I would be lying if I said I was not disappointed by the failure of Dirty Diplomacy so far to garner any major reviews in the United States. But it continues to be appreciated in small niches, like the St Paul’s American Asian Gazette :

The book often reads like a travelogue as Murray tells about his compelling travels through the country, and he also publishes previously secret memos and letters add meaning to his stories. It is an appeal to the global community to enter the hot debate over what policies and actions are acceptable in the name of security. Despite the occasionally distracting portrayal of himself as a Lone Ranger defying the evil regime and exposing the wrongs perpetuated by the complicity of others, his tale is powerful and adds a meaningful voice to the growing global call for social justice.

http://www.aapress.com/artsnews.php?subaction=showfull&id=1193960988&archive=&start_from=&ucat=6

Not entirely complimentary, but again nice to know that someone there read it. Meanwhile a very good bit of writing coming from Middlesborough:

First, take a look at pictures of Usmanov. That man appears to have no DNA. The blueprint for his being seem to be the seven deadly sins. In fact, I’d bet each cell in his body positively pulsates with greed, lust and avarice. Have you ever seen such drooping bulldog jowls, tiny pin eyes squinting out of a heaving mountain of rubbery flesh and huge murderous meaty hands other than those not behind bars?

This scientific conclusion is based on solid objective evidence. That is, I once spent a couple of hours in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and I can unreservedly state that it’s a gangster state. The officials that I had the er. interesting fortune of meeting wore black leather jackets, thick gold chains hung off their necks and their fingers were braced with even more gold.

http://www.comeonboro.com/columns/112303.php

Occasionally you read a review from someone who really “gets” what I am trying to do, and it gives you a lovely warm feeling inside. For me, that feeling is redoubled when that person is writing from somewhere I have never heard of. So here is a review from the Kingston Observer (that’s Kingston USA, not Jamaica). No. I don’t know where it is either. But I’m definitely going to go there one day now.

Before the torture scandals of Abu Ghraib became public, there was the matter of the prisoner who was boiled to death in Uzbekistan. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to that country, learned of this tragedy and exposed it, urging the British government to distance itself from U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. propped up the repressive Uzbek regime with half a billion dollars yearly in exchange for the use of an air base. For his trouble, Murray was harassed mercilessly by his own government and ultimately forced out of his position.

By his own unvarnished admissions, Murray enjoys a drink or more and he is a serial adulterer now living with his Uzbek lover, Nadira, in London, but his morality is surely greater than the sum of those two parts. He’s like the Bill Clinton of the British foreign service, messy on the personal side, brilliant and compassionate on the other. He no doubt exposed his own flaws to snatch the opportunity from his political foes. Well done and bravo.

Murray traveled the Uzbek countryside, consulting with British businessmen and ordinary Uzbeks whose lives are a torment. Growing cotton is a major industry in the country, and at harvest time, university students and hospital patients who are ambulatory are sent to pick the crop.

The political and judicial issues, however, are what landed Murray in his own vat of hot water. His description of a trial he attended is horrific since even the witnesses are tortured to produce the desired testimony. According to Murray, the post 9/11 rage resulted in the practice of sending prisoners to countries like Uzbekistan where human rights is an unacknowledged concept. Muslims are tortured in the name of the war on terror. When prisoners are executed their families are charged for the bullets. The hideous irony, of course, is that the dictator Saddam Hussein received justice at the end of a rope, while Uzbek President Karimov got a fat check from the U.S. Ultimately, Karimov embraced Mother Russia and tossed us out.

By turns unbearably sad and raucously funny, this book is a must read by a man with courage in spades and an acute sense of perspective and humor. Dirty Diplomacy is an extraordinary book.

http://kingstonobserver.com/moxie/columnists/nancy/books-by-nancy-october-20.shtml

Publisher’s blurb for new book –

In this prequel to Murder in Samarkand Craig Murray asserts that once the red soil of Africa gets into your blood, you are in thrall to the continent for the rest of your life. Returning in 1998 from heading the Political and Economic sections of the British Embassy in Warsaw, Craig becomes Deputy Head of the Africa Department of the FCO. Within two weeks of taking up the job suave, controversial, ex Guards officer and mercenary commander Colonel Tim Spicer walks into Craig Murray’s office. Murray does not like what he finds and reports Spicer to Customs and Excise – and creates the Arms to Africa Investigation that is the first big crisis of Tony Blair’s government. Suspended from duty, grilled by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, then quickly despatched sideways to Ghana as Deputy High Commissioner. Murray next finds himself caught up in nightmarish and extremely dangerous face to face negotiations with Foday Sankoh and the murderous rebels of Sierra Leone, famous for mutilating children and pregnant women and hacking off the limbs of thousands of victims. After negotiating with Sankoh and Charles Taylor, now both facing war crimes tribunals, Murray miraculously emerges with a peace deal that saved the lives of tens of thousands, only to have his thunder stolen by Jesse Jackson in a hilariously comical episode.

