By Mary Raftery in The Irish Times

He was accused of corruption, of taking bribes, being an alcoholic and sleeping around. Pretty hairy stuff, if you happen to be the UK foreign office’s youngest ambassador, a high flyer well on your way to a glittering career.

The story of Craig Murray, British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 until 2004, is a salutary tale for anyone thinking of doing the right thing, of defending people against murder and torture, of standing up and speaking out in the face of duplicity, hypocrisy and evil.

For this is what Murray did when he publicly condemned the Uzbek regime in 2003 for its systematic use of torture – “on an industrial scale”, as he has described it. He also implicitly criticised his own UK government and that of the United States, who accepted information on Islamic groups which they knew had been obtained under Uzbek torture.

Ambassadors in so-called friendly countries who blow the lid on grotesque abuses of human rights are rare birds. Only one precedent in recent decades springs to mind. Robert White was US ambassador to El Salvador in 1980, during that country’s state-sponsored slaughter of its own civilians. He lost his job for publicly condemning the murders, rapes and torture by a vicious right-wing regime, which was of course a staunch ally of the US. Craig Murray also lost his job. Never mind that the outrageous allegations against him were shown to be false; he was still forced out. He was not considered what is euphemistically known as a team player.

Uzbekistan is a member of the “Coalition of the Willing”, making it an enthusiastic supporter of the US/UK war on terror. It has allowed its territory to be used by coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, with whom it shares a border.

A former Soviet republic, it has been led since its independence in 1991 by Islam Karimov, a former Communist Party leader. There are no free elections and opposition parties are banned. It is widely accepted internationally, even by the UK foreign office, that the regime of this primarily Sunni Muslim country continues to use the threat of al-Qaeda-style terrorism as an excuse to ruthlessly suppress legitimate opposition to its policies.

The US state department describes Uzbekistan as the “strategic centre of central Asia”. It plays a pivotal role in the region, and the US “accordingly has developed a broad relationship covering political, human rights, military, nonproliferation, economic, trade, assistance, and related issues”. While there is a reference to the Uzbek regime’s routine use of torture, this clearly is no impediment to Uzbekistan’s membership of the coalitions which, according to the state department, “have dealt with both Afghanistan and Iraq”. Nor is it apparently any obstacle to America’s use of Uzbekistan for rendition purposes – it has been reported that several terrorist suspects have been deposited there by the US for interrogation. It was only when the Uzbek military opened fire last year on a group of defenceless protesters in the city of Andijan, killing over 600, that western powers were moved to murmur a protest. Craig Murray’s gravest sin was to go public about the fact that both the US and the UK governments were happily using information gained under torture from unfortunate Uzbeks identified – usually falsely – by the regime as terrorists. In Alan Torney’s enthralling documentary on RT’ radio last week, Murray described how he was told by the British foreign office that it was perfectly acceptable to use information gained as a result of torture so long as the UK did not actually torture people itself, or actively encourage others to do so.

Whether encouraged or not, the Uzbek regime uses rape, asphyxiation and electrocution as standard means of torture.

They also like to wield pliers to tear out finger and toenails and to immerse people in boiling liquid. There are reports of parents forced to witness the torture of their children so as to force information from them.

Murray makes the point that while waging a war in Iraq ostensibly to remove the tyrant Saddam Hussein and his appalling abuse of his own people, both the US and the UK are happily cohabiting with another regime in the area, namely Uzbekistan, whose persecution of its citizens was, and remains, just as savage.

The latest in the Craig Murray saga – and he continues to campaign against human rights abuses in Uzbekistan – is a remarkable assault on his work by the UK administration.

His riveting book, Murder in Samarkand, was published earlier this year, and was to contain official documents he obtained under the UK freedom of information legislation.

The British government responded by threatening legal action, on the basis that it owns the copyright to all such documents and refuses to allow them to be reproduced. Murray himself best sums up his experiences: “Have we come to this, that integrity in public life is now so rare that some consider me a hero just for exhibiting the most basic human decency?”

Murder in Samarkand, Craig Murray. Mainstream, 400 pp, ‘18.99

Paul Routledge

“How can we have come to this,” asks Craig Murray, once Our Man in Tashkent, “that integrity in public life is now so rare that some consider me a hero just for exhibiting the most basic human decency?”

