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Rather snooty review from the Indpendent’s diplomatic editor, who I feel may have been writing with an eye to preserving her FCO contacts. Incidentally, I think “Carry on up the Khyber” is a great film.

Craig

From The Independent

By Anne Penketh

Published: 11 August 2006

The Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan has one of the world’s most vicious regimes. President Islam Karimov, a Soviet-era survivor, would be right at the top of any league table of despots, along with Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Kim Jong-Il of North Korea. Former UK ambassador Craig Murray, when he was Our Man in Tashkent, launched a one-man campaign to expose human-rights abuses in Uzbekistan. But his accusations that the Government was turning a blind eye to the use of torture brought him into conflict with support for the “war on terror”, and he was forced to resign after a smear campaign encompassing both his private and professional life that destroyed his health and his marriage. In this book, Murray tells his side of the story.

If you have already formed an opinion about the poor judgement of the kilt-wearing, self-described “boozed-up, randy Scot”, who left his long-suffering wife for an Uzbek dancer, the book will not change your mind. It is a shame, because Murray has a compelling tale about torture, skulduggery and bravery in the wilds of Uzbekistan. But the central theme risks being obscured by the revelations about his personal life. It is more Carry on up the Khyber than Murder in Samarkand.

A Foreign Office colleague is described as “the only man in the FCO who can drink me under the table”: a boast illustrated during Murray’s posting to Uzbekistan. On a typical evening’s drinking with an Uzbek official, the pair down considerable quantities of Georgian red wine before they each consume the best part of a bottle of vodka with mutual toasts. They then drive to the nearest fleshpot – “in any Western country he would have been 10 times over the drink-driving limit” – where they continue the evening with beer and yet more vodka until 4am.

Murray describes well the horrors of the US-backed Karimov regime – the death by boiling, police rapes and forced labour in the cotton fields. To his credit, his decision to confront the Uzbek authorities gained him their respect and made him a hero to the NGOs. “I was trying to change a massively entrenched dictatorship by hurling myself against it. What was the point?” Simply “that it had to be done. Think William Wallace. On the other hand, when they tortured him to death they forced his own testicles down his throat.”

This is indeed what happened to Murray, metaphorically speaking, as his diplomatic career was brought to an end. His witty and engaging narrative makes him look like the Candide of the cynical diplomatic world. In his fight against the system, the system won, despite his principled stand against New Labour’s craven alignment with the Bush administration. But spare a thought for his superiors, bombarded by e-mails and telegrams. Murray was an ambassador behaving like a politician – even, at times, like the local head of Human Rights Watch. What prospects for British diplomacy if everybody behaves like a loose cannon, whatever the moral justification?

Murray realises that, by protesting about the uselessness of intelligence obtained under torture, he had inadvertently uncovered the basis of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme. “That would explain the ferocity of the attacks aimed at removing me and destroying my reputation,” he says. The sad epilogue is that, since his departure, the human rights situation in Uzbekistan has worsened still further. In a major geo-political shift, President Karimov has realigned his government with Moscow – a much less demanding partner in the field of human rights.

Anne Penketh is diplomatic editor of ‘The Independent’

From thesharpner

In August 2002 Craig Murray set off to Uzbekistan as HM Ambassador. For those of us a bit vague about the aftermath of the USSR, it’s bordered by Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan, Kazakhstan, and what’s left of the Aral Sea after the appalling ecological impact of its massive cotton industry. Alongside cotton it produces natural gas, vast amounts of minerals, and tobacco. It’s a country full of resounding place names, among them what were once called the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers and the cities of Tashkent and Samarkand.

Murray had not been an ambassador before but he had been a diplomat for some 20 years, including a spell as head of the economics section of the British Embassy in Warsaw and most recently as Deputy High Commissioner of Ghana. He did not come from the typical FCO background: a Scot, he went to a state school and Dundee University. His staff in Tashkent was tiny: few other western nations even had an embassy there at the time.

It will be no surprise to anyone who reads Murray’s site that his book is in part a sustained attack on UK foreign policy over the last few years. Murray soon began to come to the conclusion that Karimov’s regime in Uzbekistan were a brutal band of corrupt thugs, running a country where show-trials relying on ‘evidence’ obtained by torture were routine. The US and UK were backing the regime, in part as an element of the ‘War on Terror’, and pouring money into it, because it was opposed to Islamic fundamentalism, and because Uzbekistan is in a useful position for Rumsfeld’s ‘lily pad’ strategy (lots of permanent major US bases scattered over the middle east for rapid reaction), and also happen to be sitting on a lot of valuable natural resources and potential pipeline routes etc. He also argues that our Governments are, or at least were, labouring under a fundamental misapprehension: that Karimov’s regime is part and parcel with other Soviet successor regimes in eastern Europe: Walesa, Havel, and the like. It isn’t: Karimov and his ilk are the old local Communist leaders under new colours. These are men who were not at all impressed with Gorbachev.

