If you see something, say something.
—Terror warning posted in the New York City subways, 2006
In a time when supposedly civilized world leaders weigh the merits of different torture techniques, Craig Murray is that rarest of public servants: He is a defender of human rights. For that, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan was sacked, his writing was suppressed, and he has been threatened with punishment and even jail by the administration of British prime minister Tony Blair. Murray’s experience both during and after his time in Uzbekistan offers a stunning inside view of how human rights has been sacrificed to advance the narrow interests of the United States in its war on terror.
Uzbekistan is a California-size republic in Central Asia. From 1924 to 1991, it was part of the Soviet Union. It gained its independence in 1992 as a supposedly secular and democratic republic. Islam Karimov, the Communist Party chief in Uzbekistan, became president in 1990, and was reelected after independence. Karimov’s regime has been marked by brutality and authoritarianism. All genuine opposition parties were banned in the early 1990s, and the crackdown on Muslims has been especially brutal. In its 2006 World Report, Human Rights Watch described Uzbekistan as having a “disastrous human rights record.”1
Craig Murray arrived in Tashkent as British ambassador in August 2002. He quickly began castigating the Uzbek regime for its human rights abuses. Three months after his arrival, Ambassador Murray gave a speech to an Uzbek human rights group in which he spoke with undiplomatic bluntness:
Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy. The major political parties are banned; parliament is not subject to democratic election and checks and balances on the authority of the executive are lacking.
There is worse: we believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 people in detention whom we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. In many cases they have been falsely convicted of crimes with which there appears to be no credible evidence they had any connection. . . .
No government has the right to use the war against terrorism as an excuse for the persecution of those with a deep personal commitment to the Islamic religion, and who pursue their views by peaceful means. Sadly the large majority of those wrongly imprisoned in Uzbekistan fall into this category.2
The London Daily Telegraph reported that Murray’s speech “stunned those present, including John Herbst, the American ambassador. . . . The speech was a gift to human rights organizations and a disaster for the Tashkent government and its new best friend, the White House.”3
In confidential memos to the British Foreign Office, Murray was harshly critical of the United States. A month after assuming his post in Tashkent, Murray sent a secret memo to his superiors with the subject heading “U.S./UZBEKISTAN: PROMOTING TERRORISM.” He denounced the “sham reform” that was certified by the U.S. State Department, which claimed that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, a prerequisite for disbursing $140 million in U.S. aid to Uzbekistan in 2002.
Murray described President Karimov as a “dictator” whose goal was “not the development of his country but the diversion of economic rent to his oligarchic supporters through government controls.” The U.S. claim of reform, insisted Ambassador Murray, “is either cynicism or self-delusion.”
Murray charged that a U.S. motivation for backing Karimov was to establish strategic air bases in the country. Nevertheless, the U.S. alliance with the dictator “is misconceived. In the short term it may help fight terrorism but in the medium term it will promote it. . . . And it can never be right to lower our standards on human rights. . . . Above all,” Murray concluded, “we need to care about the 22 million Uzbek people, suffering from poverty and lack of freedom. They are not just pawns in the new Great Game.”4
In response to Murray’s insistent human rights appeals and pointed criticism, the British government attempted to muzzle him, then smear him, and finally sack him. In late December 2005—after the British government moved to suppress publication of his explosive book, Murder in Samarkand—Murray defied Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act by posting a series of classified memos on his Web site (www.craigmurray.co.uk) that he wrote while an ambassador. Fearing that the British government would shut down the site, Murray encouraged other Web site owners to republish the material. Hundreds took up the call.
In one classified memo from July 2004, Murray wrote, “We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services via the U.S. We should stop. . . . This is morally, legally and practically wrong.”
Perhaps the most damning memo is one that was written by a British legal advisor asserting that using information extracted through torture is not technically a violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
In January 2006, shortly after Murray posted the confidential memos, Human Rights Watch released its annual report. It included an unprecedented criticism of U.S. global human rights policy. In presenting the annual report, Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth declared, “The global defense of human rights was profoundly compromised over the last year by the Bush administration’s policy-level decisions to flout some of the most basic human rights norms, out of a misguided sense that that’s the best way to fight against terrorism.”
Roth charged that the U.S. violation of human rights had spawned “a copycat phenomenon,” offering as an example his conversation with the prime minister of Egypt the previous year. Roth was protesting the “torture of scores, if not hundreds, of suspects” in the aftermath of the bombing of the Hilton Hotel in the Egyptian resort town of Taba. The Egyptian prime minister told Roth, “Well, what do you want? That’s what the United States does.”
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan responded to the scathing criticism from Human Rights Watch, saying, “The United States of America does more than any other country in the world to advance freedom and promote human rights. Our focus should be on those who are denying people human dignity and who are violating human rights.”
“A Country Which Lives in Fear”
On January 19, 2006, Craig Murray came to the Democracy Now! firehouse studio to give his first interview in the United States since he publicly released the confidential memos. He described what he encountered when he became ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002. “I found a country which lives in fear. . . . It’s a totalitarian state. Effectively they haven’t reformed much from the old Soviet system, and then they have added a new level of brutality and violence and an extra level of corruption to that. It’s a state where everyone is scared of their neighbor, where there are 40,000 secret police in the city of Tashkent alone. And the astonishing thing was it was a state where people were being disappeared and tortured on an industrial basis and which was being financed and organized by the United States of America.”
