On my article about Alisher Usmanov which so incensed his lawyers Schillings, let me ask this question. Has anybody seen an argument posted or published from any credible source to argue that what I say about Usmanov is untrue?

I ask the question because one of the edits to this log my webhost made at Schillings’ behest was to say that my claim was “regarded as false by many people”. I have altered that edit, because there is no justification for such a claim. I have yet to see evidence of anybody, not one solitary person, arguing that I am wrong about Usmanov, other than his lawyers. Who are these “Many people”, and why are they peculiarly silent?

I am very sympathetic to my webhost having to change things for Schillings, but not to the extent of altering things to become defamatory of me!!!

Just to make plain that I have great webhosts who have been extremely supportive in all kinds of circumstances, 24 hours a day. They have wider responsibilities and I have no problem with their taking down or amending my stuff when they get their umpteenth bullying letter from ultra well paid bluffers and extortionists Schillings.

Here I explained that the Islamic Jihad Union was first heard of in the context of bombings in Uzbekistan which were not in fact bombings, as I can testify from direct personal observation conducted officially for the British government. I believe the “Islamic Jihad Union”, like the “bombings”, was concocted by the Uzbek security services.

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/09/the_mysterious.html#comments

We now hear from the German authorities that the IJU has claimed responsibility on the web for the alleged bomb plot there. Peculiarly, extensive research by the BBC in Uzbek, Russian, English and Arabic has failed to identify this claim, or any Islamic Jihad Union website. What would it prove anyway? I could get up a posting somewhere claiming to be Santa Claus and taking responsibility,

Let me repeat again:

I never met anybody in Uzbekistan, including from Islamist groups, who had heard of the IJU. I researched this intensively. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, of whom the group is allegedly a cooperative offshoot, have never referred to it anywhere. Nobody in Islamist circles in the UK, or Uzbek exile circles worldwide, has ever heard of the IJU. Nobody can name a single member, let alone leader.

The secuirty services intercept an astonishing number of electronic communications between extremists and suspected terrorists. There has never been a reference to the IJU in any intercepted conversation.

I do not say that the IJU does not exist. It may do. It may be a real terrorist organisation. It may be an agent provocateur operation. It may be a simple invention by the Uzbek security services. But it was first heard of in the context of “bombings” which were not what the Uzbek government said they were, on which JTAC accepted my reporting as correct. The IJU has been seized upon by the US and Germany successively as justification for their alliance with the appalling and totalitarian Uzbek regime, possibly the most vicious in the world.

I shall be following the case in Germany very carefully indeed. I am going to attempt to get my official reports of my investigations of the alleged IJU “Bombings” in Tashkent, and the JTAC responses, released to the German courts.

Usmanov’s lawyers are now blustering that the coverage of Usmanov in Murder in Samarkand is libellous.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2414738.ece

Given that he has such hyperactive lawyers, is it not strange that the book has been out for over a year, but they have made no move to sue for libel? Their bluff and bluster really is quite pathetic, and I am getting bored with it.

Sadly, it still continues to work on British newspaper editors. I find it astonishing that even the Sunday Times can report so deadpan Usmanov’s ludicrous claim that he was not jailed as a criminal but as a “political prisoner”.

The house magazine for US diplomats, Foreign Service, has published its September 2007 issue on “Human Rights Promotion in the Post-9/11 Era”. It contains a number of excellent essays, and also one by me on the lessons of my time in Uzbekistan, which I reproduce here:

The Folly of a Short-Term Approach

By Craig Murray

Ambassador Craig Murray resigned from the British Diplomatic Service in February 2005. He is now rector of the University of Dundee and an honorary research fellow at the University of Lancaster School of Law. His memoir of his time in Uzbekistan, Murder in Samarkand, is available from Amazon.co.uk. Paramount and Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B are producing a movie based on that memoir, with filming scheduled to begin in February 2008 under British director Michael Winterbottom.

I am very pleased to be offered the chance to pass on to you some thoughts on the conflict between human rights and the ‘War on Terror,’ drawn largely from my recent service as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Uzbekistan. As a result of that experience, I should acknowledge, I was recently vetoed as a participant in a U.S.-sponsored seminar on that topic by a very senior State Department official, on the grounds that I was ‘viciously anti-American.’

