Yet the halo that has since adorned Mr Akayev, generally the least brutal of central Asia’s dictators, has not stopped his continued exile in Moscow, where he watches the wealth of his former fiefdom being redistributed among the remnants of its elite. One can only imagine his chagrin when, six weeks later across the border in neighbouring Uzbekistan, President Karimov gave the former Soviet Union’s remaining authoritarians a textbook lesson in Stalinist repression: shoot them down and shut the doors; and soon the world will forget.

The brutal massacre of hundreds of civilians in Andijan is already beginning to fade from international consciousness. Islam Karimov’s regime has efficiently prevented any transparent investigation of the town’s fate. Germany, France, Nato, the EU, US and UN have all called for an independent international investigation. Mr Karimov has said Uzbekistan does not need to be “terrorised” by such requests. A veteran of 14 years of brutality, he appears to be sleeping well.

Jack Straw’s insistence on an inquiry has not stopped the EU from continuing its aid packages to Uzbekistan. In truth, Europe has little leverage on a country with bigger, less sensitive friends. On Wednesday, Mr Karimov went to China, a nation practised in suppressing both Muslims and protest. Beijing gave him the requisite assurance that he did the right thing in suppressing the “separatism, terrorism and extremism” represented by the Andijan uprising, before striking a deal to prospect for oil in the central Asian state.

In this visit, Mr Karimov has astutely reminded his other ally, Washington, of its competitor in the region. The White House, which took six days to condemn a crackdown it initially said was in part against “terrorists”, has too much at stake to get squeamish about Andijan. Washington appears to fear the possibility of Islamic insurgency in the region more than the consequences of the Karimov regime’s long-term suppression of a country of 26 million. Uzbekistan – strengthened by $50.6m in US aid last year, a fifth of which was for “security and law enforcement” – remains the dominant, US-friendly hardman neighbour of every other central Asian state, a useful linchpin for a threadbare and volatile region.

While the Pentagon has said it will be “more cautious” in its use of a vital military base in Khanabad, and Condoleezza Rice has said the aid might be reviewed, that appears to be just about it. It has instead fallen to the US senator John McCain, after a visit to Tashkent, to brand the events a “massacre” yesterday. Mr Karimov is intent on keeping the media out – the Guardian has been waiting a fortnight longer than usual for a visa – as mass arrests ensure this crackdown cannot snowball into a full-scale revolt.

Soon other former Soviet republics will have to decide whether to take a leaf from Mr Karimov’s freshly penned textbook. The White House’s “beacons of liberty” rhetoric has fomented dreams of – and even plans for – revolution in the oil giants of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, both expecting elections by the end of the year that the government will characteristically try to fix.

The events in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan had sent shivers through the body politic of both countries, causing the Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to ban protests during election time, to shut opposition papers and to let his police beat youth protesters wearing orange, the colour of Ukraine’s revolution. In a coup de grace for both irony and free speech in the country, yesterday an opposition figure went on trial for slander after he accused Mr Nazarbayev’s daughter, Dariga, of illegally creating a media monopoly, allegations she denies.

On the other side of the Caspian, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliev – his father’s dynastic successor – regularly sends in riot troops to batter protesters. Pro-democracy revolutions are a luxury when geopolitical issues such as hydrocarbons are at stake. Last Wednesday’s opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline – set to bring oil from the Azerbaijani Caspian and eventually Kazakhstan to European and American markets – helps spell out Washington’s key principles in the region.

Mr Aliev felt comfortable enough in his relationship with Washington to ban a demonstration planned for the previous Saturday – protesting for free parliamentary elections this November – so as not to spoil the atmosphere for Wednesday’s ceremony. When the protest went ahead all the same, he sent in the riot police, who hit some demonstrators with truncheons and made 100 arrests.

The Norwegian ambassador to Baku, Steinar Gil, whose vociferous criticism of human-rights abuses, despite his country’s strategic investment in the BTC, is fast turning him into an Azerbaijani Craig Murray, was a lone voice among diplomats when he condemned the Aliev regime’s “crude violence”. The US embassy said it “regretted” that the right to assemble freely had been violated.