Murray couldn’t keep silent about the horrors of the situation. “One of the things you have to do as a new ambassador is call on your fellow ambassadors, pay courtesy calls. And I kept saying to them, you know, to the French, the German, the Italian: ‘This is awful. It’s terrible what’s happening here. There are thousands of people being rounded up in prisons, tortured, killed, disappeared, and it all seems to have the backing of the USA.’
“And they said to me absolutely straight, they said, ‘Yes, but we don’t mention that. You know, President Karimov is an important ally of George Bush in the war on terror, so there’s an unspoken agreement that we keep quiet about the abuses.’ ” Murray decided that this conspiracy of silence would end with him.
One of the first human rights cases that came to Ambassador Murray’s attention occurred shortly after he arrived in the summer of 2002. “Two Muslim prisoners in Jaslyk gulag—which is an old Soviet gulag in the middle of the Garagum Desert, a sort of forced-labor camp, a terrible place where people are sent to die, effectively—were boiled to death,” he explained. “The mother of one of the prisoners received her son’s body back in a sealed casket. She was ordered not to open the casket, and just to bury it the next morning. Despite being in her sixties, she managed to get the casket open in the middle of the night, even though police were guarding the house outside.”
The victim’s mother took a series of detailed photos, which she then passed to the British Embassy. Murray sent the photos to be examined by the pathology department at the University of Glasgow. The pathologists issued an autopsy report which stated that the prisoner’s fingernails had been extracted, he had been severely beaten, and he died from being immersed in boiling liquid. This “gives you some idea of the level of brutality of this regime,” said Murray. The victim’s mother was later sentenced to hard labor for exposing what happened to her son.
The Uzbek government was unhappy with Murray’s scolding, so they sent him a message. In March 2003, the ambassador went to have dinner with Jamal Mirsaidov, a professor of Tajik literature at the University of Samarkand, who was a dissident in Soviet times. “While we were having dinner, his grandson, who lived in his house, was abducted off the streets, severely tortured, and murdered. His elbows and knees were smashed. His right hand was dipped in boiling liquid until the flesh peeled away. And, ultimately, he was killed with a blow to the back of the head,” Murray said. The boy’s body was dumped on the professor’s doorstep several hours after Murray left.
“This was intended as a warning, both to the professor and to me, a warning not to meet dissidents and for dissidents not to meet me.” Murray said that the boy’s death “had a profound effect on me. It has troubled my own conscience greatly. Because if I hadn’t met his grandfather, he probably wouldn’t have died that terrible death.”
Uzbekistan’s sordid human rights record did not deter the United States, which had a large military air base in the country. Uzbekistan is located immediately north of Afghanistan, and the air base was used for U.S. military operations there. Halliburton was building facilities on the Uzbek base, and the airfield was being turned into a permanent military base. Murray explained, “The United States was pumping huge amounts of American taxpayers’ money into the Uzbek regime. According to a U.S. Embassy press release of December 2002, in 2002 alone, the United States government gave Uzbekistan over $500 million, of which $120 million was in military support and $80 million was in support of the Uzbek security services who were working alongside their CIA colleagues.”
While Murray was raising human rights issues publicly, he was also pressing the British government internally about the intelligence that they were receiving from the Uzbek secret service. “I was seeing CIA reports, which were passed on to MI6 [the British equivalent of the CIA], which had been extracted from the Uzbek torture chambers,” he said.
“I had been there for two or three months, which was long enough to know that any Uzbek political or religious detainee is going to be tortured. There’s no question of . . . ‘Is that or is that not torture?’ We’re talking about people having their fingernails pulled, having their teeth smashed with hammers, having their limbs broken, and being raped with objects including broken bottles—both male and female rape—extremely common in Uzbek prisons. And from the security service, which was operating right alongside the CIA, we were getting this intelligence.
“The intelligence itself was nonsense,” Murray insisted. “The purpose of the intelligence was to say that all the Uzbek opposition were related to al Qaeda, that the democratic Uzbek opposition were all Islamic terrorists, that they’d traveled to Afghanistan and held meetings with Osama bin Laden. It was designed to promote the myth that Uzbekistan was, in total, part of the war on terror, and that by aligning himself with Karimov, Bush and the Bush administration were backing or improving United States security, which wasn’t true at all. I mean, the intelligence was false. If you torture people, they will say anything. I couldn’t believe that the CIA was working so closely with these dreadful security services and then were accepting intelligence which was obviously untrue.”
