I have just finished reading Murder in Samarkand by Craig Murray, former British ambassador who refused to lie for or to his country. The author’s account of torture and oppression in Uzbekistan , sustained and supported by the USA, his denunciation of the regime of President Karimov and the attempts of the FCO to silence him has moved me to rage and tears. I urge everyone to read it. The Uzbek government is terrible, the American connivance is awful and the attitude of the Blair government, of Jack Straw and of the mandarins who manage our country’s foreign policy is despicable.

http://disgruntledradical.blogspot.com:80/

A review of Murder in Samarkand has been written by NMJ on Velo-Gubbed Legs. Here is an extract:

At this time, the invasion of Iraq was unfolding (somehow, Saddam was a bad guy yet Karimov was a good guy). It’s not just the ‘dissident’ torture in Uzbekistan that horrifies, day to day life is grim. Uzbek children are forced by the state to work seventy hour weeks in the cotton fields in appalling conditions. Women set fire to themselves with cooking oil to escape their terrible lives. Innocent people are routinely beaten and raped by the police. The double standards and myopia of the British government in all of this is nausea-inducing. Craig couldn’t turn a blind eye to this sickening abuse of human rights – as our government appeared to be able to do without conscience – and was sacked after he blew the whistle on Uzbek intelligence being gained through torture. It’s depressing reading, but his style is light, he is funny and self-deprecating – at one point he irons a crumpled speech.

See full review here:

http://velo-gubbed-legs.blogspot.com/

She had blogged that the library had made her take back MinS before she finished it, so I sent her a copy.

I enjoy NMJ’s blog very much. She is a good writer and draws you in to her world, and I find it relaxing to go there. The attitudes to life and interests are similar to mine. It is good to remember that blogging can be used for good writing, not solely on politics. On the other hand, I find it all a bit worrying. If I am finding feelings of companionableness and relaxation on the Web, am I becoming deeply sad?

Al-Jazeera have now put up on their site my brief interview with Sir David Frost about Murder in Samarkand.

http://english.aljazeera.net:80/NR/exeres/484FE474-02C1-45B8-A2EC-9A68FE0D7F3D.htm

I am unreasonably depressed that Murder in Samarkand has not even made the longlist of 20 for the BBC Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.

Surprisingly, Stephen Grey’s Ghost Plane isn’t there either. It is a tremendous and meticulously researched investigation that cuts right into the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme. It is scrupulously fair, and gives the CIA’s reasons and version of events. It never indulges in speculation or goes beyond what can be proved. But it carefully builds up a picture that is shocking and damning – a truly great bit of investigative journalism, that forced George Bush to admit the system of secret CIA prisons abroad. It is indefensible that it is not on the BBC list.

One thing you can say about the list is that it is safe. The only book about the “War on Terror” is safely pro-Iraq war. Occupational Hazards by Rory Stewart takes the neo-con line that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, but we did not kill enough people, sorry, use enough troops with robust enough terms of engagement and provide “greater security”. Stewart seems to see himself as a right wing mystic in the mould of Francis Younghusband.

There is a book about living under a regime with a terrible human rights record. Naturally that turns out to be Iran.

I haven’t read all twenty books, but I warmly recommend The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple. It resonates for me because I saw so much of the remnants of Timurid civilisation at the Uzbek end. The book is not a biography of Zafar but a local study of the Mutiny in Delhi in 1857, and an elegy for the elegance of a lost civilisation and for the death of religious tolerance in India.

The resonances are astonishing. The ruthlessness of the evangelical christians, massacring for Christ, and the role of Mujahedin and Jihadis, cannot fail to make you think deeply.

I am a great fan of Dalrymple, but the claims made in reviews that the book is revolutionary historiography are overblown. Certainly it is very well researched, and Dalrymple has unearthed Indian sources which are insufficiently used. But close reading of the footnotes shows that these were not quite as virgin sources as Dalrymple might have us believe. It must also be said that Dalrymple himself does not give us as much of this new material as he might. For example, having discovered vast quantities of petitions to the Emperor from ordinary people, he quotes very little from them.

