Financial Times – Rising support unlikely to free fringe players from sidelines: Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, faces a challenge from Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, suspended for speaking out about human rights abuses, who is standing for Respect in Blackburn.
NB – Craig is standing as an Independent candidate, and is not affiliated with any political party, although he welcomes the support he has had from Respect.
Village Voice – The CIA’s Kidnapping Ring: Actually, there is much that U.S. interrogators can learn from their counterparts in Uzbekistan on how to break down prisoners. One of the CIA’s jet planes used to render purported terrorists to other countries’where information is extracted by any means necessary’made 10 trips to Uzbekistan. In a segment of CBS’s 60 Minutes on these CIA torture missions (March 5), former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray told of the range of advanced techniques used by Uzbek interrogators: “drowning and suffocation, rape was used . . . and also immersion of limbs in boiling liquid.” Two nights later on ABC’s World News Tonight, Craig Murray told of photos he received of an Uzbek interrogation that ended with the prisoner actually being boiled to death! Murray, appalled, had protested to the British Foreign Office in a confidential memorandum leaked to and printed in the Financial Times on October 11 of last year: “Uzbek officials are torturing prisoners to extract information [about reported terrorist operations], which is supplied to the U.S. and passed through its Central Intelligence Agency to the U.K., says Mr. Murray.” (Emphasis added.) Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly reacted to this undiplomatic whistle-blowing. Craig Murray was removed as ambassador to Uzbekistan.
The Independent – Revealed: Western nations that send terror suspects to torturing regimes: Britain and other Western countries are meeting the terror threat by sending suspects to regimes where they risk torture and abuse, it is claimed in a damning report published today… Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has recently accused Britain of complicity in torture… He said many prisoners of Uzbek origin captured by US forces were delivered to Uzbek jails where they were subjected to torture. Information from these interrogations ended up in MI6 reports that he received. “MI6 said they found the intelligence useful,” he said. “I was shattered and disillusioned.”
To read the Human Rights Watch report, follow this link.
Click here to find out how you can help Craig Murray’s campaign
The Guardian – Our Man In Blackburn:I obviously haven’t got the hang of electoral politics yet. I keep meeting people and hoping they’re not going to vote for me. I was watching Jack Straw give one of his soap box orations outside Marks and Spencers when the man standing next to me turned and said ‘He’s talking rubbish, isn’t he’. I agreed, genuinely. ‘And you can tell he’s Jewish’ he added, ‘Look at his bloody nose.’
I argued but he wasn’t listening. ‘I’m not voting for him, anyway’, he said; ‘I’m voting for that Craig Murray’. I tried to persuade him not to, though I don’t think I got through to him who I was. This politics stuff is pretty confusing.
Luckily I have a witness to this next incident, or you wouldn’t believe it. I was being interviewed by Deborah Haynes of AFP, a journalist so beautiful I have only just recovered the power to breathe normally. As she was interviewing me, two old ladies came in. They looked like saintlier versions of the Queen Mum, with their white hair, twin sets and handbags.
Ada was 82 and Mabel 83. They had come to offer their support. My gratitude suddenly froze. ‘That Jack Straw, his wife’s a Paki’ said Mabel. Ada backed her up. ‘She wears a lot of makeup and keeps her face covered. But I once saw her hand, sticking out of her sleeve’. Ada managed to say this as if sticking out of a sleeve was a particularly sinister place to find a hand. ‘And’, Ada concluded triumphantly, ‘Her hand were black’.
Mabel than added that she intended to go buy a hammer and kill all the Pakis with it.
I had thought that I had lived an unusually full and varied life, but nothing had prepared me for the sight of these two grannies full of hate. I asked them why. The results were interesting. The immediate grievance was that Mabel’s Asian neighbour had built a massive home extension, blocking the sunlight from Mabel’s garden, which was her pride and joy. The workmen building the extension, which came right to the boundary, had trampled and destroyed it, leaving it strewn with concrete and rubble.
