From Light Matter

Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand tells the story of one diplomat who fought the system and lost.

First a timeline. Way back in post 9-11 2001, when the civilized world was united by a desire to eradicate the planet of the scourge of terrorism, it seemed that global alliances were being realigned and the bad guys were on the run. The US set up airbases in Uzbekistan with Uzbekistan’s full — and Russia’s tacit — approval. So soon after the US-led NATO campaign in Kosovo, when relations between Washington and Moscow were strained to Cold War levels for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, such cooperation was unheard of. American boots in Russia’s near abroad at any other time would have signaled the final dissolution of the Russian homeland let alone the USSR. But these strange times made for stranger bedfellows. Putin, famously, was the first to call President Bush in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks; Arafat showily donated blood to the victims of the towers; even Saddam tried to find the proper channels through which to express his condolences to the families of the civilian casualties while distancing himself from the blame. It seemed unsurprising that we would form an alliance with Uzbekistan or that Uzbekistan, looking to distance itself from Moscow’s influence, would agree. It was a brave new world. By mid 2002 the US was a wave of anger and the Bush administration was shooting tubes on this wave like a world class surfer.

Then the War on terror took a surprising turn and troops were cut from Afghanistan and ran to Iraq, even as public support (except among the deaf dumb and blind) lingered somewhere in the Hindu Kush. US alliances began to dwindle and the coalition of the willing became the coalition of the willing-to-be-coerced or outright duped. Our Central Asian airbases were still of strategic importance to the war on terror, even though the Afghan campaign was winding down. Islam Karimov was willing to keep the Americans on in order to reap the benefits of Washington’s munificence and keep Moscow at arm’s length as he worked out the intricacies of his own private “independence.”

Into this world of fuzzy realpolitik stepped Craig Murray in his first posting as Ambassador, though not, despite the self-presentation to the contrary, some innocent abroad. Before taking on his job in Tashkent, Murray was the British Deputy High Commissioner in Ghana, and worked for a number years in the nineties for the UK Foreign Office in Europe. Though perhaps the fact that this was Murray’s first ambassadorship is remarkable not so much because it casts Murray as a diplomatic naif (he isanythingg but), but because that seems to be what the British Foreign Office wanted for Uzbekistan at the time. Despite the sudden importance of Uzbekistan to Britain and the US and this unique opportunity to gain a foothold in Central Asia for any number of security/energy reasons, the choice of Murray by 10 Downing Street seems oddly whimsical, even perfunctory.

But step in he did, and right away began doing the work of an ambassador: setting up the office, being greeted by the political elite, meeting local business people (who apparently had gone uncourted by the previous ambassador), giving and attending parties, sending off communiques, etc. But almost before the busy-ness of work was completed, Murray saw that there was something rotten in Tashkent. The more he talked with people, the more he learned that the Karimov regime was not what it appeared to be. The “Islamic extremists” that were routinely rounded up, imprisoned and, more often than not, tortured, seemed to have no connections to the fundamentalist Islamic groups in the region. And the torture itself…of that we do have evidence…

One of the main images that haunts this book is that of a torture victim who was found boiled to death. Murray sees photographic evidence of the result. It is one of the earliest and most haunting images of brutality in the book, haunting because Murray can’t stop thinking about it, whether he is arranging the dinner seating at some embassy function or dallying with Nadira. We see it emerge at several key moments in the book and yet the only person who seems bothered by it is Murray himself, thus adding to the surreality of the situation. The foreign office knows the reports and has seen the images, but their job is to set policy and see that it gets carried out through its ambassadors, not to address individual cases of abuse or torture. And so, nothing.

Balancing personal outrage with the duties of public office is a Quixotic and thankless task. In the life of the diplomat, for whom staying on message of the government you work for is of primary, singular concern, this balancing act can come with a price. For many of the diplomats with whom Craig Murray associates or in whose footsteps he finds himself walking, this price is their own perception. The blindness required of a British diplomat comes not from the brutal Karimov regime, for example, but from the governments whose diplomats these are. And yet Murray finds he can’t remain blind and will not remain dumb, as he informs the Foreign Office time and time again of the Karimov regime’s use of torture and suppression of dissidence. He does this not out of righteousness but so that the British Government can more accurately see what is going on and set their policy accordingly. The blank silence or the curt or angry responses he gets from his superiors surprise Murray, but it doesn’t put him off. He increases his interactions with the people of Tashkent.