Murray decided that one of the themes of his embassy would be standing up on human rights: in later correspondence with the FCO he was to write:

‘I think that outrage is absolutely the correct emotion at learning that someone has been tortured to death with boiling water. If your reaction at seeing photos of this is not to be outraged but to wonder precisely which UN Convention contains provision against torture by boiling water, then I am sorry. I see the head of ODIHR has called it in public ‘horrid’. I presume you think he is being a bit strong. [‘] PS I don’t know if you have noticed but I have a slight speech defect. I really can’t call anything ‘howwid’.’

(more…)

David Leigh on Craig Murray’s extraordinary account of his period as envoy to Uzbekistan, Murder in Samarkand

From The Guardian

There is plenty of black comedy in this frank story of the disillusionment and downfall of one of Britain’s brightest young ambassadors. It is presumably that element which has already attracted director Michael Winterbottom to his project of making it into a feature film with Steve Coogan in the title role.

Craig Murray clearly had little idea of what he was letting himself in for four years ago, when he set off with a pile of baggage on a first-class flight, as envoy to the faraway country of Uzbekistan. A bit of a bon vivant and a womaniser, he was also clever and industrious, and he knew it. One of a new unstuffy breed in the Foreign Office, from Dundee University rather than Oxford, he says he protested at being told to wear a grey tailcoat and topper for a duty call on the royals before departure. He was informed the dress code was sternly insisted on by the Palace, since an ambassador had recently committed the solecism of arriving in a linen suit. “Good God! A linen suit?” writes Murray cockily. “No wonder we lost the Empire!”

But when he got to Tashkent, Murray’s cockiness started to evaporate. As he describes it, he found himself in a milieu worthy of Graham Greene. The Americans were busy building an enormous airbase, and praising the sinister President Karimov to the skies as a reformist ally in the great war on terror. Karimov himself was exploiting US naivety while running an Asiatic tyranny on a North Korean model, with internal passports, virtual slave labour, and brutal torture of Muslim dissidents. The Americans were kept happy by a supply of colourful “intelligence” about al-Qaida activities, most of which, says Murray, was nonsense.

The new ambassador decided to attend a show trial. It was an eye-opener. He was at first intrigued by an encounter with an Uzbek lovely, and then became very ashamed of himself. “I realised this was the sister of the victim. Her eyes were filling with tears. Her brother was going to be executed and I was trying to make out her legs through her dress. I was filled with self-loathing.” He felt even more ashamed when he found his local girlfriends were resigned to being regularly raped by the thuggish Tashkent police.

Murray set about doing what he thought was the right thing. He decribes how he sent telegrams to London demanding diplomatic action. He confronted corrupt Uzbek officials. He made a dramatic public speech in front of a stony-faced US ambassador, contradicting bland American praise of the regime and becoming a local hero.

But, as he tells the story, there was just too much that Murray did not realise at the time. He did not know that Tony Blair and the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, had hitched Britain irrevocably to the White House wagon. He did not know that with the coming invasion of Iraq, any dissent from the architecture of lies used to justify it would be depicted as “unpatriotic”. He did not know that the CIA had a secret policy of “rendition” which was not merely condoning torture, but was deliberately exploiting it. And it is clear from his account that he did not realise his unhappy marriage and penchant for long-legged pole-dancers were capable of blowing up in his face.

Murray says he was briefed against by the Americans, who had the ear of No 10, and undermined by his own superiors in London. An initial attempt was made to force him to resign with false charges of alcoholism and corruption. The internal memos about this which Murray eventually obtained are quite disgusting to read, even in the heavily censored form allowed by HMG’s lawyers.

Murray temporarily collapsed under the strain, and it is not inconceivable from the evidence here that his Uzbek enemies made an attempt to poison him. He seems to have fought bravely, rescued his reputation and eventually forced the FO to pay him off, which financed his divorce. Murray does demonstrate that the men of straw have failed to silence him, for which he deserves much praise. But he has none the less been successfully defenestrated. He is now living with the young Uzbek beauty whom he fell for, and is reduced to a flat in west London. Those he took on – Karimov, Bush and Blair – remain in power.