I enjoyed greatly his little dig at the Subaltern Studies school and their tendency to cloak a lack of genuine research by etymological obfuscation and a continual use of abstract terminology. As Dalrymple demonstrates, the subaltern voice can be recovered, but it involves moving your fat arse off the seat of your luxurious office provided by your well-paid American university post, and searching through dusty archives in India. One piece of genuine history is worth a thousand pieces of theorising introspection from the field of post-colonial studies. It is a great irony that characters like Spivak and Bhabha enshrine the imputed qualities of self-serving over-clever deviousness that led the colonisers to hold the “Educated Baboo” in contempt.

Mourning the passing of cultures is what Dalrymple does so well. From the Holy Mountain is a great example. But here he is also mourning the passing of the dynasty of Timur. I wonder what there is about the passing of royal dynasties that touches such an irrational chord? The Stuarts are surrounded by a mystic glow. Richard III and the Plantagenets have their active advocates, and it is this aura that permeates CJ Sansom’s current bestseller, Sovereign. The literature around the only English king of all England, Harold, is immense. In France the yearning for the Merovingians led to the whole nonsense of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and the Da Vinci Code.

The common theme, perhaps best exemplified in the Arthur mythology, is that everything would somehow have been better had a true dynasty survived. Perhaps this is just “Good Old Days” nostalgia, but its permeation through literature over the centuries is massive. It has no relationship to truth. The Stuarts lost their crown because they were both arrogant and stupid. Richard III did depose his nephews.

The result of the Indian Mutiny was by no means a foregone conclusion. Indeed, the British hold was very precarious. One new point I learnt from Dalrymple’s book is that, on at least three occasions, the simple lack of physical courage by Zafar or his sons turned the tide at crucial moments.

Having seen all the nauseating stuff about chinless drunk groper Prince William and parasitic Kate Middleton – whose job is a “fashion accessory purchaser for designers” – the sooner we get rid of the monarchy the better. That will give authors something to really get nostalgic about.

Finally the truth is affordable! Murder in Samarkand is now out in

paperback – ‘6.43 from Amazon but as low as ‘3.88 from other internet

suppliers.

Craig

‘…the army officer is left with the revolver on his desk and asked to do the decent thing. I picked it up and started shooting at the bastards’

A review of Murder in Samarkand by Norrie MacQueen, University of Dundee

This book had a difficult birth. This was nothing to do with the writing process ‘ Murray possesses an easy and fluent style. The problems came from the endless wrangles between the author and his former employers in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about what could and could not be offered for public scrutiny. It is a book that Whitehall would dearly have liked to bury: the story of Murray’s pyrotechnic two years as Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the post-Soviet Central Asian state of Uzbekistan and the Foreign Office’s cack-handed operation to rid itself of this turbulent diplomat.

Putting right the dysfunctional and ineffective mission that he inherited as his first (and, as it

turned out, emphatically his last ambassadorial posting) would have been a formidable task on its own. But Murray’s restless energy was also directed at building the previously neglected commercial and trade side of the embassy’s work. And, most dramatically, he began a high profile crusade against the hideous human rights abuses (including, charmingly, the boiling alive of political opponents) of the sinister President Islam Karimov and his ruling clique. Karimov, like other post-Soviet leaders in the region, had glided effortlessly from communist hack to enthusiastic western ally. By playing up a barely discernable ‘Islamist challenge’ and offering tracts of the country for American military bases, Karimov’s brutal kleptocracy had been given a free hand to plunder the country’s economy and destroy all internal opposition. Instead of being named and shamed as the vicious despot he undoubtedly is, he was lauded as a key ally in the ‘war on terror’.

The consequence of Murray’s outspoken public speeches, angry diplomatic telegrams and face-to-face conflicts with venal and violent officials was the implacable enmity of his American counterparts in Uzbekistan. The word was passed from Tashkent to Washington and then on to London that the ambassador was not merely off-message but out of control. The Foreign Office and allegedly Downing Street itself, in the raw-nerved atmosphere of the invasion of Iraq, were ready to respond to these transatlantic concerns. The vehicle of this response was a dossier of official complaints against Murray’s personal and professional conduct designed to force his resignation. They were complaints which seemed for the most part to be grossly exaggerated or utterly trivial when they weren’t simply mendacious.