That is not true, of course. Yes, I am a person who holds his beliefs very dear and who believes strongly in individual liberty in all spheres. Thus, I am a passionate supporter not just of democracy and human rights, but also of capitalism and free markets.

So how could someone with that belief set come to be perceived as anti-American? The answer is that I do not believe that recent U.S. foreign policy has promoted those goals at all, but rather has been doing something very different.

Walter Carrington Avenue

To illustrate what I mean, let me offer an example of diplomacy at its best. One of my inspirations was Walter Carrington, the U.S. ambassador to Nigeria from 1993 to 1997. Amb. Carrington never accepted the brutal dictatorship of the Sani Abacha regime (1993-1998), and constantly went beyond normal diplomatic behavior in assisting and encouraging human rights groups, and in making outspoken speeches on human rights and democracy.

Carrington’s approach was a direct challenge to the British Embassy in Nigeria, which pursued a much more traditional line of polite interaction with the president and his cohorts. This appeasement did us no good, as Abacha repeatedly moved against our interests; for example, he banned British Airways from flying into Nigeria. Nonetheless, my diplomatic colleagues looked down their long noses at Carrington with disdain, for raising unpleasant subjects like torture and execution at cocktail parties. (I regret to say that some of the career subordinates in the U.S. embassy did the same.)

The Abacha dictatorship hated Carrington so much that the Nigerian armed forces even stormed the ambassador’s farewell reception and arrested some Nigerian participants, a breach which was rightly condemned by the U.S. Congress. But a grateful Nigerian people did not forget his efforts on their behalf, and soon after Abacha’s downfall, the street on which the U.S. and British consulates in Lagos were situated was renamed by the local authorities as Walter Carrington Avenue. I believe it is still called that.

Carrington’s example taught me a great lesson in diplomacy: that the relationship of an embassy should be with the people of a country, not just with their authorities. Regimes which are hated by their people will never survive indefinitely, though they may endure a very long time. A fundamental role of an embassy in these situations should be to do everything in its power to hasten the dawn of freedom.

A Perfect Failure

Uzbekistan is undoubtedly one of the most vicious dictatorships on Earth. Freedom House ranks it as one of just five countries scoring a perfect 7 ‘ complete lack of freedom ‘ on both political rights and civil liberties. The Heritage Foundation’s view of economic freedoms there is similarly critical. In short, Uzbekistan does not follow the Southeast Asian model of an authoritarian government overseeing a free economy and rapid economic development. It is more akin to North Korea than to Singapore. Soviet institutions have been strengthened and corruption even increased. Only the iconography switched, from communism to nationalism.

Yet Uzbekistan was embraced as a Western ally following the 9/11 attacks, a member of the ‘Coalition of the Willing.’ In 2002 alone the U.S. taxpayer gave the Uzbek regime over $500 million, of which $120 million went to the armed forces, and $82 million direct to arguably the world’s most vicious security services. Also during that year, according to impeccable British government pathology evidence, at least one Uzbek dissident was boiled alive. The U.S. taxpayer paid to heat the water.

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The three alleged “terrorists” arrested in Germany, aimed to blow up US military airports, civil airports, bars, discos and other targets, according to the German authorities, motivated by a fanatical hatred of the United States.

They have been identified as coming from the “Islamic Jihad Union”, an alleged offshoot of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. This organisation was first heard of in intelligence passed by the Uzbek intelligence services to the United States during alleged “Terror attacks” in Tashkent in spring 2004. Those attacks were in fact largely fake and almost certainly the work of the Uzbek security services, from my investigations on the spot at the time. These are detailed in pages 325 to 339 of Murder in Samarkand. These “attacks” were followed by the arrest of many hundred people in Tashkent, largely those with a little money and a Western lifestyle. From the torture chambers, hundreds confessed to membership of the Islamic Jihad Union. The United States, still an ally of Uzbekistan at that time, was keen to accept the narrative and moved succesfully to place the Islamic Jihad Union on the United Nations list of terrorist organisations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1595387,00.html

In fact there was no evidence of the existence of this organisation other than that given by the Uzbek Security Services. There are, for example, no communications intercepts between senior terrorists referring to themselves as the Islamic Jihad Union.