They had been to the Council to complain and discovered that there was no planning permission; but, Mabel alleged, the neighbour’s father was a ‘Big man at the mosque’ so the Council had done nothing.
Probing further the story gets more interesting. The neighbour the other side of the new extension, a Mr Khan, had also had his garden destroyed and had complained to the Council, without avail.
‘So you like Mr Khan.?’
‘Oh, yes, Mr Khan’s a real gentleman, very polite.’
‘And he’s Asian?’
Mabel conceded this, reluctantly. I suggested that the problem was not the colour of people’s skin, but this was a question of rich, influential people trampling on the rights of the poor and vulnerable. The challenge to their way of thinking was too much for Mabel and Ada, who left. ‘We’re still buying that hammer’ said Ada.
Race relations in Blackburn are at worst dreadful and at best non-existent. I have yet to see a single mixed race social group just chatting together on the street. People work together and transact business, but they don’t mix. I met a pleasant lady of Tanzanian origin who told me she has white friends and Asian friends, but not together. Both sides say to her ‘You don’t mix with them do you?’
The big story of this election is vote-rigging. A Blackburn councillor was last week jailed for three and a half years for vote-rigging in the council elections. There are an astonishing 16,000 postal votes registered in Blackburn, and still rising by two hundred a day. One feature of this fraud mechanism I find most sinister. Postal ballots are mixed in with other ballots before they are counted, so there is no way you can tell if it is rigged. If one candidate loses the main ballot but gets in on eighty per cent of the postal ballot, there is no way you could know. I strongly suspect this might happen in Blackburn now.
I have had, to date, nine people come separately to see me, all from the Asian community, to complain about intimidation in the current election. One shopkeeper told me that he had been visited by the local Labour councillor who had demanded that all eight of his family must apply for postal ballots, and must show them to the councillor before they are posted. In a rotten borough like Blackburn the council can do a lot of harm to a small shopkeeper.
The Green Goddess is up and running as my campaign bus. It is an alarming vehicle. We have it plastered in posters and going round town blasting out our campaign song ‘Hit the road Jack Straw’ by The Rub. Martin Bell took a ride in it and declared it scarier than anything he had done as a war reporter.
Martin did a campaign launch for us. About ninety people attended, which for an election meeting nowadays is quite good. The local paper said fifty, and devoted three times as much space to Jack Straw’s refutation than to what I said. Some nuts are tougher to crack than others. But I am now ready to make a prediction; Jack Straw’s vote will be down to 15,000. He is looking very beatable.
[NB – This is the unedited version of the piece that appeared in today’s Guardian]
If you can’t wait for the Green Goddess, click here to listen to Craig’s campaign song, “Hit The Road Jack Straw”
Click here to find out how you can help Craig beat Jack in Blackburn
The Guardian – Off with their heads: Alternatively, Muslim voters could make a point in Blackburn. Jack Straw was about 9,000 ahead in 2001, but this time he faces a Tory opponent in the shape of an anti-war Muslim, Imtiaz Ameen, and Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who cried foul over human rights abuses and was sacked by Straw for his pains. It’s a long shot, but the departure of the foreign secretary would surely count as 2005’s Portillo moment.
Could Jack Straw be the new Michael Portillo?
Daily Telegraph – Troops to start leaving Iraq next year: British and American troops will be withdrawn steadily from Iraq starting next year and are likely to be completely out of the country within five years, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday… Mr Straw may be seeking to assuage anti-war sentiment in Britain, particularly in his Blackburn constituency, which has a sizeable Muslim population. He admitted that “quite a lot of people are angry about Iraq” in Blackburn but hoped his constituents would recognise his efforts to avert a looming war between India and Pakistan in 2002. Among those running against Mr Straw is Craig Murray, a controversial former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who fell out with the Foreign Office over his criticism of the Central Asian republic’s human rights record.
Meanwhile, several of today’s papers comment on Straw’s relegation to the back row of “also rans” and junior ministers at Labour’s manifesto launch. Is Jack becoming an election liability?