Though the accusations faltered and fell in the absence of credible evidence and in the face of the formidable support he was able to muster, the campaign against him caused his emotional and physical breakdown. Though he returned briefly to Tashkent after the worst of the affair seemed to be over, it should perhaps have been clearer to him than it appeared to be that he would have no future in the diplomatic service. Another series of wrangles with the FCO over his attacks on the regime soon followed. These led to threats of dismissal and, eventually, a reasonable severance package which he had no real option but to accept. His spirits soon rallied, however, and he was to brighten one of the dullest general elections in memory when he ran an obviously doomed but highly colourful campaign against his one-time boss, the then

foreign secretary Jack Straw in his Blackburn fiefdom.

Murray perhaps cannot be wholly absolved of all responsibility for the situation he found himself in. He was by any standards an unconventional ambassador, and not just because of his state school and Dundee University background. In fact the FCO is not as Eton and Oxbridge-dominated as it once was. Murray’s insistence that nothing had changed in this respect does however provide one of his more amusing images. On the doomed attempt to get him to go quietly, he observed ‘…the army officer is left with the revolver on his desk and asked to do the decent thing. I picked it up and started shooting at the bastards’. Although his approach to his job was intentionally informal and relaxed, one doesn’t have to be a Whitehall stuffed-shirt to suspect that it may also have been careless and incautious at times. His penchant for young local women (which, it has to be said, comes across in the book as more Benny Hill than James Bond) was freely admitted, openly pursued and usually alcoholassisted. Inevitably this provided hostages to fortune. And even those in the diplomatic service who shared his revulsion for the Karimov regime may have felt his head-down, glovesoff attacks on it to be unwise.

But if he can be faulted for misjudgement and naivety, he certainly can’t be accused of personal cowardice or lack of moral integrity. He is a brave if flawed individual, a genuine original, and his book has a multiplicity of qualities. It provides an intriguing view of the consequences of Russia’s decolonization of its Asian empire ‘ one of the less explored aspects of the end of the cold war. It offers a snapshot of the front-line of British diplomacy during a phase which is unlikely to be recalled with much pride. Perhaps most importantly, it skewers the hypocrisy and moral absurdity which underlies so much of the ‘war on terror’. It is also a very accessible, often funny and always exhilarating read.

From ZA@Play

Drew Forrest reviews Murder in Samarkand, a rollicking autobiography laced with jokes, racy incident, political gossip and colourful travelogue

At one level a rollicking autobiography laced with jokes, racy incident, political gossip and colourful travelogue, Murder in Samarkand is also a kind of 21st century morality play.

British ambassador to the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004, Craig Murray is a philandering party animal who is finally ditched by his long-suffering wife when he falls for a beautiful Uzbek nightclub dancer. But exposure to the horrors of President Islam Karimov’s dictatorship, and growing disquiet over the appeasement policies of his Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) bosses, force to the surface an under’lying humanity and moral zeal. He evolves into what must be a rare bird in a morally elastic profession whose stock-in-trade is compromise — an activist.

The ambassador turned missionary emerges vividly in his brushes with the terrifying Uzbek secret police, the SNB. Delayed at one of the endless roadblocks en route to an opposition meeting, he hurls a policeman’s cellphone into the night and overturns a table on the stunned commander. Confronting cops who threaten to rape and kill a detainee — and who point a gun at him while making menacing clicking sounds — he gets up close and personal: ‘You are not going to kill anyone, you fucking little cunt! Now sit the fuck down and keep your mouth shut!’

Bear in mind that the uniformed thugs of the SNB were licensed for every enormity, including (in a globally reported case, which Murray exposed) boiling oppositionists alive. His Uzbek staffers delighted in these slap-downs, which he claims also earned him the government’s grudging respect. ‘The Uzbek people,’ says opposition leader Mohammad Salih, ‘have one word for Craig Murray: hero.’