Germany houses the biggest concentration of exiled Uzbek dissidents in the West, and in May of 2004 the Uzbek security services were already passing on alleged intelligence about attacks by the Islamic Jihad Union on US targets in Germany. Peculiarly, newspaper stories about these IJU plots in Germany have been surfacing regularly for the last two years, ahead of the recent arrests.

Germany is of course now Uzbekistan’s major ally in the West. Germany has an airbase in Uzbekistan and still has very close security service coopertation with Uzbekistan. Germany has been pushing hard within the EU for the lifting of sanctions imposed on Uzbekistan following the massacre bu the Uzbek armed forces of at least 700 demonstrators at Andijan in May 2005. Germany’s close relationship with Uzbekistan is based on the interests of Gazprom and its $8 billion Nordstream Russian/German joint venture for a Baltic pipeline to bring Russian and Uzbek gas to Germany. This was orchestrated by Gerhard Schroeder, now Chairman of Nordstream, and Alisher Usmanov, chairman of Gazprom Investholdings.

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/05/uzbekistan_and.html

Germany therefore remains very open to the Uzbek security service agenda. It is in the light of these interests that the story being given about the latest arrests should be considered. There are some peculiar points about it: why are the German authorities connecting a Turk and two ethnic Germans, who allegedly trained in Pakistan, to an obscure and possibly non-existent Uzbek group?

I should make plain that regrettably it is a fact that there are those who commit violence, motivated by a fanatic version of their faith. Sadly the appalling aggression of US and allied war policy has made such reaction much more frequent. These men may or may not have been planning to commit explosions. But if they were, the question is who was really pulling their strings, and why?

I am much shaken by the assassination of yet another of my Uzbek friends, the brave, talented and internationally renowned theatre director, Mark Weil.

Mark created and led an independent theatre company, the Ilkhom Theatre of Tashkent. They were the very first independent theatre company in the whole Soviet Union. Their artistic freedom, performance of previously banned works and tackling of social issues made them one of the sensations of the late Soviet Union, enabled by Glasnost. They became the toast of Moscow intellectual circles in the late 1980’s.

As Mark described it to me, they then had the irony of being part of the destruction of the Soviet Union, only to be plunged into the even greater gloom and tyranny of Uzbekistan. But by then Mark, a native Uzbek of German stock, had built up the formidable international reputation that enabled Ilkhom to continue to flourish as a tiny, bright and incredibly unlikely beacon of light in Tashkent. They played to great acclaim on every continent, their last appearance in the UK being a sell out run at the Barbican last year. I had a long talk with Mark and his family afterwards and found him less optimistic, his cares heavier, than ever before. He was, however, determined to stay in Tashkent and battle it out.

Mark’s style was always in public to deny breezily that he faced any particular problems, and to try to shelter everyone else – his company, his family, his loyal audiences – from them. He would avoid direct criticism of the regime, but allow his art to talk for him, still using his theatre to tackle challenging questions of Uzbek society – unemployment, drug addiction, freedom, homosexuality, religion – which are absolutely forbidden from discussion, both in Uzbekistan’s 100% state controlled media, and in public. Typical of his style was his TV documentary on Tashkent’s monumental architecture. Showing the change of monster iconography in bronze from Tsarist generals, through Lenin, Stalin and Marx to Karimov’s use of the Tamerlaine cult, on the surface it was a paean to state progress, but the message that “Karimov too will pass” could not have been more clear. Mark was a great subverter.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ft20070222a1.html

He was currently engaged in one of those collaborations with Western theatre companies which so worried the authorities, in this case a British company. He was also preparing for the opening tonight of Ilkhom’s new season. Arriving back at his apartment block after final rehearsal last night, he was murdered by a group of men in T-shirts. Reports are confused as to stabbed or shot.

The method of killing is precisely that used in every one of the murderous assaults on Russian journalists I investigated earlier this year. In each case, they were ambushed on return home from work – the standard method of the security services. Mark had told his British collaborators he was under great pressure.

