monopoly. The banking system is used to control the money supply by simply refusing, on a regular basis, to allow people to draw out any cash. This hits foreign companies. Cash shortages have several times this year caused a reverse black market – you have to pay a premium in dollars to get sum.

Officially this is to control inflation, but in fact it is part of a series of draconian measures to exert full control over the economy by the ruling elite, operating sometimes through the state, sometimes as state-enforced commercial monopolists.

This started with the closure of bazaars in November 2002, and their subsequent re-opening on a much smaller scale. The informal trading structures, which were endemic to Uzbekistan for centuries, were wiped out with remarkable thoroughness, and tens of thousands thrown out of employment from the trading sector. At the same time the land borders were effectively sealed to trade. This physical blocking of trade remains in force, with in the Ferghana Valley several bridges destroyed to prevent cross-border movement.

In addition to this extraordinary physical isolationism, tariffs were increased and non-tariff barriers introduced in terms of certification and safety procedures and Uzbek language labelling, inter alia. Next there were measures making most cash transactions illegal necessitating commerce to operate through a State banking structure which itself became deliberately obstructive.

The result of this is economic disaster. What private sector activity there was has withered, living standards are in steep decline. Against the background of these restrictions on economic activity, the introduction of sum convertibility became meaningless. There is much anecdotal evidence of living standards in terms, for example, of ownership of household goods.

In this climate it is not perhaps strange that foreign direct investment in Uzbekistan is virtually insignificant. There has been a small amount of recent activity in the gold sector, but it has been announced no further foreign investment will be sought there. There has been some promise of Russian investment in the energy sector.

But the climate for foreign investors is dreadful. In effect there is no respect by the government of Uzbekistan of private property rights or the sanctity of contract. The civil, just as the criminal, courts entirely lack independence and follow government instruction. I know of one British company which one morning found that its 60 per cent share in a joint enterprise with an Uzbek state entity, had been reduced to 30 per cent by a court case they had not been told was happening. Jahn International, a Danish investor, had approximately $1 million simply removed from its bank account as “excess profits”. Another British businessman this year had his assets awarded to an Uzbek former partner, with the Uzbek court refusing to acknowledge British legalised documents showing the partner had sold out and been fully paid up.

The anti-trade measures, the lack of redress, and the petty and continual interference of corrupt officials thriving on massive over-regulation, make Uzbekistan a very poor investment prospect.

So the population of Uzbekistan are poor, and getting poorer. There is, as you might imagine, widespread disillusionment with the government. But just as economically the reinforced Soviet system crushes the hopes of the aspiring, so the political system crushes all who oppose.

There is no democracy in Uzbekistan. President Karimov’s term in office has been repeatedly extended by rigged elections and referenda. This December will see parliamentary elections, but all five so-called political parties are Karimov supporting. The genuine democratic opposition, Erk, Birlik, the Free Farmers etc – none of these were allowed to contest.

But on an everyday basis, there is also no way to protest. There is no freedom of the media, no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly. A regime so harsh to the many, so luxurious for the few, rules only by the harshest of repression. There are not only exit visas, but still the propusk system of internal movement control. Almost all of those born on state farms are condemned to be, in effect, serf labour for life.

Bill Rammell at the FCO instituted a freedom of expression panel. The FCO and NGO’s together meet quarterly to choose ten imprisoned writers worldwide whose cause the FCO will take up. The first two meetings alone chose three Uzbeks. Not a word of dissent appears in the Uzbek media – indeed not one word of my speeches ever did.

Strangely the US Ambassador’s comments were often carried at some length. In Uzbek schools and Universities, pages are still torn from textbooks before they are issued. The Open Society Institute funded a library at the University of Tashkent, from which all the books on Central Asia were mysteriously “stolen” in the night. The OSI itself was, of course, kicked out of Tashkent earlier this year, while strict restrictions were placed on remaining international NGOs.