To people in Central Asia, home to some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, President Bush’s inaugural speech in January was important. “When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you”, said Bush, and his words sounded very promising. Thirteen years after the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, no country in Central Asia has yet held elections which could be described as even remotely free or fair. While the presidents, their families and entourages amass enormous fortunes, 80 per cent of the population struggles to survive on less than $1 a day.

Celebrating VE Day in the Baltic states, the US President lambasted the Soviet occupation and “secret deals to determine somebody else’s fate”. A couple of days later, speaking in front of 100,000 people in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square, the US president talked enthusiastically about “the idea of countries helping others become free” and “a rational, decent and humane foreign policy”.

“The path of freedom you chose is not easy, but you will not travel it alone,” Bush promised. As Julian Evans reported last week in these pages, the US is actively fomenting revolt in Belarus. In Central Asia, however, US policy is characterised not by supporting the oppressed, but by showering the oppressors with millions of dollars and political support in return for access to the region’s military installations and energy resources.

For three years experts have been warning against this hypocrisy. In the words of David Lewis, Central Asia director for the Crisis Group, “the list of countries which are described as tyrannies is very selective. Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan are exactly as tyrannical as Cuba or Iran, but are not on the list because they are security allies of the US. The double standards in US foreign policy are very clearly demonstrated in Central Asia. And there are no signs that this will change.”

The explanation is not difficult to find. Within a few weeks of 9/11, the Bush administration agreed to pay $500 million for a strategically important military base in Uzbekistan from where its special forces operate into Afghanistan. The other Central Asian countries immediately granted the US landing rights and intelligence-sharing. An old study mate of mine, now an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld, told me in Tashkent, “What we need in this region is an aircraft carrier in a smooth, calm sea and Uzbekistan is that aircraft carrier.” He laughed and told me to “grow up” when I asked him about the human rights abuses of the Uzbek regime. “Mr Rumsfeld is right,” he sarcastically told me, “Uzbekistan is stable – stable and quiet as a graveyard.”

The Uzbek President Islam Karimov certainly seems pretty stable. In January 2002 he extended his rule until 2020. “Sometimes authoritative methods are necessary,” he said. And two days later the US secretary of state Beth Jones was on Uzbek TV enthusing over the “new warmth” between the two countries, wishing the dictator a very happy birthday and inviting him to visit the White House.

The following spring the Uzbek police who receive $80 million a year from the US boiled two prisoners to death; an act which did not deter Colin Powell, a couple of months later, from testifying to Congress that Uzbekistan is “making progress”. “Such statements are designed to keep the Uzbek regime happy and to fool people in the US,” says an angry Matilda Bogner from the Human Rights Watch office in Tashkent.

“US foreign policy in Central Asia is run by the Pentagon,” says David Lewis. “In the summer of 2004 Congress forced the State Department to reduce its funding to Uzbekistan because of human rights abuses. But two weeks later the Pentagon gave $25 million to the Uzbek government. This is a clear signal to the Uzbek regime not to take international criticism seriously.”

Many Western diplomats in Tashkent were disgusted with the US policy, but their governments kept them “on message”. That is until Craig Murray arrived. At 44, Murray was Britain’s youngest ambassador, with a promising career ahead of him. With the waistcoat of his three-piece suit barely concealing his pot-belly, his thick glasses and unkempt grey hair, he looked like a quirky professor from a softer, more decent era. Uzbekistan shocked him. “At the Foreign Office, they prepared me with language lessons, but nobody ever mentioned the 10,000 political and religious prisoners,” he said.

In October 2002 the US ambassador gave a speech in which he praised the close relations between the US and Uzbekistan and argued that Uzbekistan had made “some progress” on “democratic reforms and human rights”. The broad smile he bestowed on his new British colleague as he handed over the microphone quickly disappeared. “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy,” said Craig Murray, adding (and contradicting what his US colleague had just said), “nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy.” He then described, in detail, the case of the two boiled prisoners.

“Murray is a finished man here,” one US top diplomat told me over lunch the next day. “A shame that Blair could only find an alcoholic to send here,” another remarked.

Murray went on to compare Karimov with Saddam Hussein: “Why do we remove one dictator and support another who is just as bad?” he cabled home. He also protested against “extraordinary rendition” when suspected terrorists are delivered by the CIA for interrogation to countries well known for using torture, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Uzbekistan.