The Guardian – We must not move on : I imagine the ghost of Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty, turning in his grave at the CIA kidnapping their terror suspects in Europe and dumping them in client states for vicarious torture; new US attorney general Alberto Gonzales advising Bush that some elements of the Geneva conventions are “obsolete”; US general Ricardo Sanchez’s memo authorising new interrogation techniques that violate the Geneva conventions; subcontracting of interrogation by private US contractors in Iraq; and UK ambassador Craig Murray, fired from his post in Uzbekistan for “operational reasons”, who coincidentally took up the case of a mother whose son was boiled alive in detention, and who further claimed MI6 had used information gained by torture passed on by the CIA. Torturers are on the march; some have muscle and plastic gloves, others have expensive educations to chip away at legal convention, and most insidious of all, the wordsmiths, who “soften up” public opinion with “sleep manipulation”.
This Is Blackburn – Man in the white suit wades in: Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s record on Iraq makes him worse than disgraced former MP Neil Hamilton, according to anti-sleaze campaigner Martin Bell. The veteran journalist and ex-MP, who ousted the cash-for-questions Tory in Tatton in 1997, spoke out in Blackburn last night… He threw his weight behind the independent candidate for the Blackburn election, Craig Murray. “Tony Blair and Straw have committed far worse offences than Neil Hamilton. They misled the country and took the country to war. I have worked in war zones, I have been in the army. I know what war does… People here have a unique opportunity to stop another war and send a clear message to Downing Street”.
Jack Straw has admitted that his government uses information extracted under torture, but now he claims that Craig Murray’s criticisms are “just a smokescreen”. A smokescreen for what?
Dissident Voice – Unrest in Central Asia: Freedom’s Shining Hour?: The human rights-/democracy-promotion politics in Central Asia reached its glorious apogee with the ambassadorship of Craig Murray in Uzbekistan. A young idealist, Murray caused a sensation with a scathing attack on Uzbekistan and its leader at the opening of America’s Freedom House two years ago, and was finally removed from his post after more than one scandal, the last one being his denunciation of the British Foreign Office’s use of information obtained under torture by Uzbek authorities.
The campaign song, Hit the Road Jack (Straw), produced and recorded by Peace Not War The Rub, is now, once again, available for download:
Hit the Road Jack (Straw) (1.95Mb MP3)
Eurasianet – Ousted Ambassador makes Uzbekistan key election issue in Britain: Some critics have suggested Murray’s comments and actions were motivated primarily by a quest for celebrity. He adamantly denies the charge, saying that until his assignment in Uzbekistan he had not exhibited a penchant for courting controversy. His shock over the vast scale of rights abuses in Uzbekistan compelled him to speak out, Murray indicated. “It is a vicious regime,” he said. “I went to the trials of opponents, I met the families of dissidents who had been arrested or killed. It was just quite appalling. And what was also appalling is that the US backed – is sill backing – the regime, and then invaded Iraq allegedly to overthrow a similar regime. It was hypocritical.”
See also:
Guardian – Tony Blair’s new friend: Britain and the US claim a moral mandate – and back a dictator who boils victims to death.
Sunday Times – Focus: Could the election be won by fraud? (by Robert Winnett and Abul Taher): This week Craig Murray, a former diplomat hoping to become the local MP, will be writing to the Electoral Commission to raise his fears of vote-rigging in the constituency. The soaring numbers of people voting by post, he said, are leaving the election wide open to fraud. “I’ve been approached by several people in the Asian community who are under huge pressure from Labour activists to apply for a postal vote rather than a ballot vote and then hand their postal vote over to the Labour party. That is happening now in Blackburn on a wide scale. In my career as a diplomat I’ve been used to precisely this situation abroad but wasn’t expecting to face it in the UK.” In Blackburn the contest is particularly tense. The sitting MP is Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and the local Muslim community is threatening to vote him out in protest over the Iraq war. In its efforts to hang on to every vote it can, Labour is urging people to register for postal votes; already 50% more people than in 2001 will be using the system in Blackburn this time. Many of them, claimed Murray, are facing pressure or even threats of “repercussions” intended to influence who they support.