The FCO mandarins were not so admiring: months of conflict climax in a disciplinary inquiry on apparently trumped-up charges, exclusion from his own embassy and the sack.

The villains of Murder in Samarkand are the loyal servants of the British and American governments — no doubt clean-living family men with spotless employment records — who bend over backwards to excuse Karimov and credit his lies. What really sticks in Murray’s craw is the Blair government’s willingness to accept Uzbek intelligence, which he knows — and tells the FCO, without result — has been extracted under torture.

Fingered as the main apologists are Murray’s line manager, Simon Butt, who accuses him of being ‘over-focused on human rights to the detriment of British interests’, and the United States ambassador, John Herbst. For these, the issue is the war on terror and Karimov’s wily self-projection as one of its ‘moderate’ Islamic friends.

Herbst is hugely impressed by the dictator’s pro-Israeli rhetoric. It is suggested that the thousands of Muslim prisoners of conscience held in Uzbek jails — some for having beards — have earned the regime brownie points and Western aid. At that stage, Uzbekistan also played host to one of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘lily-pads’ — giant airbases built to encircle the Islamic world.

The peculiar force of Murray’s revolt is that he cannot easily be dismissed as a malignant. A liberal opponent of terrorism and outspoken anti-communist, he had the vocal support of British business in Uzbekistan during his FCO showdown.

The Big Lie, he persuasively argues, was to spin Uzbek independence as a freedom-loving breakaway from the Soviet empire, rather than Karimov’s ploy to ringfence an enclave of the Soviet totalitarianism and extend the life of its bloodsucking elite.

Small wonder Murray scorns Blair’s New Labour as ‘all haircut and presentation’! How could the party of Keir Hardie, born of the British unions’ long fight for social justice, brown-nose such a regime?

The corrupting influence of the war on terror also underlies Labour’s assault on civil liberties at home, Murray argues. He points out that Blair’s bid to legalise the use of torture evidence — rejected by the Law Lords last year — was the first such move in two centuries.

And the towering irony is that appeasement failed. A year after Murray’s sacking, Uzbek troops mowed down 600 pro- democracy demonstrators at Andijan, sparking a wave of Pharisaical hand-wringing by the British government. Karimov’s response was to end the alliance and expel the US military.

Apart from the human rights dimension, Murray is surely right to argue that torture evidence is intrinsically unreliable, that praising fake reform will not encourage the real thing, and that indulging the brutality and misrule of the world’s Karimovs will fuel religious extremism and further discredit the West.

One expects nothing from the Americans, who have institutionalised torture at Guantanamo Bay and through ‘special rendition’. But it is hard to dispute Murray’s bitter complaint that Britain ‘has sold its soul for dross’.

From neweurasia

I know what you were thinking: ‘It’s about time for another post about Craig Murray, because we haven’t had enough of those.’ Well you are in luck, because I just read his new book, Murder in Samarkand, and am about to ‘ somewhat reluctantly ‘ share my thoughts on it.

But first I should note that, according to Mr. Murray, there are currently no plans to release the book in the States. Luckily, American readers can buy it on the UK Amazon site, although I wouldn’t recommend it as in-flight reading.

Love Murray or hate him, the book is an interesting read that anyone interested in Central Asia or the War on Terror should be familiar with. If you’ve been living in a cave, Craig Murray is the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan during 2002-2004. He was eventually fired from his post by the Foreign Office, allegedly because of his personal indiscretion, but he argues that he was sacked because of his stance on human rights issues and opposition to the Iraq war. Murder in Samarkand is his side of the story.

The Good

For people who have not had the luxury to spend a great deal of time in Uzbekistan, this book is a wonderful way to obtain information one doesn’t necessarily get from academic journals or news reports. Murray relays the rumors and oral history directly from the mouths of people he meets, including torture victims, KGB agents, and government officials. Naturally all of this information must be taken with a grain of salt, but Murray is fairly up front about how he came by the stories he is told.