“In Central Asia, Bush applies the model which failed in Iran,” Bahodir Musayev, a Tashkent sociologist, told me. “First priority the Shah, second priority the military and, at the bottom, the population. The US support for Karimov has led to a genocide. Anybody who disagrees with the regime is exterminated…only the extreme Islamic underground opposition has managed to survive.”

In 2004 a number of suicide attacks on the brutal Uzbek police, as well as one on the US embassy, provided worrying evidence that the Karimov regime is indeed provoking such a radicalisation. The bloodshed started last Friday in Andizhan, a region 10 miles from where I used to live. Here you can find villages where most families have one or more relatives (often youths of between 12 and 20) serving long jail sentences for having a Muslim beard or for conducting prayer meetings in their houses. In some streets there are practically no young men aged between 18 and 35 left.

This time the violence was the culmination of demonstrations which had been going on for weeks over a trial of 23 local businessmen. Without a shred of evidence, the Uzbek regime accused the 23 of being Islamic terrorists. Several of the men do belong to the group Akramia, a group of pious Muslims named after its founder, Akram Yuldashev, an Islamic dissident who was jailed in 1999 for allegedly planning President Karimovs overthrow. The Akramis are very able businessmen and form the heart of the small business community in Andizhan, providing several thousand jobs in the area. Many there believe the charges were trumped up by local officials in order to seize the property of the accused.

After weeks of orderly demonstrations for the release of the 23, armed gunmen stormed the prison and freed not only the 23 but 2,000 other prisoners and seized a government building and 10 police hostages. Soon thereafter thousands of people converged on the city’s main square for an anti-government rally. According to all independent accounts this was completely peaceful. Many women and children could be seen in the few pictures that appear on the internet the Uzbek government then closed off the region in an attempt to quash both the demonstrators and the story. Within a few hours the army attacked the crowd; according to many eye-witnesses, they fired indiscriminately, killing hundreds.

“The innocent perished,” Nadyr, a worker at the Andizhan market, told the AFP news agency. “They placed weapons near the killed civilians to make people think that they were terrorists.”

The Uzbek President immediately blamed Hizb-ut-Tahrir for the violence. “The centre of planning was in southern Kyrgyzstan and the territory of the Ferghana Valley,” he said. “Their aim is to overthrow the constitutional regime.” Karimov also claimed that his security services had tapped phone conversations between the rebels and their colleagues in neighbouring Kyrgyz cities of Osh and Jalalabad just across the border, and even in Afghanistan. As anybody knows who has ever used a phone in this part of the world, the idea of such calls is nonsense. Hizb-ut-Tahrir in Central Asia is an outlandish but absolutely peaceful sect. Its goal is to (re)establish an Islamic Caliphate from North Africa across Arabia to Central Asia. Despite many attempts by Central Asian regimes, Hizb-ut-Tahrir has never been proved to have used violence, and it has swiftly denied any involvement in Andizhan.

“The terrorists of tomorrow are the people whose rights are trodden on today,” Craig Murray said to me in the summer of 2003. Later that night a stooped old woman approached me as I left the British embassy. Her son had been jailed for 20 years for attending private prayer meetings. Murray had tried to help him. She was afraid to go in but said, “Please tell Mr Murray that I pray for him. Britain should be proud to have such an honest man as its representative.”

A month later Craig Murray was locked out of his embassy, recalled to London and accused of power abuse, including being drunk on the job and selling visas for sex. Sources in the Foreign Office told me that “a systematic campaign” was waged against Murray, partly directed from Downing Street. His honesty cost Murray his job, his marriage, a nervous breakdown and a spell in hospital on suicide watch.

All accusations were later withdrawn, and in February Murray received ‘315,000 in redundancy from the Foreign Office. He used some of the money to stand for Parliament against his former boss, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Blackburn. “There are fundamental values like human decency and opposition to torture which I hope we as Europeans stand for. In his eagerness to be George Bush’s poodle, Blair has sold out these values,” he says.

A Human Rights Watch researcher who went to Andijan found new evidence of government measures that prevent the public from learning the full story about the killings and the government’s use of force.