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2007/06/russian_journal.html

What happens now is very predictable. Karimov will blame “Islamic militants” and there will be further arrests, and probably convictions, of dissidents in Tashkent as usual. With Mark a great talent dies, and one of the last flickering embers of freedom in Uzbekistan.

The cruel and rapacious Karimov family strengthen still further their grip on Uzbekistan’s command economy, and continue to siphon off the money of their people. Karimov’s daughter. Gulnara, is the family’s principal bagman. The bulk of the Karimov billions are securely stored in the Swiss branch of Rothschild’s Bank.

How heartwarming, therefore, to see Gulnara Karimova and Nathaniel Rothschild so happy together. You may print this picture off and find an appropriate use for it. Gulnara, incidentally, is not very tall, so the squit next to her is not merely morally stunted.

Continental Clothing has become, to my knowledge, the first large scale mainstream clothing company to ensure that none of its cotton comes from Uzbekistan. Uzbek cotton is a state monopoly, relying on slave labour and the forced labour of hundreds of thousands of children working in appalling conditions for little, or often no, pay.

http://www.continentalclothing.com/?P=55&name=Uzbekistan

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2005/08/iwpr_the_cost_o.html

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2005/08/sanctions_again.html

Continental are to be congratulated on this initiative. We need to keep up the pressure on other manufacturers and retailers to follow suit.

Germany – which has a historical weakness on human rights – prepares to push EU foreign ministers to drop sanctions against Uzbekistan on Monday. This comprehensive report is from IWPR.

Should EU End Sanctions Against Uzbekistan?

Reports from Uzbekistan suggest there is little evidence of human rights improvements that would warrant the removal of sanctions.

By Caroline Tosh in London and IWPR staff in Central Asia (RCA No. 492, 11-May-07)

As the European Union prepares to vote on whether to lift the sanctions it imposed on Uzbekistan in the wake of the Andijan violence two years ago, human rights activists and journalists in the country as well as international experts warn that any relaxation of the measures will send the wrong message to Tashkent.

Germany, which currently holds the EU presidency, appears to be pushing for awkward human rights concerns to be quietly dropped from the agenda in pursuit of a new EU strategy for engaging with Central Asia. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, RFE/RL, reported on May 11 that EU ambassadors were deadlocked on whether sanctions should be renewed, softened or dropped.

Uzbek officials have sensed the new mood over recent months, and have in turn sought a rapprochement with Europe on their terms.

If Tashkent gets a clean bill of health when EU foreign ministers meet on May 14, it will have achieved this without addressing fundamental human rights concerns, and specifically without instituting the international inquiry requested by the EU, the United Nations, and countries such as the United States.

Government soldiers opened fire on unarmed civilians in the eastern town almost exactly two years ago, on May 13, as people gathered in protest over the trial of 23 local businessmen accused of Islamic extremism ‘ said by their families to be innocent.

The massacre is widely thought to be the worst atrocity committed by a government against demonstrators since the Chinese army killed several hundred protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The Uzbek authorities say 187 were killed, but human rights organisations put the figure closer to 800, and argue that a determined effort by the Uzbek authorities to shut down non-government organisations, NGOs, and independent media has meant the truth behind events has never emerged.

Human rights groups are urging the EU to maintain the sanctions, and are calling for them to press for an international inquiry into Andijan and raise other human rights concerns.

See full article here

http://www.iwpr.net:80/?p=rca&s=f&o=335486&apc_state=henh

On 14 May the German Presidency of the EU will push hard again to persuade the EU to lift the limited sanctions imposed on Uzbekistan after the massacre of at least 700 demonstrators at Andijan two years ago.

Not only has Uzbekistan not agreed to the international inquiry the EU demanded, but since Andijan there have been thousands of new political arrests, including of many high profile human rights defenders I worked with. Here is a report from Human Rights Watch on the sentencing of their activist and interpreter Umida Niyazova.

Uzbekistan; Rights Defender Sentenced to Seven Years

EU Should Demand Release Before Sanctions Decision

(New York, May 1, 2007) ‘ The sentencing of Umida Niazova, an Uzbek human rights defender, should compel the European Union to make the release of rights defenders a necessary precondition for any further easing of sanctions against Uzbekistan, Human Rights Watch said today. Niazova is the translator for Human Rights Watch’s Tashkent office.