I was impressed by Murray’s defense of the accusations leveled against him. He often backs up his points with citations referencing websites on which he posts actual classified transcripts he went to pains to obtain, but was not allowed to publish for fear of legal action.

The book is obviously not a comedy, but there are parts that are hysterical. For instance, in one scene Murray repeats word-for-word Karimov’s ‘paranoid’ speech, complete with a translation from BS into English. I have heard others recount these infamous, rehashed speeches, but Murray describes it in particular detail and directly from the horse’s mouth:

[President Karimov] ‘The greatest misfortune in the history of the Uzbek people is what happened in what you call the Great Game. Unforunately, The British were never able to make any progress stowards Central Asia, and their efforts to do so met with some very historic defeats’

Subtext: your country doesn’t really cut that much ice around here.

‘ and so forth.

Finally, Murray is remarkably candid about his personal life. He seems to hold nothing back about his affair, the end of his marriage, nights spent at strip clubs, etc. There is a flip side to this honesty, however, which will be my first point in the next section.

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A review of Murder in Samarkand by Iain Elliot in Times Literary Supplement

Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004, has written a riveting account of that period which both amuses and horrifies. It is not difficult to understand why the Foreign Office wished to sack him. His unsuitability did not really stem from the fact that the FCO mandarins are still disproportionately drawn from the Eton and Oxbridge intake, while Murray was educated in a state school and at Dundee University. Nor was it because he preferred to wear his own suit ‘ or indeed his kilt ‘ rather than hire morning dress at the taxpayers’ expense for the routine ambassadorial call on Buckingham Palace. There are Scots in all sorts of high posts, and as for petty matters such as dress codes, the FCO is much less hidebound than it once was.

Of course Murray’s lifestyle was scarcely conventional. He confesses to enjoying years of ‘wonderful, madcap booze-fuelled evenings out, full of wit and wrongdoing, and a string of mistresses’. But when his long-suffering wife Fiona, the mother of his two children, demands that he give up his ‘floozy’ Nadira (an Uzbek girl half his age whom he met in a Tashkent nightclub, and who takes her Walkman to dinner parties), he finally recognizes her unhappiness, but fails to abandon Nadira. When appointing a new secretary he shortlists a dozen candidates but admits: ‘The moment the first candidate walked in the door, she had the job. She had the most extraordinary classical beauty, a perfect face framed by long blond hair’. But the beautiful Kristina lets him down, mangling the guest list for an important Embassy dinner, and making nonsense of a diplomatic note she translates by omitting a crucial ‘not’.

Yet Murray is not the only ambassador to have strayed from his marriage vows. More seriously for the FCO, he seems to have been too outspoken and honest, about his own shortcomings as well as those of the government to which he was accredited, to do his job properly ‘ even if it is not strictly true that the first qualification for a diplomat is to be able to lie for his country. In Tamerlane’s Children, a perceptive book about contemporary Uzbekistan, the journalist Robert Rand prints a conversation with Murray, asking him at one point, ‘How do you cure Uzbekistan?’. Murray replies, ‘I think you’ve got to just get rid of the present leadership entirely. Lock, stock, and barrel’.

This may well have been the case, but it is certainly a rash remark to make to a journalist, certain to cause offence to the host regime and capable of being exploited by the Soviet-style regime should its officials wish to allege links with violent forces of opposition. Although Islamic extremists were officially blamed for bombings in Tashkent, some observers believe that these were actually carried out by government security agents, to justify measures against the religious revival and to further Uzbekistan’s membership of the coalition against terror. President Islam Karimov was First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party until the collapse of the USSR, when, Murray argues, he opted for national independence to maintain the Soviet system rather than to destroy it. Since then he has stayed in power, helped by a clan system, brutal police repression, and elections condemned by the world’s monitoring bodies as neither free nor fair.