This method of mixing daily business with the outrage of a statesman makes for some very clunky prose at times. As, for instance, when he eyes up the sister of a torture victim before he realizes who she is. But Murray injects these awkward and unprofessional scenes as an antidote to the way in which he was villified. He does not persistently refute the charges brough against him or beg the question: he looks at the girl and then looks where he is supposed to look, at the evidence. That his superiors stopped short at the girl says more about them. Beyond the ocassionally (rarely, really) salacious, Murder in Samarkand is filled with interesting information, about people for whom the salacious, had they engaged in it, would make them seem at least human. We learn, for instance, how after the Rose Revolution in Georgia, Edward Scheverdnaze went out of his way to personally warn Karimov of the dangers of the NGOs to the stability of his government. Raised to political awareness during the years of perestroika and glasnost, I had always seen Scheverdnaze as a statesman of the first order. Sure, I had heard of the charges of government corruption, but I decided to remain blind to it, because I didn’t know enough. Another shattered illusion…

Murray calls what he as done an “experiment — I believe a successful one — in a more dynamic style of ambassadorship,” adding to the myth that this was seat-of-the-pants statesmanship; but Murray has been doing the diplomat’s job all along, don’t let him fool you. The stories that circulated about the boozing, or the Tashkent clubs, or his wandering eye, are the irrelevant salacious details put into circulation by Machiavellian, Puritan scolds. Murray went, saw and, unfortunately, was conquered. If the experiment was successful it was because he was able to show the limits of good work in a world overrun by politicians who base their decisions on nothing more tangible than gut feeling.

And perhaps that is the point: the eye of Craig Murray, as likely to look down a girl’s top or up her dress as it is to descry the blatant brutality of a corrupt dictatorship or the hypocrisies of his colleagues and superiors, is an eye that is needed. “Intelligence” after all has been one of the biggest casualties in the post-9-11 world, whether it in the halls of power in Washington or, apparently, 10 Downing Street. Policy relies on intelligence, which emerges from clear sightedness, on an accurate and clear perception of what is out there. Policy decisions can be debated, and to a degree so can “what has been seen,” but this debate must range on the evidence that is out there, not the willful and claustrophobic speculation of abstract concepts.

More than two years after Murray lost his job and more than a year after the events at Andijan, it seems that things haven’t changed a bit in Uzbekistan. Western “diplomats” are more willing than ever to be led by the nose by Karimov, and are often seen sniffing around his table. This even after Karimov kicked the US out and is back to courting Moscow. Now THAT is realpolitik!

And not a peep, not a peep…

Murray did indeed fight the system and lose: he lost the battle over the importance of accurate intelligence, he lost his job, he lost his health, he, for a time, lost his reputation, and yet with this book, this communique, one would hope that these losses are easier for him to bear; because these losses were both the result of, and met with, a bravery that is unique in these days.

I only wish Murray’s bravery had allowed him to post a picture of him wearing his kilt.

From 21st Century Vision

One theory of the peculiarity of the British state has it that its threefold origin created a democratically dysfunctional structure which is in urgent need of reform. This is nothing to do with its multi-national past as the fusion of Scottish, Irish and English/Welsh states, but instead the result of its colonial history. The triune British state grew up on the basis of the colonial states, each with its relative independence in the dominions and possessions, the island British state, with its slow advance to universal suffrage if not democracy, and – linking them all together – the imperial state. The problem was, and to some extent still is, that while the colonial states have withered away, and the British state is at least to some extent publicly accountable, the imperial state marches on unchecked and unchallenged. Exercising those “prerogative powers” which the monarchic fiction preserves from normal scrutiny, it comprises military, intelligence, diplomatic and other functions which are not normally discussed before the servants, i.e. ourselves.

Of course we like to think of the assorted officers, spooks, uniformed ambassadors and other inhabitants of this self-governing demi-monde as motivated only by patriotic concern for the good of the country, tempered these days by a sense of European values and a regard for the rule of law in general and human rights in particular. OK, they get it wrong, but Suez was a terrible lesson and the mandarins and generals saw through WMD in Iraq and were extremely unenthusiastic about following the US in its rampage through the Muslim world. Like more or less everyone else they are waiting for better political times and an end to the increasingly bizarre leadership they get from Downing Street. Our recent post of an article by Oliver Miles (see below, 3rd August ) makes the point.