Strongly commended by Robin Cook and loaded with obscure African honours, Murray then launches into arranging a State Visit for the Queen to Ghana which is part of his strategy to massage perpetual ruler Jerry Rawlings out of office. Outwitting the Rawlings regime in a series of astonishing set pieces, including canoe borne trips to obscure villages personally to supervise voter registration, Murray delivers free and fair elections that enable the opposition peacefully to take power, and Murray becomes a national hero in Ghana. But his public statement that British companies have been involved in corruption in Africa draws down firm censure from the FCO and he is despatched to remote Uzbekistan in order, his bosses hope, that he will never be heard of again….

Told with Murray’s customary style and panache, this near incredible story points up many of the paradoxes of Western involvement in the Africa which Murray loves so deeply. Readers of Murder in Samarkand will enjoy again the alternation of impish wit and moral high mindedness, high jinx and stunning flashes of political insight. And, as ever with Murray, there are several lovers and a variety of alcoholic beverages on the way, as well as green mambas, cerebral malaria and a mischievous Ashanti ghost…

The US edition of Murder in Samarkand has finally hit the shops, under the title of Dirty Diplomacy. Be warned that it is basically the same book, and I do not recommend you to buy both.

Dirty Diplomacy is however a different cut from an original manuscript. So while slightly shorter than Murder in Samarkand, it includes some passages which were not in the UK version, and is less heavily censored because of the protections for freedom of speech in the US.

Here is a pre-publication review from Booklist, a library and bookseller trade magazine:

Dirty Diplomacy.

Murray, Craig (Author)

Oct 2007. 368 p. Scribner, hardcover, $26.00. (1416548017). 958.70.

Must diplomacy involve duplicity? Murray, an energetic and forthright British diplomat, moved his family to Tashkent in 2002 with high hopes for fostering progress in Uzbekistan. But he soon discovered that under the dictatorial rule of Islam Karimov, thousands of political and religious prisoners were being held without trial, many tortured and murdered. Murray sent urgent communiques to his superiors, then began speaking out. A hero to the oppressed, he was viewed as a traitor in London and Washington as both administrations courted Karimov as an ally as the war in Iraq got under way.

Forced to leave his post in 2004, Murray now boldly details Karimov’s crimes against humanity, his own wild and risky adventures, and the chilling and unconscionable actions of the UK and the U.S. Writing with brio, chagrin, and conviction, Murray admits that as a whiskey-loving, kilt-wearing skirt chaser, he is no paragon. But his determination to stand up for human rights makes him a man of conscience well worth listening to. And he is one helluva storyteller. An electrifying read; watch for the movie.

?” Donna Seaman

This one is from Publishers’ Weekly

Although the subject matter is dead serious, the picaresque subtitle reflects the defiant wit at the heart of this highly revealing memoir by the colorful and prominent former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray’s brief term (2002?”2004) belies his influence as a scrupulous administrator who, whatever his personal failures (and he’s refreshingly up-front about them), proved incorruptible in pursuit of social justice in a nation suffering under a sadistic regime. In addition to competence, wit and considerable daring, Murray displayed a rare integrity in Tashkent that stood out among his counterparts, which was precisely what got him into trouble with both dictator Karimov’s brutal totalitarian state and with his own government, which eventually resorted to an eye-opening campaign to oust him. A deluge of bureaucratic and personal information occasionally blurs the focus in this book, but Murray uses the full weight of his ambassadorship to hold a key ally of the U.S. accountable for deep-seated economic corruption and human rights abuses?”including pervasive use of torture?” and runs headlong into some of the fiercest contradictions in the war on terror. (Oct.)

Those are trade reviews; since publication last week, one newspaper review so far from the New York Post

BATTLING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, ONE MEMO AT A TIME

By STEPHEN LYNCH

October 14, 2007 — Legend has it that the road connecting Afghanistan to Uzbekistan leads the region in car accidents, as truckers emerging from burkaland catch their first glimpse of Uzbek women in miniskirts and veer off the road.