You only have to read this important, and courageous, book to understand why. If you are a public servant, and you speak out about the moral cesspit into which New Labour has jumped ‘ not fallen ‘ then you will be hounded from your job, blackguarded in the media and pursued by the avenging furies of the security services and their lawyers.

Craig Murray paid this price for revealing the British government’s role in the use of information gained by torture, which in turn led to the expose of the USA’s “extraordinary rendition” flights” and infuriated Washington. He simply had to go, and once gone, further and better punished to discourage the rest.

It is amazing that this book ever appeared. The government’s censors have had a field day, cutting out damning details on pain of crippling litigation against the publisher. And Whitehall’s finest lawyers were wheeled out to threaten the author with breach of copyright if he disclosed sensitive diplomatic telegrams. But the great virtue about this awkward Scot, who looks like a bemused schoolteacher down on his luck, is that you cannot shut him up.

Murder in Samarkand is the result : a bludgeon by bludgeon account of the barbaric regime of President Karimov in Uzbekistan, and a Labour government’s complicity in his rule. Murray, a career diplomat with postings in Warsaw and west Africa behind him, was appointed Britain’s youngest ambassador in Tashkent in 2002 at the age of 43. He was Norfolk grammar school and Dundee University, rather than Eton and Oxbridge, and Liberal rather than service-orientated Conservative or career Labour. In retrospect, he looked like trouble from the beginning. Except that he did his job so well.

Murray found Tashkent a diplomatic quiet zone, with embassies unable, or unwilling, to influence Karimov’s corrupt, reborn-Communist government. His first act was to attend a dissident’s trial, where three hours of observing perversion of justice set him on his own course of dissent. He fired off a telegram to London condemning the regime that was Blair’s ally in the “war on terror” and demanding an EU protest. Within days, opponents of the regime were knocking at his door with horrific fresh evidence, including photographs of a man who had been boiled alive. The American ambassador cautioned him, claiming that the boiling man was “an isolated case.”

Contrarily, Murray upped the tempo with a public speech condemning the Uzbek regime’s human rights record, and a stream of telegrams disclosing “systemic” torture. His FCO managers were not amused, warning him that he was behaving like a politician, not a diplomat. Worse was to come. Murray, who was reading the MI6 material, denounced as hopelessly wrong information “from a friendly security service” gleaned from “detainee briefing.” He was sure this stuff was “hot out of the torture chambers.” But for Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the head of MI6, the material was “operationally useful”, even if they both (allegedly) lost sleep over its use.

Thereon, it was downhill all the way. The story of the FCO’s persecution of Murray is told in relentless detail. He was accused of being unpatriotic, drunk on duty, unduly fond of the local women, and a host of other undiplomatic habits. He was certainly na’ve, and enjoyed the social round, such as it was in Tashkent. Murray enlivened it with Gilbert and Sullivan, a Scottish rock band and fireworks. Recalled for interview to London, he almost died from a pulmonary embolism and was probably unwise to return to his post while the campaign to destroy him reached a climax at home. He was banned from his own office, a policy specifically supported by Straw. Eventually, practically all the charges against him were dropped, except for the heinous crime of talking about them. But they sacked him all the same, ending his “experiment in a more dynamic style of ambassadorship.”

His real crime, of course, was unwitting subversion of the longstanding US-UK intelligence sharing agreement, under which everything is swapped between the CIA and MI6. Since the American spook industry is four times bigger than ours, this is an unequal swap, and part of the bargain has to be British acceptance of information wherever it comes from. If it comes from torture, “we have to accept it in order to maintain the integrity of the agreement,” Murray emphasises..

That is the nub of the issue, and he is disarmingly frank about stating it. From a simple protest against political corruption, Murray was drawn ineluctably into a power game that could only have one ending. Within days of his controversial Tashkent speech, a top US diplomat in Uzbekistan told a visiting Danish journalist “Murray is a finished man here.”

But happily, not here at home. Murder in Samarkand is not just a harrowing, dramatic story, occasionally relieved by an impish sense of humour. It is a clarion call to all those who care about justice and human rights. No wonder they wanted to shut him up, and thank heaven they failed.