Niazova was sentenced on May 1 to seven years of imprisonment on politically-motivated charges by the Sergeli District Court in Tashkent. She was convicted of illegal border crossing, smuggling, and distributing material causing public disorder by using financial support from foreign governments (articles 223, part 1; 246, part 1 and 244/1, part 3 v of the Uzbek criminal code).

‘The Uzbek authorities are punishing Umida Niazova because she worked for groups that expose human rights abuses and they want to send a chilling message to others like her,’ said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. ‘Uzbekistan should immediately release Niazova and at least 14 other human rights activists wrongfully detained.’

Human Rights Watch also called on Uzbekistan’s other key partners, including Russia, to use their influence with the Uzbek government to insist on the release of imprisoned defenders.

A Human Rights Watch representative who monitored the trial said that at the May 1 hearing Niazova told the court that she had worked for 10 years in human rights, and that it was normal to criticize the authorities.

‘This is the idea of a democracy,’ Niazova told the court. ‘If we want to build civil society, criticism of the authorities must be allowed.’

Niazova also expressed hope for a mild verdict because her 2-year-old son had just started to talk. Niazova remained calm during the sentencing.

Niazova’s family was allowed into the courtroom, but representatives of the German and US embassies were denied entry.

‘There is already a German present,’ said Judge Nizam Rustamov, referring to the Human Rights Watch representative, who is a German citizen.

Before her arrest, Niazova was a regular contributor to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other news agencies. She also worked with such international nongovernmental organizations as Freedom House and Internews.

Niazova is one of 15 human rights defenders imprisoned by Uzbek authorities on politically motivated charges as part of its brutal crackdown on civil society unleashed in the aftermath of the May 2005 massacre in Andijan, in which security forces killed hundreds of mostly unarmed protesters as they fled a demonstration.

EU sanctions on Uzbekistan ‘ put in place in November 2005 in response to the Uzbek government’s refusal to allow an independent, international inquiry into the massacre ‘ are to be reviewed on May 14 at a meeting of the EU General Affairs and External Relations Council. One of the assessment criteria for reconsidering the sanctions is ‘willingness to adhere to the principles of respect for human rights, rule of law and fundamental freedoms.’ But the European Union never made the release of Uzbekistan’s human rights defenders a condition for easing the sanctions, choosing instead to focus on establishing a ‘structured human rights dialogue’ with the Uzbek government.

The European Union, led by the German presidency, has also made no public statements about Niazova or any of the other imprisoned human rights defenders, nor has it called for their release.

‘Niazova’s sentence is first and foremost a disgrace for the Uzbek government, but it’s a disgrace for the EU too,’ said Cartner. ‘The EU now needs to make absolutely clear there will be no consideration of easing any sanctions until Niazova and the 14 other imprisoned defenders are released.’

Other imprisoned Uzbek human rights defenders are: Gulbahor Turaeva, Saidjahon Zainabitdinov, Mutabar Tojibaeva, Nosim Isakov, Norboi Kholjigitov, Abdusattor Irzaev, Habibulla Okpulatov, Azam Formonov, Alisher Karamatov, Mamarajab Nazarov, Dilmurad Mukhiddinov, Rasul Khudainasarov, Bobumurod Mavlanov, and Ulugbek Kattabekov.

I won’t here detail again the horrors of Uzbek jails, but I shudder at poor Umida spending years in one. Nor should we forget Sanjar Unmarov or any of the thousands of political prisoners also jailed.

Deutsche Welt has, like all foreign news organisations in Uzbekistan, been closed down and its Uzbek correspondent has fled the country. Germany maintains an airbase in Uzbekistan, at Termez, and maintains a close alliance with the Uzbek regime. The German Foreign Minister is a close protege of the “retired” ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Schroeder is the highly paid Chairman of Nord Stream, the 51% owned Gazprom subsidiary building a $8 billion pipeline to bring more Russian and Central Asian gas to Europe. Schroeder pushed the scheme through as Chancellor then moved instantly to head it on retirement. Schroeder is very close to Alisher Usmanov, chairman of Gazprom Invest Holdings. Usmanov, an Uzbek and major Russian oligarch, engineeered Gazprom’s takeover of the Uzbek gas reserves in the last two years. Usmanov is the closest political ally of Karimov and his daughter, Gulnara. Gulnara received a bribe of $88million from Gazprom Invest Holdings in return for the contacts.