Justin Marozzi reviews Murder in Samarkand in The Spectator

Craig Murray, formerly Our Man in Tashkent, was not your average ambassador. He put the wind up the Uzbeks with his uncompromising position on President Islam Karimov’s unspeakably grisly human rights record. This is the country that infamously boiled a dissident to death and then sentenced his mother to six years of hard labour when she had the temerity to complain about it. It is thanks to Murray’s efforts that the case was publicly aired in the first place and that the unfortunate mother’s sentence was subsequently commuted to a fine.

Upsetting Uzbekistan is one thing. The problem was that all this business was going on from 2002-4, when Washington, historically a little careless about choosing its friends around the world, was cosying up to one of its nastiest regimes. Karimov was a new-found ally in President Bush’s war on terror, providing an important airbase from which the Taleban regime in Afghanistan was defeated. Washington wasn’t happy about Britain’s man in Uzbekistan ruffling feathers. So he had to go. Britain, having mislaid its independent foreign policy, shamefully did America’s bidding.

Click to access the full article at The Spectator

From Literary Review, August 2006

Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror

Put aside the clunky subtitle and the garland from moral pimple John Pilger ‘ the anti-Establishment Antipodean’s a hero until you meet him ‘ and what you have here is an amazing narrative, beautifully written, of one man’s war on the War on Terror.

Craig Murray was the youngest British ambassador when he was appointed to represent Her Majesty in the Central Asian tyranny of Uzbekistan. Brilliant, unorthodox, committed to championing the causes of the United Kingdom, free trade and human rights, Murray had served his country with aplomb in Poland, Ghana and in the Citadel in Whitehall, playing real-life, real-time war games against Saddam’s arms-procurement network after the invasion of Kuwait. But the rising star sizzled up like an overdone sausage when he came up against the War on Terror.

The fascination of Craig Murray’s tale of his fall from grace at the hands of the Foreign Office is that he gives so much ammunition to his enemies. He freely admits that he does hang out in dodgy bars, he does drink, he does fall in love with an Uzbek dancer (and English graduate) half his age, he does leave his (long-suffering and admirable) wife and he does have a nervous breakdown. Murray was cared for in St Thomas’s in London:

‘For the next ten days, I was on suicide watch. This involved a burly male nurse watching my every move 24 hours a day, and even following me into the loo. I can promise you, if you are not suicidal before, you will be after ten days of having a large male nurse follow you into the loo.’

But it is the honesty with which Murray reports his predicament that is striking. I do not think that he holds anything back from the reader, and that makes his indictment of the Foreign Office mandarins and then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw all the more compelling. He is an honest man, and that seems to have been his difficulty.

The core of the story is that Murray found President Karimov’s Uzbekistan a disgusting dictatorship where the government runs the heroin trade, business is a personal fiefdom of the ruler’s cronies and dissidents are boiled alive. His problem was that his honest reporting of the situation did not square with how Washington wanted to see it. The script from the White House was that Karimov was onside in the War on Terror, was fighting Muslim extremists and associates of Bin Laden, and was making significant moves towards democracy.

And Britain? The cornerstone of the Atlantic relationship is the USA’UK intelligence-sharing agreement, in which the CIA and the National Security Agency share everything (or nearly everything) with MI6 and GCHQ. The Americans pump out four or five times as much data as the Brits do, so it is a relationship from which we benefit. The problem with any intelligence system is ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If the Americans are told by the Uzbek SNB (the local, rebranded KGB) that an Al Qaeda cell is running in, say, the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, then that is reported as fact by the CIA. But Murray went to the bother of attending some of the regime’s show trials. At one, he hears an elderly farmer cry out, denying his testimony that his grandson had travelled to Afghanistan and had met Bin Laden:

”They tortured me!’ said the old man.

‘They tortured my grandson before my eyes. They beat his testicles and put electrodes on his body. They put a mask on him to stop breathing. They raped him with a bottle. Then they brought my granddaughter and said they would rape her. All the time they said ‘Osama Bin Laden, Osama Bin Laden’. We are poor farmers from Andijan. We are good Muslims, but what do we know of Osama Bin Laden?”

Game over. It was this trial, and a mountain of other compelling evidence that led Murray to question the fundamental propositions behind the War on Terror. Murray’s first broadside came in his speech to the Freedom House in 2002 when he corrected the American ambassador’s drivel and said: ‘Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy. The major political parties are banned; parliament is not subject to democratic election; and checks and balances on the authority of the executive are lacking”.