It is this unthinking assumption of the basic decency of the people who run the shadowy institutions of the imperial state which takes such a body blow from Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand (published last month by Mainstream). No need to rehearse the whole story here of how as ambassador to Uzbekistan Murray took the UK’s human rights agenda seriously and – with great persistence and courage – drove it forward in a country where legal, political and civil freedoms were and are almost non-existent and where extreme forms of torture are normal instruments of government (see our photograph). In 2003, however, Uzbekistan was being built up by the US as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism and an ally in the “war on terror”, and Murray’s very public pronouncements were not welcome. Nor was his forthright rejection of the policy of using information obtained under torture.

It is by now unsurprising that Downing Street moved immediately to rid itself of the embarrassment, but what does come as an unpleasant revelation is the extent to which senior figures in the Foreign and Colonial Office engaged willingly in every form of pressure, falsehood and character assassination to give the appearance of due process. Their methods might be described as Stalinism without the Lubyanka, but when one considers that in stifling Murray they were in fact buttressing US cover for Uzbek and other torture chambers, the phrase is too kind.

The book is valuable in a number of ways. First it shows the extent to which when the Bush administration says so the UK’s human rights rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. Second, it provides material of relevance to that eternally unanswerable question of how far, like Vichy France, the British would have collaborated with a Nazi occupation in the 1940s.

Finally, it shows the need for reform in the structures of the British state, with no more reserved areas beyond the reach of open parliamentary scrutiny.

From the Washington Post

It was a diplomatic war of words. On one side, Britain’s outspoken envoy in Tashkent, Craig Murray, aiming to expose Uzbekistan’s human rights abuses. On the other, Murray’s superiors in Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, seeking to rein in his criticisms — and his behavior.

While writing his just-released memoir “Murder in Samarkand,” Murray tried to publish several memos and telegrams documenting the FCO’s efforts against him. However, he withdrew them after the British government threatened a lawsuit. The documents, excerpted below, are available at sites such as http://blairwatch.co.uk/ and http://dahrjamailiraq.com/ .

Shortly after reaching Tashkent in the summer of 2002, Murray voiced criticisms of human rights violations in Uzbekistan and U.S. policy in Central Asia. Simon Butt, head of the FCO’s Eastern department, sent an e-mail about Murray to Michael Jay, chief of Britain’s diplomatic services, on Oct 16, 2002:

. . . We are fast developing a problem with Craig Murray, who is using unclassified email pretty indiscriminately to fire off criticisms of the Uzbek regime, US policy etc . . . He has also sent the draft text of a speech he is shortly to give at a Freedom House meeting, which criticises the human rights situation in Uzbekistan in terms which are bound to infuriate the Uzbeks (“This country has made very little progress in moving away from the dictatorship of the Soviet period . . . no effective brake on the authority of a President who has failed to validate his position by facing genuine political opponents in anything resembling a free and fair election”).

* * *

Charles Hill of the Eastern department sought to revise the text of Murray’s Freedom House speech. He sent this letter to Murray on Oct 16:

Many thanks for sending a copy of your draft speech. It is hard-hitting, and one that (I think) Martin Luther King would have been proud of. But there are elements of it, as currently drafted, that I doubt should be delivered by an HMA [Her Majesty’s Ambassador] Tashkent. Language which is too outspoken risks antagonising the Uzbek authorities, and undermining your mission (in both senses of the word) . . .

Nowhere in the speech is there any acknowledgement of the Soviet legacy Uzbekistan needs to overcome, or the genuine extremist/terrorist challenges it has had to grapple with . . . We do not accept Uzbek arguments that these problems justify human rights abuses, but we do seek to address them in recognising that . . .

The best examples of what the FCO is on record as having said are in publications such as the Human Rights Reports . . . As you will see, on torture the Report says “Uzbekistan has a poor record of ensuring respect for human rights . . . We are concerned about reports of torture . . . etc etc”. We would be content for you to jazz up the language of the Report somewhat, but expressions like “deep shame” “outrage” etc go too far.

* * *

On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Murray sent a telegram to the FCO accusing the Bush administration of “double standards” for deciding to dismantle “the torture chambers and the rape rooms” in Iraq while treating the “systematic torture and rape” of the Karimov regime as “peccadilloes.” Butt subsequently met with Murray in Uzbekistan and reported back to the FCO on April 16, 2003:

. . . Craig was unapologetic. What he had said needed saying. He had again received congratulatory emails from a number of other Posts which had received the telegram. These were issues about which he felt strongly, and which needed to be aired. His drafting style reflected his feelings. He was not prepared to compromise on principles to further his career. I did not dispute his right to air the issues (I myself met with the US Ambassador and queried whether US policy was too indulgent towards Uzbekistan). But he should cultivate a more measured and less emotional style, and should not seek to give the impression that he was the only person in the FCO with a conscience . . .