The EU sanctions on Uzbekistan include a travel ban on senior Uzbek officials directly implicated in the Andijan massacre. Germany fought successfully to keep Karimov and his family off the list. The top name on the list was Almatov, then Uzbek Interior Minister. On the very first day of the ban, he was allowed in to Germany for medical treatment – which took place privately in a hospital in Gerhard Schroeder’s home town, under a doctor who is a personal friend of Schroeder.

Uzbekistan ranks with North Korea and Burma as the worst totalitarian state on earth. You would hope that Germans, with their history, would be wary of open support for a country maintaining death camps for thousands of political prisoners. But in fact the German government does not give a bollocks about human rights.

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There has been something of a stir lately over Le Monde’s revelation that France passed warning to the CIA in 2001 that Bin Laden was planning an aircraft hijacking.

Nobody has paid a great deal of attention to the fact that the French intelligence came from the Uzbek security services.

But the headlines about France warning the US of 9/11 are complete nonsense. The alleged intelligence was about a plan to hijack a plane at Frankfurt airport. Flying the plane into buildings didn’t feature.

There was then (and is) intelligence cooperation between France and Uzbekistan, but in 2001 as now the Uzbek intelligence liaison relationship with Germany and the US was stronger than with France. It seems most improbable that the Uzbeks learnt of a plan to hijack a flight between Germany and the US, and told only the French.

An Associated Press report speculates that the Frankfurt plan was disinformation spread by Al-Qaida to distract attention from the 9/11 plot. http://www.topix.net/content/ap/0152981010029215169242201015390845871804That is obvious rubbish. Bin Laden would not want to give any indication that he was switching tactics to aircraft hijack, and have people looking at aviation security.

A far more likely explanation is that this was disinformation by the Uzbek security services. I have seen a great deal of intelligence passed on by the Uzbek intelligence services. It is inevitably self-serving, and almost always untrue.

The purpose of the Uzbek intelligence services in passing intelligence to the West is to persuade us that they and the Karimov regime must be supported as a bastion against a massive Islamic terror plot. They seek to portray all domestic opposition as al-Qaeda linked.

It goes wider than that. Consider this – across a huge swathe of the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkic peoples have been struggling to emerge from colonial occupation. This belt runs from the Chechens of the West through the Tatars, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Kazakh, Kirghiz and Mongols to the Uighurs of China in the East. The wave of struggles for national liberation of these peoples is perhaps the most important political fact since the fall of the iron curtain, yet completely neglected.

The Chechens and Uighurs are being brutally suppressed by the Russian and Chinese imperial powers respectively. Those like the Uzbeks who have achieved nominal nation status are suffering under the fierce regime of the surviving indigenous colonial cadres.

As it happens, these Turkic nations engaged in a struggle for liberation are Muslim. By one of history’s unpleasant chances (and I would argue it is no more than that – there are transactions, but almost no causal relationship either way) their efforts at national re-emergence have coincided with a surge in fringe Islamic radicalism. This has enabled their opponents to attempt to tar them with that brush.

Uzbek intelligence is therefore primarily aimed at portraying Uzbek dissidents as Islamic terrorists, and linking them to Al Qaida and to Chechen and Uighur “terrorists”. The governments of Russia and China are enthusiastic co-participants in building the same story to discredit their own Chechen and Uighur dissidents, and the other authoritarian governments of Central Asia join in too. The most important diplomatic entity in the region – the Shanghai Cooperation Agreement – functions entirely on this principle.

The sad thing is that, such is the appetite of Western intelligence agencies for any material that stokes the so-called “War on Terror”, MI6, the CIA and others accept this self-serving dross as true, even when it is fabricated in Uzbekistan’s notorious torture chambers. That is the issue over which I resigned from the diplomatic service, as detailed in my book “Murder in Samarkand”.

