“The intense repression here, combined with the inequality of wealth and absence of reform, will create the Islamic fundamentalism that the regime is trying to quash,” said the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. So they recalled him to London. Ally Number One, the United States of America, is making Uzbekistan a major logistical base for its military operations in central Asia, and would be grateful if Britain’s ambassador stopped bad-mouthing its new ally in the crusade for democracy — the Uzbekistani dictator, Islam Karimov.
It looked like curtains for Murray: trumped-up allegations of drunkenness and womanizing. He had to be out of the limelight until all this blew over. But then something surprising happened. It’s not clear quite what it was — either Murray’s professional colleagues at the British foreign office quietly rebelled against the plan to sacrifice one of their own at the altar of the “special relationship” with the US, or the Blair government decided that this was a genuflection too far. But suddenly, last month, Murray was back in Tashkent. What’s more, his mouth has not been sealed shut.
Murray was hardly back in the country when Fatima Mukhadirova, the mother of a young Uzbek man who had been tortured and murdered by the authorities for his alleged links with Islamic extremism, was herself sentenced to six years in a maximum security prison for publicizing information about her son’s torture (or attempting to “overthrow the constitutional order,” as the court put it). Murray could not contain himself: “It is another example of a gross breach of human rights in Uzbekistan,” he said.
The dead speaks
There is absolutely no evidence that Mukhadirova’s son, Muzafar Avazov, was anything but a devout Muslim with no political links. In Karimov’s brutal dictatorship, just being seen in a mosque can draw suspicion to you. Avazov was arrested, tortured and killed in the notorious Jaslik jail, as thousands of others have been in Uzbekistan on equally flimsy charges. The only different thing about the case is that when his mother got his body back, she took pictures of it and publicized them. When Murray saw them in 2002, he protested loudly.
When Avazov’s mother was sent to jail the week before last, he protested again, telling the BBC World Service that the six-year sentence was “simply appalling”. Later he told the Guardian: “She took photographs of her son’s corpse which she gave to the British embassy. The Foreign Office sent them to the University of Glasgow pathology department. Their forensic report said the body had clearly been immersed (in boiling water) because of the tide marks around the upper torso.” His teeth had been smashed and his nails pulled out. But the Uzbek prison authorities continue to insist that he died as inmates spilled hot tea on him.
Cannot lie
An everyday story of central Asian folk, ending with the sentencing of a 63-year-old woman to six years of hard labour. This sort of stuff goes on all the time in most of America’s new allies in the former Soviet republics of central Asia. The US government steadfastly looks the other way because now the rulers of the “Stans” have become valuable allies in the “war against terror”, whatever that means these days. Indeed, US foreign aid to Uzbekistan, most of which goes straight to Karimov, tripled last year.
Murray is absolutely right that backing people like Karimov will only generate support for Islamic extremism in the long run, but that alone is not his point. He’s actually saying that backing people like Karimov is simply wrong, because they are wicked dictators who abuse their own people (like that chap down in Iraq, you know, Saddam something or the other....) And he could just be a sign that the Bush administration’s major foreign ally in its incursions into the Muslim world is starting to have second thoughts about the people it has chosen for allies.
But probably that is too much to read into this case. At any rate, it is refreshing to see a diplomat who does not believe that he was hired to lie for his country.
