Plain speaking and hard drinking

Craig Murray, formerly Our Man in Tashkent, was not your average ambassador. He put the wind up the Uzbeks with his uncompromising position on President Islam Karimov’s unspeakably grisly human rights record. This is the country that infamously boiled a dissident to death and then sentenced his mother to six years of hard labour when she had the temerity to complain about it. It is thanks to Murray’s efforts that the case was publicly aired in the first place and that the unfortunate mother’s sentence was subsequently commuted to a fine.

Upsetting Uzbekistan is one thing. The problem was that all this business was going on from 2002-4, when Washington, historically a little careless about choosing its friends around the world, was cosying up to one of its nastiest regimes. Karimov was a new-found ally in President Bush’s war on terror, providing an important airbase from which the Taleban regime in Afghanistan was defeated. Washington wasn’t happy about Britain’s man in Uzbekistan ruffling feathers. So he had to go. Britain, having mislaid its independent foreign policy, shamefully did America’s bidding.

What was so damaging about Murray’s speech in Tashkent on 17 October 2002? In it he observed, ‘Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy.’ He described how major political parties were banned, voiced his concern over an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 political/religious prisoners, reminded his audience of the dissident-boiling case and the general prevalence of torture in Uzbek prisons, and urged the authorities to halt the repression and start opening up. It was only embarrassing to Washington in so far as it highlighted the uncomfortable direction post-9/11 realpolitik was taking.