For the record, I think I should state that we don’t think these repercussions include being boiled alive.
Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, now standing as an independent anti-war candidate against Jack Straw, spoke to Anindya Bhattacharyya
Follow the link or peek below the fold for more:
Nouse – Taking a stand against human rights abuses: From a British perspective, Mr. Murray observes that a “terrible thing happened in the Civil Service” following the September 11th attacks. Criticism of the new ‘war on terror’, he argues, is increasingly unacceptable within a Civil Service that is no longer impartial. He ascribes this particularly to the close cooperation between the Blair government and the Bush administration.
His criticism of Labour also extends to issues of civil liberties within the U.K. Discussing the new anti-terror legislation proposed by the Home Secretary Charles Clarke, he asks: “who’s seen the emergency?” Adding that “nobody in the U.K. has ever been killed by an Islamic terrorist”, he likens the situation to a “case of the emperor’s new clothes”. His suspicion at the justification offered for abuses of human rights both abroad and at home is all too evident. We have, he argues, “lost all perspective of legality in international relations”. This is a grim assessment to be made by a man who until last year was responsible for high-level diplomacy.
The – Guardian – UK Embassy Bash Falls Foul of Uzbek Secret Police: It is an event more usually associated with cocktails, canapes and polite laughter. But in Uzbekistan, the annual party held by the British embassy in honour of the Queen’s birthday has been the object of dark threats from the secret police.
Furious with the efforts of the British ambassador, Craig Murray, to highlight human rights abuses in the country, the Uzbek security services have warned everyone from government officials to local musicians not to attend.
A source close to the embassy said: “Prominent Uzbeks were invited to attend. But they have been getting phone calls from the secret police telling them it would be bad for their health to be there.”
At least 20 Uzbek guests rang the embassy to say they would come anyway. The callers said the Uzbek security services, or SNB, had made the majority of threats.
The Uzbek government then summoned a host of prominent musicians to the prime minister’s office for a meeting on Monday. “They were told they would be banned from performing in public or in the media if they played at the party,” said the source.
The renowned Uzbek folk singer Sherali, who has already been banned by the government, was top of the bill at the party.
“What are they going to do?” asked the source. “Ban him twice?”
The ‘war on terror’ must not become a cover to support repressive regimes, Robin Cook, Independent, 24 October 2003
I do not know whether, as the press have claimed all week, our ambassador to Uzbekistan has been “recalled”, but I remember Craig Murray as a conscientious and earnest diplomat. I am only too familiar with his dilemma on how to maintain civil relations with a very uncivil regime.
Uzbekistan is a challenging case for human rights advocates. Amnesty International sums up its record with the blunt word, “dire”. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has reported that its use in Uzbekistan is “systematic”. The Foreign Office, to its credit, provides a frank exposure of the failings of the regime in the recent edition of its Human Rights Annual Report, which Labour started publishing on taking office. The section on Uzbekistan registers the case of two prisoners who were tortured to death with boiling water, and is illustrated with a photograph of inmates at a “notoriously brutal” prison. Our ambassador’s excellent speech on the need for Uzbekistan to improve its standards is reprinted as an annexe to the Annual Report (which suggests approval rather than reprimand from his ministers).
To describe the practices in such countries as human rights violations does not rise to the occasion. We are not contemplating simply a legalistic breach of a multilateral code, but brutal abuse of individual persons, who will have suffered excruciating agony and cowed in terror from the next interrogation. Silence is not an option for the international community in the face of the screams of the victims of torture. In Britain we enjoy the right to express ourselves freely without fear that we or our families will be imprisoned and beaten for our views. As Tony Blair never tires of reminding us, with rights come responsibilities, and the high standard of human rights that we enjoy puts on us a special responsibility to speak up for those peoples who are denied liberty.