I am not going today to produce an exhaustive list of human rights offences. I do not think the appalling human rights record of the Uzbek government is in dispute. There remain many thousands of political and religious prisoners, and torture and brutality remain the instruments by which the regime maintains its fierce grip. I came. personally, very close to incidents and victims. When I had dinner with Professor Mirsaidov and other leading dissidents in Samarkand at the end of March 2002, some four hours after I left the house his grandson’s body was dumped on the doorstep.

The lad was eighteen. His knees and elbows had been smashed by blows with a hammer, or perhaps a spade or rifle butt. One hand had been immersed in boiling liquid until the flesh was peeling away from the bone. He had been killed with a blow that caved in the back of his skull.

The professor was sure that he had been killed as a warning to the dissidents for meeting me. I was unsure until a fellow Ambassador with excellent contacts with the Uzbek intelligence services told me it had indeed been a political warning, and had been ordered by the regional hokkim. That gentleman is now Prime Minister of Uzbekistan.

It was in my first few days in Uzbekistan that I was confronted with the pictures of Avazov, with Azimov boiled to death in Jaslyk prison. The University of Glasgow pathology department studied the detailed photos and concluded that this was immersion in, not spattering with, boiling liquid. There was a clear tidemark. The fingernails had also been pulled.

So how should the West react to this regime? There is no doubt that Uzbekistan occupies a vital geo-strategic position. Immediately north of Afghanistan, it borders every Central Asian state. It has almost half the population of Central Asia and the Region’s largest and most effective military forces. It is less than two hours by military jet to Russia, Iran and China, among others.

Uzbekistan is a member of “The coalition of the willing”. It provides the United States with an airbase, garrisoned by thousands of US troops and airmen, which is useful, if no longer central, to operations in Afghanistan. But it is absolutely essential as the easternmost of the ring of so-called lily pads, US airbases surrounding the “Wider Middle East”. It is also a projection of US military force into the centre of a region which will become increasing essential in the next fifty years in satisfying Western demand for oil and gas. In the eyes of a Pentagon hawk, there is every reason to cosy up to Karimov.

There should be no doubt just how cosy this relationship is. Let me quote more from the current State Department briefing paper:

“US/Uzbek relations have flourished in recent years and were given an additional boost by the March 2002 meeting between President Bush and President Karimov in Washington, DC… High-level visits to Uzbekistan have increased since September 11 2001 ‘including that of the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of State Colin Powell and numerous congressional delegations?.”

“The US has consulted closely with Uzbekistan on regional security issues, and Uzbekistan has been a close ally of the United States at the United Nations… on foreign policy and security issues ranging from Iraq to Cuba, from nuclear proliferation to drugs trafficking… Uzbekistan is a strong supporter of US military reactions in Afghanistan and Iraq and of the global war on terror?” “The United States, in turn, values Uzbekistan as a stable, moderate force in a turbulent region”.

To be fair, the document goes on to list areas where improvement in human rights is needed, but that has not prevented the US from lubricating the relationship with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, including military and political aid, and all the political support they can give Karimov by joint photo calls and glad-handing.

Nowhere will you find a public mention of human rights by that stream of high level US visitors to Uzbekistan, and I don’t believe they were that firm in private either.

We have I think to look behind the language. How can it advance the war on terror to back a totalitarian dictator who terrorises and impoverishes his own people? If Karimov is part of the “Coalition of the willing”, is on “our” side in the war on terror, then that war cannot be the straightforward clash between good and evil which the politicians are selling.

It is, in fact, about something else. It is about the advancement of American military power in areas central to the control of oil and gas, US oil and gas interests are served by backing an unpleasant dictator in Tashkent, willing to give them a dominant position in Central Asia, just as they are served by toppling one in Baghdad.

This is nothing to do with the advancement of democracy. If it were, why has the US government put so much effort into shielding the Uzbek government from criticism in international for a such as the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva?

