Virtuallu unnoticed, last week’s EU summit lifted the arms embargo and travel ban on the murderous Karimov regime in Uzbekistan. So now British arms manufacturers can sell arms for Karimov to use against his people again. Indeed, British troops may return to Uzbekistan to teach Karimov’s thugs “Marksmanship”, as they did before the Andijan massacre which killed over 700 peaceful demonstrators in 2005.
There have been no improvements in human rights in Uzbekistan. There remains no freedom of speech, assembly, movement or religion. Thousands of political prisoners slave in the gulags, children are forced into the fields by soldiers to pick the cotton. Thousands still suffer hideous torture every year. But the UK hails “Dialogue” with the Karimov regime on human rights as a reason to end the arms embargo. Germany and Milliband led the internal EU lobbying for Karimov.
In March the Obama administration signed a new agreement with Karimov for transit of supplies to Afghanistan, and negotiations are virtually complete for a new US airbase in Uzbekistan. Germany remains focused entirely on the access to Central Asian gas via Gazprom and the Nordstream project. The British remain keen to maintain “Security cooperation” with the unspeakable Uzbek security services.
The politicians do it because the media and public do not seem to care, so they think they can get away with it. So far, they are right. With Karzai exposed for the gangster he is and a new alliance with Karimov, the sickness of our Central Asian policy is now stark.
Dear Craig, Thank you so much for the truth and sincerety in this great speech! http://fromthewilderness.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/former-british-ambassador-craig-murray-says-uk-and-usa-sent-prisoners-to-uzbek-to-be-tortured/
Not so unreported
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8327703.stm
However the document on the EU site seems to have gone off radar, found it but seems to be well hidden now.
Paul
What brillinat news for Dostum, Karimovs best mate, they will now be able to swap.
The weapons Dostum can’t get, like shoulder launched missiles, karimov can order, citing the frequent overflights by radical muslims in their paper planes.
And when it comes to the end of the forthcoming civil war in Afghanistan, they’ll come handy to get NATO out of the country, leaving the same situations and conditions that were there before we came in to rescue the barbarians.
The subjection of the poor to the will of the Imperial Corporate is driven by the venality and inhumanity of the rich. Those rich who profit from the Corporate and those who gain through their corrupt abuse of political and institutional authority act for mutual benefit. They work hand-in-hand to repress, exploit or annihilate the poor to meet their objectives of policy, profit and power. In far-away countries with brown-skinned people, few here care about the means. Who understands the location of Uzbekistan? Isn’t it smaller than Wales?
Closer to home, the smiling face of an unsmiling government does its insidious work in reinforcement of conformity within limitations on the range of sanction. The government’s acceptance of evidence from and tolerance of exported torture illustrates the vital need to expose their wrong-doing and fight against the steady erosion of liberties in both the UK and EU. For the evidence from such as Uzbekistan is an exemplar of what an inappropriately regulated authority would be prepared to do to all of us. It is prepared to tolerate that elsewhere.
The inconvenient legal restrictions on corporate trade, operations and employment practice face corporate influence through lobbying, through appointment to advisory roles, by means of membership of “independent” advisory committees and so-on. It is no great surprise that the Arms Embargo on Uzbekistan has been removed.
All helped and consolidated by the friends of the rich who own or run the media in which work of propaganda and zeitgeist any producer or journalist of integrity is sidelined, much as the FCO and Establishment friends sideline inconvenient Ambassadors. The public might care. Had they but the information to do so. And for those with the wit to rather better recognise what is going on, the social, career and legal consequences of their voicing their view encourage the silence of self-preservation.
Which will become a silence of the damned. As observed by Pastor Martin Niemoller
Documents in the EU going off-radar? EU documentation access presents a maze of blind alleys which act to deter all but the most determined of researchers. Excellent work in this field by Tony Bunyan at Statewatch dot org.