Soon after he arrived in Tashkent, Murray attended the trial of dissidents on what were clearly trumped-up charges, backed by confessions extracted by torture. He resolved not ‘to go along with political lies or leave the truth unspoken’, but to give active support to those speaking out in defence of human rights. In this respect he differed from his fellow European ambassadors and the United States’ ambassador, John Herbst, who played a more passive role. Murray spoke publicly in condemnation of Karimov’s political and economic record, and sent frank telegrams back to London, distributing them more widely than the FCO Eastern Department considered advisable. On one occasion, when he pushed through police barriers to attend a meeting of opposition parties in Kokhand his car narrowly avoided being rammed by security police. He took Simon Butt,the visiting head of the Eastern Department, to meet dissidents in Samarkand. The next morning their host, a Professor Mirsaidov, found the body of his eighteen-year-old grandson, Avazov, dumped in the street outside his home.

Murray was given photographs, taken by the boy’s mother, of the corpse of Avazov, a member of an Islamic liberation party who had been imprisoned in the Jaslyk gulag. Pathologists at Glasgow University examined the photos and concluded that Avazov had been severely beaten before being killed by immersion in boiling liquid. According to Human Rights Watch and other respected international bodies, some 7,000 Uzbeks are held prisoner for political and religious beliefs. Nor is Karimov’s record better in other areas. The media are tightly controlled, and official statistics totally unreliable. Yet international bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank were prepared to support the regime on the basis of these flawed figures, despite evidence of corruption and embezzlement by the Karimov family and other ruling clans and the direct experience of Western firms defrauded by the authorities. The population of some 26 million is enslaved by the cotton monoculture (with its miserable wages and a workforce of children and students taken from their studies to help with the harvest), while the irresponsible use of irrigation canals and chemicals have caused the ecological disaster of the dying Aral Sea. Only the clan leaders have drawn any profit.

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ConservativeHome.com reviews 3 books from ex-ambassadors:

Murray’s story is the most extraordinary. It reads like a Jeffrey Archer thriller ‘ sex, murder and conspiracy ‘ and it is hard to remember that it is not fiction. A damning indictment of realpolitik taken to the extreme.

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.

(more…)

By Mary Raftery in The Irish Times

He was accused of corruption, of taking bribes, being an alcoholic and sleeping around. Pretty hairy stuff, if you happen to be the UK foreign office’s youngest ambassador, a high flyer well on your way to a glittering career.

The story of Craig Murray, British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 until 2004, is a salutary tale for anyone thinking of doing the right thing, of defending people against murder and torture, of standing up and speaking out in the face of duplicity, hypocrisy and evil.

For this is what Murray did when he publicly condemned the Uzbek regime in 2003 for its systematic use of torture – “on an industrial scale”, as he has described it. He also implicitly criticised his own UK government and that of the United States, who accepted information on Islamic groups which they knew had been obtained under Uzbek torture.

Ambassadors in so-called friendly countries who blow the lid on grotesque abuses of human rights are rare birds. Only one precedent in recent decades springs to mind. Robert White was US ambassador to El Salvador in 1980, during that country’s state-sponsored slaughter of its own civilians. He lost his job for publicly condemning the murders, rapes and torture by a vicious right-wing regime, which was of course a staunch ally of the US. Craig Murray also lost his job. Never mind that the outrageous allegations against him were shown to be false; he was still forced out. He was not considered what is euphemistically known as a team player.

Uzbekistan is a member of the “Coalition of the Willing”, making it an enthusiastic supporter of the US/UK war on terror. It has allowed its territory to be used by coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, with whom it shares a border.

A former Soviet republic, it has been led since its independence in 1991 by Islam Karimov, a former Communist Party leader. There are no free elections and opposition parties are banned. It is widely accepted internationally, even by the UK foreign office, that the regime of this primarily Sunni Muslim country continues to use the threat of al-Qaeda-style terrorism as an excuse to ruthlessly suppress legitimate opposition to its policies.