Sounds like a country America can get behind!

And indeed we have, as is illustrated tragically, and often comically, in “Dirty Diplomacy” by Craig Murray, who served as Britian’s ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002-05.

Murray argues that because of the Uzbek administration’s support in fighting the Taliban, and providing a friendly environment for oil companies, the U.S. looks the other way when it comes to Uzbekistan’s human rights abuses and economic neglect of its own people. In short, we’re supporting a tyrant – President Islom Karimov – to battle Muslim extremists (as compared to Iraq, where we chose Muslim extremists over a tyrant).

The ambassador’s outrage peaks soon after his arrival, when he attends a dissident trial in a kangaroo court, and the witness, presented with six men from which to pick three criminals, selects the wrong three. The judge, outraged, tells him to chose again.

From that moment, Murray decides to take action, in the best way the British know how – memos. He hopes to shame the rest of the diplomatic corps, his own meager embassy staff and the Uzbekistan government into doing what he believes is right.

As a travelogue, “Diplomacy” is fascinating, serving as a good introduction to a region most Americans don’t know a lot about. Murray rightly notes that it was the Soviet Union that made a mess of things, purposely drawing lines for Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan that had little bearing on the actual ethnic makeup of those countries (as British cartographers did in the Middle East). The folly is when the U.S. – or anyone – clings to these artifices too strongly. What we learned in geography (or didn’t, considering the study of test scores) isn’t as permanent as we’d like to believe.

In Uzbekistan, rallies for reform often come in the form of Islam, which scares the West now more than Communism. But Murray argues that many innocent believers are being swept up in Karimov’s anti-terrorism efforts.

The failing of “Dirty Diplomacy” is Murray’s self-aggrandizing description of his crusades against injustice. After all, besides driving his country’s state department crazy, alienating his staffers and ending his marriage, he walks away with nothing but his righteous indignation. Uzbekistan is still run by Karimov. The crackdown goes on.

The hope, of course, is that by packaging that indigation into the story of a “Scotch Drinking, Skirt Chasing … and Thoroughly Un-repentant Ambassador,” as his subtitle states, Murray can get the U.S. to recognize how it’s hurting itself.

By supporting Karimov’s regime, we may be driving more Uzbeks into the very arms of those we hope to defeat. If his dictatorship falls, will it be replaced by Western-friendly democrats? Or will it be the disgruntled Muslim dissidents, bearing a grudge?

Blowback’s a bitch.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10142007/postopinion/postopbooks/one_man_takes_a_stan.htm

Which is not bad considering it’s a Murdoch tabloid. And here comes Playboy!

Dirty Diplomacy:

The Rough-and-Tumble Adventures of a Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against Terror

By Craig Murray

Scribner, 384 pages, Hardcover$26.00

Reviewed by Frank Marquardt

Don’t be misled by Dirty Diplomacy’s subtitle. As Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, author Craig Murray mostly drank vodka, chased only one woman and failed to bust any dictators.

On this last point, it’s not for lack of trying. Soon after taking up his post, Murray is shown pictures of a corpse of a man who, prior to being immersed in boiling liquid, was beaten around the face and had his fingernails ripped out. That event provided the inspiration for the British release of the book’s more accurate title: Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror. Murray attempted to expose the country’s human rights record, in which people are falsely accused, imprisoned and tortured, and women are routinely raped by the police.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the party line. British officials, standing side-by-side the Americans, seemed more intent on recognizing Uzbekistan’s progress toward freedom — of which there has been arguably little — than its transgressions in the area of human rights. America’s reasons for championing Uzbekistan, in turn, seem to have had a lot more to do with the U.S. desire to maintain an airbase in the country than any actual action by the Uzbekistan authorities to create a more democratic country or free market economy.

Defying the diplomats at home got Murray into some trouble, setting off a media storm in Britain; higher-ups tried to remove him under a set of trumped-up charges. At first, Murray prevailed, remaining in Uzbekistan, but eventually he was forced out. Dirty Diplomacy offers his side of the story. As an inside view of the work of an ambassador, it’s interesting; as an indictment of British and American hypocrisy in their so-called “War on Terror,” it’s damning. The irony, for America at least, came in May 2005, when Uzbek police killed an estimated 700 protestors, and soon after evicted the American airbase. Hardly diplomatic — but dirty, indeed.

http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/reviews/books/dirty-diplomacy/dirty-diplomacy.html