Human Rights Watch urged the United States not to engage in any further discussions with Uzbekistan about making permanent its military base there, and called on the European Union to suspend a major trade agreement until the Uzbek government allows an independent, international inquiry into the May 13 killings.

‘The Uzbek authorities are trying to shut Andijan off from the world,’ said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. ‘They’re going to succeed unless other governments insist on a full international investigation, and soon.’

Nearly two weeks after the shootings, Andijan residents whom Human Rights Watch contacted clearly feared government retribution for speaking about the events. A woman who was wounded and lost two family members on May 13 told Human Rights Watch:

‘I am so scared, I don’t want anything, I don’t want any justice. Don’t tell our names, don’t say you came to our house ‘ just say you heard about what happened to us from other people.’

Several people told Human Rights Watch that police had warned them not to talk to journalists or other ‘outsiders.’

One person told Human Rights Watch:

‘Last night there was an [identification] check throughout the neighborhood. Several policemen were checking the documents in every house. They warned us, ‘If the journalists, correspondents come ‘ you should not tell them anything, otherwise we will find you.”

The same person warned Human Rights Watch not to go to the local cemetery where there were reportedly visibly fresh graves, because ‘there is an informant sitting near the gates watching for any strangers who come to the cemetery.’

Ever since I heard ‘ by email about three weeks ago – that street protests were taking off in Andizhan ‘ I had been longing to be there. I would never get a visa, but was speculating about getting over from Kirghizstan on a smuggler’s route. Once the massacre happened sections of border were out of control for a few days. I desperately wanted to go. Annoyingly, I have to go into hospital tomorrow for a heart operation on Monday. I have been trying to convince myself that I have done more good by media work here.

That desire to be there did not entail a longing to be British Ambassador again. At least, not until Wednesday, when I saw reports of the pathetic trip by diplomats to inspect the scene. I had predicted on ITN that this would be ‘a nauseating propaganda charade’. It was. They travelled in a tightly controlled convoy on a sealed off route. The blood had been hosed away. The government dictated who they could meet. The only civilian was the father of a dead soldier. This charabanc trip ended an hour and a half before they expected ‘ Karimov doesn’t just get the buses to run on time, they even run early. The bulk of the time was taken in a formal banquet.

My successor, David Moran, bleated ‘Can we not meet some people?’ Of course you can. At that moment I wished I was back in his shoes. You just walk out, pushing past the soldiers, down to the bazaar, and talk to people. One of my more delightful memories was of Clare Short doing exactly that in May 2003, to the huge consternation of the regime. You, David, are one of the tiny number of people in Uzbekistan they can’t shoot. No-one physically forced you to spend the bulk of your precious time in Andizhan on your arse.

I have been keeping up with events both from phone and email contacts to Uzbekistan, and via the internet. I see The Australian has reported I had a habit of manhandling obstructive Uzbek officials (how did they know?). I wouldn’t call it a habit, but you do sometimes have to show in a totalitarian state that you are not going to be obstructed in your work. To be fair to David Moran, his semi-protest showed at least some backbone; it was more than most of my senior ex-colleagues would have done.

The next day we had the Uzbek Prokurator General announcing that 170 people had, after all, been killed but that they were all armed rebels. I did feel vindicated by the sheer disbelief that greeted this. Here is why.

In March 2004 there were a series of explosions and shootings in Tashkent, in which at least thirty people died. I dashed round to the scene of each incident, arriving within hours or even minutes, accompanied by Giles Whittell of the Times who had just walked in to the Embassy to interview me.

Suicide bombers from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, linked to Al Qaida, had carried out a series of attacks on security forces. That remains the internationally accepted version of events. But it isn’t true.

I attended the briefings the Prokurator General gave to journalists and diplomats. His claims were completely incompatible with the facts I observed. He said suicide belts had been used each with the force of two kilos of TNT. But at the sites there just wasn’t the physical damage. Not so much as a cracked paving stone, let alone a crater. The first ‘bomb’ had been in a roughly triangular courtyard thirty metres wide at maximum. Allegedly six soldiers and a suicide bomber had been killed. Not a pane of glass was broken in the buildings overlooking the courtyard, not a branch or sprig torn from the tree in the centre.