I ought to mention, without further comment, one further aspect of Craig’s unconventional style. After a dinner in Samarkand, the rest of the party returned to our hotel. Craig, in the company of our young female LE [locally engaged] fixer, went off in search of a jazz club. I have heard from others that he has patronised strip clubs in Warsaw . . . But during my visit his demeanour was perfectly correct, and I picked up no signs whatsoever of familial tension while staying at the Residence. It is not particularly palatable to set these tales down, but they should be recorded somewhere. . .

Craig is likely to continue to speak as he finds. But he accepts the need to broaden his functions beyond being a powerful advocate of respect for human rights (and he has got us to raise our game on this).

From the Washington Post

The courtroom provided a telling introduction. I had recently arrived as British ambassador in Uzbekistan’s old Silk Road capital of Tashkent, where I was watching the trial of a 22-year-old dissident named Iskander Khuderbegainov. The gaunt young man was accused with five other Muslims of several crimes, including membership in a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda. The six sat huddled in a cage guarded by 14 Kalashnikov-wielding soldiers. The judge made a show of not listening to the defense, haranguing the men with anti-Islamic jokes. It looked like a replay of footage I’d seen of Nazi show trials.

The next day, an envelope landed on my desk; inside were photos of the corpse of a man who had been imprisoned in Uzbekistan’s gulags. I learned that his name was Muzafar Avazov. His face was bruised, his torso and limbs livid purple. We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow. Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived. It said that the man’s fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid. He had been boiled alive.

That was my welcome to Uzbekistan, a U.S. and British ally in the war on terror. Trying to tell the truth about the country cost me my job. Continuing to tell the truth about it dragged me into the Kafkaesque world of official censorship and gave me a taste of the kind of character assassination of which I once thought only a government like Uzbekistan’s was capable.

When I arrived in Tashkent, in the summer of 2002, I was a 43-year-old career diplomat with two decades of varied experience, which included analyzing Iraqi efforts at weapons procurement and negotiating a peace treaty with Liberian President Charles Taylor. But nothing had prepared me for Uzbekistan, a country immediately north of Afghanistan in the heart of hydrocarbon-rich Central Asia. President Islam Karimov had reigned here as the Soviet satrap since 1989; after independence two years later, he had managed to make poverty and repression even worse than in Soviet times.

In Karimov’s Uzbekistan, no dissent is allowed. Media are state-controlled, and opposition parties are banned from elections. Millions of people, including children, toil on vast state-owned cotton farms, receiving some $2 a month for working 70-hour weeks. Their labor has made Uzbekistan the world’s second-largest cotton exporter. More than 10,000 dissidents are held in Soviet-style gulags. Many are pro-democracy advocates, but anyone showing religious enthusiasm is also swept up. Most are Muslims, but Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses are routinely persecuted, too.

I saw this happening in a country regarded as a strategic friend by the United States, which was looking for well-placed allies after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Karimov had delivered for President Bush, allowing the United States to take over a major former Soviet airbase at Karshi-Khanabad to help wage war in neighboring Afghanistan; the several thousand U.S. forces stationed there were the first Americans permitted to serve in former Soviet territory. As a reward, Karimov had been Bush’s guest for tea in the White House in March 2002.

It was clear by the time I arrived in Tashkent a few months later that the United States was handsomely rewarding Karimov’s cooperation. Hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid were flowing to the country — after the U.S. government, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, repeatedly certified that the Uzbek government was making progress on human rights and democracy. According to a press release distributed to local media by the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent in December 2002, the Karimov regime received more than $500 million in U.S. aid that year alone. That included $120 million for the Uzbek armed forces and more than $80 million for the re-branded Uzbek security services, successor to the KGB.

In other words, when the prisoner was boiled to death that summer, U.S. taxpayers had helped heat the water.

In mid-October, I made a speech at Freedom House in Uzbekistan, in which I made plain what I had learned in my brief time there. “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy,” I asserted, contradicting the U.S. ambassador, John Herbst, who had spoken before me. I went on to detail the political prisoners, prevalence of torture and lack of basic freedoms. I spoke out despite a written rebuke I had received from my superiors in London, chastising me for being “over-focused on human rights.” Apparently, my job was to stand beside my U.S. colleague and support our Uzbek ally.

Danish journalist Michael Andersen later wrote of conversations he had had with U.S. diplomats in Uzbekistan the day after my remarks. “Murray is a finished man here,” one told him.

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