Synopsis

Craig Murray was the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to Uzbekistan until he was removed from his post in October 2004 after exposing appalling human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of President Islam Karimov. In this candid and at times shocking memoir, he lays bare the dark and dirty underside of the War on Terror. In Uzbekistan, the land of Alexander the Great and Tamburlaine, lurks one of the most hideous tyrannies on earth – one founded on cotton slavery and brutal torture. As neighbouring ‘liberated’ Afghanistan produces record levels of heroin, the Uzbek rulers cash in on massive trafficking. They are even involved in trafficking their own women to prostitution in the West. But this did not prevent Karimov being viewed as a key US ally in the War on Terror. When Craig Murray arrived in Uzbekistan, he was a young Ambassador with a brilliant career and a taste for whisky and women. But after hearing accounts of dissident prisoners being boiled to death and innocent people being raped and murdered by agents of the state, he started to question both his role and that of his country in so-called ‘democratising’ states. When Murray decided to go public with his shocking findings, Washington and 10 Downing Street reached the conclusion that he had to go. But Uzbekistan had changed the high-living diplomat and there was no way he was going to go quietly.

Synopsis

On December 28th 2000, Charlotte Wilson, a 27-year-old VSO worker, was killed when her bus, the inauspiciously named Titanic Express, was ambushed in war-torn Burundi. The attackers were members of the Hutu-extremist FNL, a faction linked to those responsible for the Rwandan genocide. Twenty others died with Charlotte, including her Burundian fiance. One of the few survivors was given a chilling message for the Burundian government: “We’re going to kill them all and there’s nothing you can do”. In “Titanic Express”, Charlotte’s brother Richard charts his painful struggle to unravel what happened that day, to understand the complex and brutal history that lay behind it. Cutting through the obfuscations of the authorities, he uncovers a story of violence, fanaticism and neglect that exposes the self-interest and double standards at the heart of our supposed commitment to human rights and the fight against terror. As the facts begin to emerge, the family’s deep personal grief is compounded by the realisation that this murder is just one among thousands, in a war fuelled as much by western cynicism and African greed as by ethnic divisions. “Titanic Express” is a political detective story, a memoir of grief and a moving portrait of an extraordinary woman who died at the very moment she had found fulfilment. In gripping detail it shows the human reality of lives torn apart by the machinations of war and diplomatic expediency, where competing versions of the truth can be as deadly as bullets and machetes.

Synopsis

International lawyer Philippe Sands has a unique insider’s view of the elites who govern our lives. His sensational revelations in Lawless World changed the political agenda overnight, forcing Tony Blair to publish damning material that he’d tried to hide. Now, in this updated edition with a shocking new chapter, you can get the full story of how the US and UK governments are riding roughshod over international agreements on human rights, war, torture and the environment – the very laws they put in place. Here sands looks at why global rules matter for all of us. And he powerfully makes the case for preserving them …before justice becomes history.

Synopsis

The Caspian Region, lying south of Russia, west of China and north of Afghanistan, contains the world’s largest untapped oil and gas resources. As much as 100 billion barrels of crude oil and 40 per cent of the world’s global gas reserves can be found in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Since the fall of communism, politicians and multi-national companies have struggled to possess and develop these resources.

In his penetrating new book, Lutz Kleveman reveals that there is a new ‘Great Game’ being played out in the region, a modern variant of the nineteenth-century clash of imperial ambitions between Britain and Russia, but with higher stakes. Desperate to wean itself from dependence on the OPEC cartel, the United States is now pitted in a struggle with Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran ‘ most of which are nuclear powers ‘ for dominance of the Caspian’s fabulous energy reserves and its pipeline routes.

Lutz Kleveman researched and travelled extensively in the Caucasus, the Caspian and Central Asia, meeting with oil barons, generals, diplomats and warlords from Kabul to Moscow. The New Great Game is a revelatory and extremely timely account of the perilous game to dominate the crucial resources ‘ one that mixes religion and oil to explosive effect.

From Scotland’s best traditional music outfit.

Includes the original track ‘Ambassador Craig Murray’s Reel’.