The US state department describes Uzbekistan as the “strategic centre of central Asia”. It plays a pivotal role in the region, and the US “accordingly has developed a broad relationship covering political, human rights, military, nonproliferation, economic, trade, assistance, and related issues”. While there is a reference to the Uzbek regime’s routine use of torture, this clearly is no impediment to Uzbekistan’s membership of the coalitions which, according to the state department, “have dealt with both Afghanistan and Iraq”. Nor is it apparently any obstacle to America’s use of Uzbekistan for rendition purposes – it has been reported that several terrorist suspects have been deposited there by the US for interrogation. It was only when the Uzbek military opened fire last year on a group of defenceless protesters in the city of Andijan, killing over 600, that western powers were moved to murmur a protest. Craig Murray’s gravest sin was to go public about the fact that both the US and the UK governments were happily using information gained under torture from unfortunate Uzbeks identified – usually falsely – by the regime as terrorists. In Alan Torney’s enthralling documentary on RT’ radio last week, Murray described how he was told by the British foreign office that it was perfectly acceptable to use information gained as a result of torture so long as the UK did not actually torture people itself, or actively encourage others to do so.

Whether encouraged or not, the Uzbek regime uses rape, asphyxiation and electrocution as standard means of torture.

They also like to wield pliers to tear out finger and toenails and to immerse people in boiling liquid. There are reports of parents forced to witness the torture of their children so as to force information from them.

Murray makes the point that while waging a war in Iraq ostensibly to remove the tyrant Saddam Hussein and his appalling abuse of his own people, both the US and the UK are happily cohabiting with another regime in the area, namely Uzbekistan, whose persecution of its citizens was, and remains, just as savage.

The latest in the Craig Murray saga – and he continues to campaign against human rights abuses in Uzbekistan – is a remarkable assault on his work by the UK administration.

His riveting book, Murder in Samarkand, was published earlier this year, and was to contain official documents he obtained under the UK freedom of information legislation.

The British government responded by threatening legal action, on the basis that it owns the copyright to all such documents and refuses to allow them to be reproduced. Murray himself best sums up his experiences: “Have we come to this, that integrity in public life is now so rare that some consider me a hero just for exhibiting the most basic human decency?”

Murder in Samarkand, Craig Murray. Mainstream, 400 pp, ‘18.99

Paul Routledge

“How can we have come to this,” asks Craig Murray, once Our Man in Tashkent, “that integrity in public life is now so rare that some consider me a hero just for exhibiting the most basic human decency?”

You only have to read this important, and courageous, book to understand why. If you are a public servant, and you speak out about the moral cesspit into which New Labour has jumped ‘ not fallen ‘ then you will be hounded from your job, blackguarded in the media and pursued by the avenging furies of the security services and their lawyers.

Craig Murray paid this price for revealing the British government’s role in the use of information gained by torture, which in turn led to the expose of the USA’s “extraordinary rendition” flights” and infuriated Washington. He simply had to go, and once gone, further and better punished to discourage the rest.

It is amazing that this book ever appeared. The government’s censors have had a field day, cutting out damning details on pain of crippling litigation against the publisher. And Whitehall’s finest lawyers were wheeled out to threaten the author with breach of copyright if he disclosed sensitive diplomatic telegrams. But the great virtue about this awkward Scot, who looks like a bemused schoolteacher down on his luck, is that you cannot shut him up.

Murder in Samarkand is the result : a bludgeon by bludgeon account of the barbaric regime of President Karimov in Uzbekistan, and a Labour government’s complicity in his rule. Murray, a career diplomat with postings in Warsaw and west Africa behind him, was appointed Britain’s youngest ambassador in Tashkent in 2002 at the age of 43. He was Norfolk grammar school and Dundee University, rather than Eton and Oxbridge, and Liberal rather than service-orientated Conservative or career Labour. In retrospect, he looked like trouble from the beginning. Except that he did his job so well.

Murray found Tashkent a diplomatic quiet zone, with embassies unable, or unwilling, to influence Karimov’s corrupt, reborn-Communist government. His first act was to attend a dissident’s trial, where three hours of observing perversion of justice set him on his own course of dissent. He fired off a telegram to London condemning the regime that was Blair’s ally in the “war on terror” and demanding an EU protest. Within days, opponents of the regime were knocking at his door with horrific fresh evidence, including photographs of a man who had been boiled alive. The American ambassador cautioned him, claiming that the boiling man was “an isolated case.”