We also need to be sceptical about some of the language on threat. One area of cooperation mentioned was narcotic trafficking. There has been a massive increase in opium and heroin smuggling from Afghanistan in the past three years. A large amount of that drug follows the natural trade route through Uzbekistan and up the river valleys to Russia and eventually the Baltic. (Incidentally, I have been much plagued by Customs and Excise analysts who argue that, because much more is seized in Tajikistan, much more must be going that way. If you think about it, that’s a reason for a drug smuggler to avoid Tajikistan).

There is a tremendous taboo surrounding international efforts to counter drug trafficking in Central Asia. No progress is possible until the real problem is acknowledged, so I will break the taboo. The real problem is participation, at very senior levels indeed, of regime members in the trade. It is not just a question of minor corruption by customs officers.

At Termez on the Uzbek/Afghan border the EU, the UK and the US have all put money into customs training and state of the art search areas and equipment, including gizmos that can x-ray whole containers. But while the border is hard to cross, and UN emergency relief supplies are routinely held up for days or weeks, fleets of cars with black windows and of trucks are waved through, shuttling between the Uzbek regime and General Dostum.

Customs never stop the vehicles that have the heroin. We should face the fact. So what of Karimov’s claim to be holding out against terrorism? There has been little or no historical tradition of militant Islam in Uzbekistan. The extremism of teaching by the new mosques and schools introduced in the early 1990s from Saudi Arabia is, from my talks with people directly involved, much exaggerated. No doubt there was a threat from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan as a would-be insurgency in the margins of the Tajik civil war and thereafter supporting the Taliban. But they had no history of terrorist style operations. Certainly in Tashkent it is accepted by virtually everyone that the 1999 bombings were the work of the regime or of warring factions within it. Following the decimation and dispersal of the IMU in Uzbekistan, the remnants appear to have reorganised in a more classical terrorist structure.

However it appears that the March bombings in Tashkent were not co-ordinated or even expected by the surviving IMU leadership. They seem to have been the work of predominantly young Uzbeks with a desperate hatred of the regime. There is however compelling evidence that the groups which carried out these terrible acts had been heavily penetrated by the Uzbek security services, to the extent that it is hard to believe they could not have been pre-empted and their may be reason to suspect an agent-provocateur operation. The July bombings at the Israeli and US Embassies perhaps are more classical terrorist attacks with input from an external leadership. In particular, because there is no news on the subject on the Uzbek state media, awareness of the Palestine issue in Uzbekistan even among activists is almost non-existent.

But the key point must be that the despair caused by the deepening poverty and lack of religious and political freedoms, worsened by the lack of any democratic means to express that despair, is what creates the violence.

If the US believes that backing Karimov is producing stability in the region, which is a remarkably short-term view. Uzbeks know they are miserable and getting poorer, and their government is deeply repressive and, increasingly, hated. They are being offered no liberal, democratic alternative. Indeed Karimov’s propaganda tells them that the system they have now is freedom and democracy, and they don’t think much of it.

The only opposition to Karimov they often encounter is the underground Mosque movement or Hizb-ut-Tehrir. And terrible torture and persecution increasingly radicalise these groups. The system is building up towards inevitable violent confrontation. That could be five or seven years away, but I have no doubt that as things stand at present we are heading for a catastrophic model of regime change. And thanks to US support for Karimov, the result is likely to be anti-Western. The targeting of the US and Israeli Embassies in Uzbekistan shows that we are creating a whole new race of people who hate the West.

Young Uzbeks are attracted to radical Islam because we are giving them no viable alternative to Karimov. Supporting Karimov is creating, not combating, Islamic fundamentalism. I strongly commend to you this Human Rights Watch publication, Creating Enemies of the State, which documents the brutalising of a society.

What can we do? Stop digging. The policy of engagement is plainly not producing results and we should treat the Karimov regimes as pariahs. There is measurably less freedom, and measurably more brutality, under Karimov than under Lukashenko or Mugabe, and we should be looking to sanctions on members of the regime and their ill-gotten assets.