The clue in the 2001 French intelligence causing the current stir is that the Uzbeks claimed that Bin Laden met with Chechen terrorists to plan the Frankfurt hijack. Of course there was no such plot. This so-called Uzbek/French intelligence was just part of the propaganda campaign to link the Chechen cause to Bin Laden.

Much saddened by the death of Paul Bergne, one of my three predecessors as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

For most of his career Paul worked for MI6, but he was John Buchan not Ian Fleming. He spoke a vast array of Central Asian and Middle Eastern languages, and was a qualified and genuine authority on the archaeology of the area. He could read ancient as well as modern languages. You suspected he could speak them too.

Paul was in many ways the archetypal establishment figure. He was from exactly the stock of most British Ambassadors – Winchester (one of Britain’s most expensive private schools) and Cambridge. He had A’Court as a middle name. In many ways he represented the privilege that I so disliked in the Foreign Office. But I really liked Paul.

He was the only diplomat I ever met who truly shared, not just understood, my gut revulsion at the horrors of the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan. In his time he had been almost as forceful and diplomatically unconventional as I. The Uzbek government had put out feelers about having him removed. In a conversation at the University of Michigan he told me he felt I had crossed an absolute line when, on occasion, I had physically jostled the Uzbek security services. What would happen, he asked, if foreign diplomats started striking policemen in London? I pointed out that the cases were different – I was trying to save life: Uzbekistan was a dictatorship, we were a democracy. His eyes twinkled: “Really, Craig, you’re such an imperialist!”

Paul was called out of retirement to be the liaison with the Northern Alliance in the war in Afghanistan. It was a dashing adventure so late in his career. In the Foreign Office at that time we referred to him as “Greenmantle”, only half in jest. He had no illusions at all about General Dostum and his thugs, and though keen to see the Taliban removed, remained deeply ambivalent about the consequences of Western intervention. He opposed the War in Iraq.

His last publication was a review in “Asian Affairs” of Murder in Samarkand, which I have not seen yet. It is not, I am told, entirely friendly, but Paul’s views will remain worth considering.

This training is run by people I know and trust, and seems an exciting development in teaching media skills to young Central Asians and push the bounds of information and free comment. For interested potential participants, more information in Russian is here.

Craig

Listen (mp3)

Read (Word Doc)

From Amnesty US, an upsetting summary of the Uzbek government’s campaign to wipe out the last remnants of pro-democratic opposition in Uzbekistan. I know the majority of the people named in this report personally. This comes as the German presidency seeks to move the EU towards closer relations with the Karimov regime.

AMNESTY US

UZBEKISTAN

Government crackdown on human rights defenders

Secret trials and torture in the ‘information war’

The ruthless campaign by the government of Uzbekistan to silence human rights activists and journalists shows no sign of abating. The imprisonment, ill-treatment and harassment of individual human rights defenders has accelerated as protests over the killings of hundreds of unarmed men, women and children in Andizhan on 13 May 2005 refuse to go away.

President Islam Karimov conceded publicly in October 2006 that failures by local authorities might have contributed to unrest in the eastern town of Andizhan. Yet his government is still rejecting any independent international investigation of reports that the security forces fired indiscriminately at largely peaceful demonstrators. Instead, hundreds of protesters were detained and scores of people have reportedly been sentenced to up to 22 years in prison, including several prominent human rights defenders. Most of the trials were closed or secret.

International organizations have been forced to close their operations in Uzbekistan, including the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, in March 2006. The government has continued to renege on its promise to allow access to prisons by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Some of the harshest punishments have been inflicted on Uzbekistan’s own human rights defenders. Amnesty International is calling on the government of Uzbekistan to stop the persecution of human rights activists and journalists, and for effective action by the international community in support of those who courageously stand up for human rights.

Prisoners of conscience

Some human rights defenders have been prosecuted on charges that were reportedly fabricated, and sentenced to long prison terms after grossly unfair trials that denied basic rights of defence and failed to meet international legal standards.