Repressive regimes tend to resent criticism from outside as much as dissent from the inside. They are given to pleading that the West is committing a form of cultural imperialism when it imposes its standards of liberty, free speech and popular democracy. This is self-serving nonsense. There is no evidence that the peoples, rather than the governments, of any country regard torture and arbitrary imprisonment as an important part of their national heritage. As Kofi Annan memorably observed, African mothers also weep when their sons or daughters are killed or maimed. We see their tears on television in our living rooms. We are witnesses to their suffering, and if we stay silent we become accomplices in their oppression.
We can also make a practical difference as well as a rhetorical statement. In the case of Uzbekistan, the Foreign Office is advising on judicial reform, training judges and funding the recording of court proceedings. The next stage is to broaden the investigative capacity of the police, who now rely on confessions in police custody, which in turn provides the incentive for brutality.
I never met anyone in my years as Foreign Secretary who was prepared to defend torture as a valid government method. Regrettably I came across many in the media who were prepared to mutter that it was none of our business what governments did to their own citizens and our job was not to upset the people with power. This is profoundly short-sighted. It is a welcome feature of the modern world that repressive regimes are on the retreat, partly because of the incompatibility of an information economy with mediaeval repression. Those foreign powers who have supported human rights will be better able to do business with the more representative political leaders who displace authoritarian governments.
I remember visiting Nigeria shortly after the death of General Sani Abacha had opened the path for a return to democracy. Our high commissioner there had gone straight from being the least favoured foreign diplomat, because of our trenchant criticism of Abacha’s brutality and corruption, to being one of the most influential on the new authorities, for exactly the same reason. Some day the ageing military junta in Burma will fall and Britain will be in a stronger position for the support our embassy has given to Aung San Suu Kyi. We should support human rights because it is the right course to take, but in the long run what is right in principle usually turns out to be right in practice.
This brings us back to Uzbekistan, which justifies its repression as a necessary tool against Islamic militants. We should not be romantic about the nature of militant dissent. If fundamentalists were successful in sweeping aside the present regime, they would not replace it with an inclusive government promoting individual liberty and respecting freedom of speech. But they will not be beaten by violence and repression, which only provide them with more martyrs. Nor does the existence of a fundamentalist movement justify the Karimov regime in suppressing bona fide critics of their human rights record: that only gives their population fresh reason to fear the regime and welcome its removal. If the government of Uzbekistan really wants to isolate the terrorists, it needs to make a common cause with those in their nation who want a more open society than either President Karimov offers at present or the fundamentalists hope to impose in the future.
There is a similar message for the Bush administration to ponder. It is rumoured that the British ambassador to Tashkent has fallen out of favour not so much because he upset the government of Uzbekistan, but because that in turn upset the government of the US, which has secured a base from which to prosecute its operations in Afghanistan. We have been here before. Nothing more discredited the conduct of the West in the Cold War than its willingness to form alliances with reactionary regimes around the globe to whom freedom and democracy were strange and threatening concepts. It would be a tragedy if the Bush administration were to revert to turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in order to find allies in its War on Terror.
It would also be a political blunder. We will only beat the terrorists if we stand by the values of liberty, tolerance and non-violence which are the strengths of the open societies they want to destroy. We provide grist to the propaganda mill of the fundamentalists if we allow ourselves to be associated with regimes who have as little compunction as the terrorists in using violence for their own ends. Terrorism will not be beaten by security measures alone and must be defeated politically.
None of this means that making progress on human rights is going to be easy. But there are no voices more irritating than the world-weary who argue that because we cannot make the world perfect we should give up trying to make it better. The growing interdependence of countries gives us ever greater opportunities for economic leverage and political persuasion of repressive regimes. If we refuse to take these opportunities, we ourselves share responsibility for the agony and the terror of the tortured victims of the regimes with whom we connive without protest.