Contrarily, Murray upped the tempo with a public speech condemning the Uzbek regime’s human rights record, and a stream of telegrams disclosing “systemic” torture. His FCO managers were not amused, warning him that he was behaving like a politician, not a diplomat. Worse was to come. Murray, who was reading the MI6 material, denounced as hopelessly wrong information “from a friendly security service” gleaned from “detainee briefing.” He was sure this stuff was “hot out of the torture chambers.” But for Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the head of MI6, the material was “operationally useful”, even if they both (allegedly) lost sleep over its use.

Thereon, it was downhill all the way. The story of the FCO’s persecution of Murray is told in relentless detail. He was accused of being unpatriotic, drunk on duty, unduly fond of the local women, and a host of other undiplomatic habits. He was certainly na’ve, and enjoyed the social round, such as it was in Tashkent. Murray enlivened it with Gilbert and Sullivan, a Scottish rock band and fireworks. Recalled for interview to London, he almost died from a pulmonary embolism and was probably unwise to return to his post while the campaign to destroy him reached a climax at home. He was banned from his own office, a policy specifically supported by Straw. Eventually, practically all the charges against him were dropped, except for the heinous crime of talking about them. But they sacked him all the same, ending his “experiment in a more dynamic style of ambassadorship.”

His real crime, of course, was unwitting subversion of the longstanding US-UK intelligence sharing agreement, under which everything is swapped between the CIA and MI6. Since the American spook industry is four times bigger than ours, this is an unequal swap, and part of the bargain has to be British acceptance of information wherever it comes from. If it comes from torture, “we have to accept it in order to maintain the integrity of the agreement,” Murray emphasises..

That is the nub of the issue, and he is disarmingly frank about stating it. From a simple protest against political corruption, Murray was drawn ineluctably into a power game that could only have one ending. Within days of his controversial Tashkent speech, a top US diplomat in Uzbekistan told a visiting Danish journalist “Murray is a finished man here.”

But happily, not here at home. Murder in Samarkand is not just a harrowing, dramatic story, occasionally relieved by an impish sense of humour. It is a clarion call to all those who care about justice and human rights. No wonder they wanted to shut him up, and thank heaven they failed.

From Eurasian.net

‘Is that about terrorism?’, asked the lady that examined my onboard luggage. ‘Humm, well, it contains mentions of that, but it’s about your former ambassador to Uzbekistan and more about diplomacy’, I replied politely. ‘Does it have al-Qaida in it?’ I looked a bit confused. ‘What?’ – ‘Well, I have to check this with my manager, the rest of your stuff is fine, though.’

The manager then came after a minute or two. ‘Hello Sir, can you tell me about this book?’ ‘Sure, it is about Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan.’ ‘Where, if I may ask, did you buy this book?’ – ‘Well, it is available at any Waterstones here in Britain. I just bought my copy in the Angel branch yesterday.’

‘I am afraid you cannot take this onboard, Sir.’ You must be kidding me. I just spent 20 pounds on a book that, despite arousing some controversy in the UK, should not be banned onboard a flight to Germany. I understand that the terror plot (which coincidentally seems to have an Uzbek dimension) makes for some overwrought nerves.

But to ban a book widely available in book stores in the UK is just a joke. Now, cash-strapped, I have to wait for the paperback edition to be published. Already late for the flight and raging in front of the calm airport security manager, I must have overheard that they can – in exceptional cases – post confiscated material to a UK address. I recalled that onboard the plane’

From AbeBooks

When it comes to the slings and arrows of politics, Paul Routledge has seen it all – from Arthur Scargill’s battles with Thatcherism to the rise of Tony Blair’s New Labour. Aside from being a hard-hitting columnist, the chief political commentator for the Daily Mirror newspaper is also an accomplished author. He has penned biographies of Gordon Brown, Betty Boothroyd, Airey Neave, John Hume and Scargill as well as the Bumper Book of British Lefties. An avid reader and customer of Abebooks, Paul has recommended 10 political biographies that illustrate life in the corridors of power and far beyond.

Click here to see his recommendations

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’