See details of individual cases…

Two very interesting bits of information on the Uzbek cotton industry. The first is an extract from a chapter on the disappearance of the Aral Sea, from the excellent book “When the Rivers Run Dry” by Fred Pearce. If the Aral Sea were anywhere else in the World, this monumental environmental catastrophe would receive massive publicity. As it is, it is almost entirely forgotten.

My only thought is that the situation is even worse than Pearce outlines. It is very hard to get any worthwhile statistics on Uzbekistan, and all those used by international organisations ultimately derive from Uzbek government sources. There are no independent research institutes allowed in Uzbekistan. In fact the proportion of the population enslaved on state farms is closer to 60% than 40%.

FRED PEARCE: WHEN THE RIVERS RUN DRY

Chapter 25

ARAL SEA: THE END OF THE WORLD (EXTRACTS)

About five kilometres out to sea, I spotted a fox. It wasn’t swimming. For the sea as marked on the map is no longer a sea. The fox was jogging through endless tamarisk on the bed of what was once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water. In the past 40 years, most of the Aral Sea in Central Asia has turned into a huge uncharted desert. For the most part, no human has ever set foot there. This new desert is adding dry land the size of a small English county every year. It cannot be long before someone decides that it should be protected as a unique, virgin desert. But for now, such is the scale of what has happened here, that the UN calls the disappearance of the Aral Sea the greatest environmental disaster of the 20th century.

Till the 1960s, the Aral Sea covered an area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined and contained more than a thousand cubic kilometres of water. It was renowned in the Soviet Union for its blue waters, plentiful fish, stunning beaches and bustling fishing ports. Most atlases still show a single chunk of blue. But the new reality is very different. The sea is broken into three hypersaline pools, containing only about a tenth as much water as before. The beach resorts and promenades lie abandoned. The fish died long ago. As the fox and I peered north from near the former southern port of Muynak, there was no sea for 150 kilometres. It felt like the end of the world.

What has caused this environmental Armageddon? The answer lies in the death of the two great rivers that once drained a huge swathe of central Asia into the Aral Sea. The biggest is the Amu Darya. Once named the Oxus, it was as big as the Nile. In the fourth century, Alexander the Great fought battles on its waters as he headed for Samarkand and the creation of the world’s largest military empire. It still crashes out of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. But, like its smaller twin, the Syr Darya from the Tian Shan mountains, it is largely lost in the desert lands between the mountains and the sea.

During the 20th century, these two rivers were part of the Soviet Union. And Soviet engineers contrived to divert almost all their flow ‘ around 110 cubic kilometres a year — to irrigate cotton fields that they planted in the desert…

Today in Uzbekistan, the biggest producer, the government is still the only purchaser, and meeting cotton production targets remains a national obsession. During the harvest season, cotton employs a staggering 40 per cent of Uzbekistan’s workforce, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. Every province, every canal network and every farm has its production target. Even as the old collective farms are privatised, the targets persist, and farmers and officials can lose their land and jobs for failing to meet them. And cotton still consumes most of the region’s water.

During October 2004, during my visit, the government declared that Uzbek cotton production had exceeded 3 million tonne for the first time in several years. Ministers were interviewed on the TV standing in cotton fields brimming with pride. Officials that had seemed uptight and nervous suddenly relaxed. The bottles of vodka came out. Nobody cared that in the process the ratchet on the Aral Sea had been given one more turn.

The amount of water used here is simply insane. Today the countries around the Aral Sea ‘ Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — occupy five of the top seven places in the world league table of per-capita water users. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the two countries that take their water from the Amu Darya, use more water per head of population than any others on Earth. The Aral Sea basin is very far from being short of water. The problem is the simply staggering level of water use…

ENDS

I also received, courtesy of exiled Uzbek dissident Evgeni Dyakonov, a set of photos showing the condition of state-forced child labour in the Uzbek cotton fields. These are not sensationalist; they are very much the everyday conditions in which hundreds of thousands of Uzbek children are forced to live for months. The harvest can begin in late August with temperatures well over 40C, and finish in late November with temperatures well below freezing. I have seen children picking cotton in the snow.

I think the photos may originally be from the Environmental Justice Foundation, who have done good work on Uzbk cotton.

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