Murray realised that secret intelligence from Uzbekistan ‘ fed to the CIA, and passed on to MI6 and then to him ‘ was based on torture. He put it succinctly in one telegram to Jack Straw: ‘We are selling our souls for dross.’

Murray was rewarded with total disgrace. He was charged with eighteen counts of gross professional misconduct, including having sold visas for sex, alcoholism, having used the flag car as a fun vehicle, blah, blah, blah. Back in Whitehall, Murray accused his Foreign Office superiors, Simon Butt and Linda Duffield, of doing their utmost to undermine his position with the torturers. Part of me has never been able to understand Appeasement, how the British Establishment could have bent so low. Having read Murray’s story, I can now. Even so, it is a shocking read, to see how often the Foreign Office twisted facts and invented half-truths to do Murray down. Fascinatingly, no one outside bought a word of it.

The lie factory in King Charles Street was almost universally disbelieved. Virtually the entire British business community in Uzbekistan had seen for themselves just how hard Murray had worked at understanding their problems. They’d seen, too, how the Uzbek leadership treated lickspittles with contempt, and how the moment Murray started standing up for the UK and human rights, the authorities had begun to treat the British with more respect. The business community ‘ from the tobacco company to the lowliest consultant ‘ sent Jack Straw fax after fax, setting him straight.

The hacks did Murray proud, too. Fleet Street’s finest rushed off to Uzbekistan and trawled the girly bars. Yes, the ambassador did some drinking. Yes, he had one woman, Nadira (who now lives with him). But all the other allegations were false. Instead, the hacks got the real story: that torture and repression were routine, and that Murray was in trouble for telling it straight. Some of the most fascinating bits of this book concern how Murray, the insider, used Foreign Office procedure against the FO itself.

But, in the end, he was forced out, and what Murray claims were the big lies ‘ for example, that the British government opposes torture in intelligence-gathering ‘ were able to settle down, no longer challenged from within. The latest twist in the story is that the Treasury’s solicitors have been on to Murray, and his publishers, calling on them to pull sensitive telegrams from his website. They may succeed, for a limited while.

But truth will out. Craig Murray is at pains ‘ sometimes absurdly so ‘to demonstrate that he is no hero. But that doesn’t stop him from being heroic, or his book from being a bloody good read.

By Daniel Bardsley in GulfNews.com

Dubai: A rebellious former British Ambassador has described his country’s foreign policy as “appalling” and predicted it will lead to more terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom.

Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, called on Britain to align itself with Europe rather than the United States, saying Tony Blair was “completely out of step”.

Murray, 47, was removed from his post in 2004 after criticising the West’s support for Islam Karimov, the Uzbek leader accused of human rights abuses, among them the boiling alive of dissidents. His recent memoir of his time in Uzbekistan, Murder in Samarkand, has hit bookstores in the UAE and is being reprinted following strong demand.

In a telephone interview with Gulf News from London, Murray said: “Britain should return to being in line with European policy. European policy in the Middle East was respected. We’ve lost that respect.

“With Lebanon, it’s so obvious that it’s only the UK and the US standing in the way of an immediate ceasefire. The idea that we should prevent a ceasefire and allow the Israelis to kill as many Lebanese as possible is appalling.

“The government is completely out of step and sadly it will lead to a lot more terrorist attacks in the UK.

“We should coordinate our foreign policy with France and Germany and distance ourselves from the US.”

Murray had postings in Lagos and Warsaw before becoming Ambassador to Uzbekistan when still in his mid 40s. Within weeks of starting his job he decided that the regime was riding roughshod over human rights.

He said a trial of dissidents accused of killing a policeman and being members of an Islamic organisation was like “a Nazi show trial”. “The judge kept shouting and screaming at the defendants and making anti-Islamic remarks. It was really nasty.

“Within 24 hours I received photos of dissidents boiled to death. That was a hell of an eye opener,” he said.

Murray criticised the Uzbek regime in public and to his employers, and a string of disciplinary charges he described as “trumped up” were levelled against him.

He was cleared of the charges, which ranged from sexual misconduct to misuse of an embassy vehicle, but removed from his post after saying that British intelligence officials used information gained by the Uzbek authorities through torture. He resigned from the foreign office, which he said “destroyed my career”.

Later, he hopes to work promoting development in Africa. “I knew [the book] would be controversial. A lot of what it says is stuff the British Government really wouldn’t want to get out. That’s caused a lot of international interest,” he said, adding that a film version is planned, with Steve Coogan playing Murray and Michael Winterbottom directing.