Rather than military aid to Karimov, we should put major resources into assisting the democratic forces in Uzbekistan, notably the parties that have combined to form the Democratic Forum. We should at least fund a newspaper for the expression of a wide range of Uzbek views. We could also put substantive resources into much greater transmission into Uzbekistan by broadcast media.

Finally, we should break off our relationships with the Uzbek intelligence services. I have no doubt that we are receiving information that has been obtained under torture. Where you are receiving such information systematically, under an established procedure, I also believe that you are acting illegally. This is complicity under Article IV of the UN Convention against torture.

It has been argued that it would be irresponsible to ignore useful intelligence in the War Against Terror. I have two responses – firstly I deny this material is useful. It is provided by the Uzbek regime with the object of exaggerating their role in the War on Terror, the strength of the IMU and the linkage of the threat against them to Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden.

I was genuinely surprised when I first learnt that this information was taken seriously and regarded as valuable by the British intelligence services. I still find that strange, and fear that it shows a preference for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat – a tendency which the Butler report shows was much in evidence in our acceptance of a lot of nonsense on Weapons of Mass Destruction.

But what worries me most – what absolutely terrifies me – is the thought that such poor intelligence material, endorsed by someone in the last gasps of agony, given credence by some gung-ho Whitehall Warrior – can be used to keep some poor soul locked up in Belmarsh Prison. Without trial or charge, without any idea what he is accused of, day on day, week upon week, year by weary year.

And what I was seeing was only about Uzbekistan. There is great international concern at the use of torture worldwide in the War on Terror, not just in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay but including the transport of detainees worldwide by the US authorities, delivered to governments which torture, in plain contravention of Article V of the UN Convention.

Many of my colleagues in other countries must also be seeing intelligence obtained under torture.

The US State Department briefing says that torture is used as “A routine investigative technique” by the Uzbek security services. Theo van Boven, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, found it to be “Widespread and systemic”. Nobody in the British government has attempted to argue to me that the information we receive from the Uzbek sources was not obtained under torture. Rather they argue that we did not encourage or instigate the torture, so are not complicit.

That might be a valid argument – and I repeat might – if we stumbled on the material in the street, or got handed some as a one off. But it is not sustainable where we regularly receive such material through an established system. That must make us complicit.

The difficulty is, that to refuse the Uzbek and other torture material would be to create an exception to the UK/US intelligence sharing agreement, which we are anxious to keep whole.

During all of this, I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure it is not a nightmare. Is the British government really insisting on its right to receive material obtained under torture? Similarly, in the Katherine Gunn case, were we really going along with US plans to bug Security Council members inside the United Nations?

I associate support for human rights, and opposition to torture, with fundamental British values. Surely we have to stand up to the US and say that under George Bush the CIA is involved in things we cannot go along with.

Just as we cannot go along with US policy in Central Asia. This is a throwback to the US policy of support for dictators in Central America in the 1970s. The situation is redolent with ironies. In supporting Karimov, George Bush is helping prop up the remnants of Soviet totalitarianism.

I have talked of how Uzbek state farm labourers are bonded to their farms effectively as serfs. I should add that for months at harvest time workers in all sectors are conscripted into the cotton fields. Schools and educational institutions are closed down. Children from eight years old are dragooned into the fields, working 16 hour days, sometimes sleeping in the open, working sometimes in freezing conditions. Is it not an irony that a US administration of the party of Abraham Lincoln is supporting a regime founded on cotton slavery?

Every crunch of bone at the smash of a limb, every female scream of terror, every second of dreadful, of unimaginable anguish in the torture chambers of the US-backed Karimov regime, just as every block in Sharon’s wall, just as every bomb that falls tonight on a home

in Fallujah, will fuel the fires of hatred across the Islamic world. And while no act of random terrorist violence is ever justified, is in truth evil, we must nonetheless say that myopic US foreign policy under President Bush reinforces hatred across the Muslim World.

That was certainly my daily perception in Tashkent, and my aim there was to distance the UK and articulate a distinctive British policy based on support for human rights and the rule of international law.

It was worth a try.

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