“Fabric of Deceit”
For Tony Blair’s government, which had hitched its star tightly to the Bush administration, there was little patience for this outspoken ambassador’s persistent criticism of U.S. and British complicity in the Uzbek abuses. In March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, Murray was summoned back to London for a meeting. It was there that Sir Michael Wood, chief legal advisor to the British Foreign Office, made an astonishing pronouncement: He said that it wasn’t illegal for the UK to use intelligence that was obtained under torture. He confirmed this view in a memo, which Murray later published on his Web site. “He said that as long as we didn’t specifically ask for an individual to be tortured—if he was tortured and we were passed the material—then that was not breaking the UN Convention Against Torture, and therefore the CIA and MI6 were acting perfectly legally in getting this information from torture,” recounted Murray. He was told that this was also the view of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the head of MI6. “They had decided that we should continue to receive this intelligence material, which was all CIA-sourced, even though it was obtained through torture.”
Murray went so far as to confirm his allegations about torture with the CIA. “I asked my deputy to call up the American Embassy just to make sure I wasn’t missing something here and to ask the CIA station there whether they, too, believed that this Uzbek intelligence was probably coming from torture. And so, my deputy went off to the American Embassy. . . . and the American Embassy had said, ‘Yes, it probably did come from torture.’ But they didn’t see that as a problem.”
The Western intelligence agencies, he explained, are careful to maintain “a fabric of deniability over the whole thing. They don’t actually go into the torture chamber. They receive the intelligence that comes out of the torture chamber, but they don’t enter it. The CIA will then process the material, so that when it actually arrives on the desk of Colin Powell, as it was then, or Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld, or on the desk of a British minister, it just says this intelligence was got from an Uzbek prisoner related to al Qaeda. It doesn’t say who he was. It doesn’t say his name. It doesn’t say when he was interrogated. So you can’t trace it back, in order to say it was that individual and he was tortured in this way. . . . So [Condoleezza Rice] can say, ‘I, to my knowledge, have never seen information obtained under torture.’ And that’s a fabric of deceit set up to enable her to say that.”
For Ambassador Murray, the reasons given to justify the invasion of Iraq pushed him to the edge. “I saw George Bush on CNN making a speech the day the real fighting started, where he said we are going in basically to dismantle the torture chambers and the rape rooms. And yet, the United States was subsidizing the torture chambers and the rape rooms in Uzbekistan.” Murray said “the sheer hypocrisy of that” led him to cable the British Foreign Office:
As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not much focused on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan the US pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship. We must not close our eyes to uncomfortable truth.
I watched George Bush talk today of Iraq and “dismantling the apparatus of terror . . . removing the torture chambers and the rape rooms.” Yet when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in international fora. Double standards? Yes.5
The Blair government was furious at its outspoken ambassador. In August 2003, Murray was called back early from vacation in Canada and told to resign as ambassador to Uzbekistan. He was offered the job of ambassador to “somewhere peaceful, like Copenhagen.” Murray declined, saying he was arguing his case internally, as required. He was then handed a list of eighteen “disciplinary allegations” that the British government was going to investigate—including that he was stealing money, drinking, issuing visas in exchange for sex, and a charge that he drove a Land Rover down a flight of stairs to a picnic area (Murray does not drive).6 He was told he had a week to consider whether or not to resign. Murray refused, insisting the allegations were false. The smears were then leaked to the media. The message was clear: Complaining about British and American complicity in human rights abuses would be punished by character assassination, for starters.
The smear campaign backfired. There were protests at the British Embassy in Tashkent. Fifteen British businessmen in Uzbekistan signed a letter of support for Murray. A formal government investigation ultimately cleared Murray of all charges.
But the incident took a personal toll on the human rights crusader: While awaiting the outcome of the investigation, Murray suffered a nervous breakdown and spent ten days recuperating in a London hospital.
Ambassador Murray returned to Uzbekistan for another year. In October 2004, one of his confidential memos was leaked to the Financial Times. In it he said that “Uzbekistan is morally beyond the pale, that we shouldn’t be treating it as an ally, and we certainly shouldn’t be cooperating with the Uzbek security services,” he recounted. He was promptly removed as ambassador; he resigned from the Foreign Office four months later. Murray denies leaking the document, and suspects it was done by officials in the British government in order to provide a pretext for sacking him.
James McGrory, a British businessmen in Uzbekistan who co-signed a letter of support for Murray, said there was a “common belief that Mr. Murray is being sacrificed to the Americans.”7
Bush and the Barbarians
George W. Bush’s association with Uzbekistan dates back to his days as governor of Texas, when Enron CEO Kenneth Lay asked him to meet with the Uzbek ambassador. It was 1997, and Enron was arranging a $2 billion deal with Uzbekistan to exploit its natural gas reserves. Bush lent a helping hand, prompting Lay to write that he was “delighted” that Bush would meet the Uzbek officials.
Murray explained that Uzbekistan’s energy reserves and its authoritarian government made it irresistible to foreign oil companies. “Central Asia has the largest untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world. Uzbekistan doesn’t have much oil; it has a terrific amount of natural gas. And Uzbekistan dominates Central Asia. It has half the population of the whole region. It has, by far, the biggest army and the most muscle. So Uzbekistan was key to the energy policy, and that’s why Enron and Halliburton and all of the companies you very much associate with the Bush administration were in there plugging this policy of staying close to Karimov. And that’s why he was such a welcome guest in the White House.
“The war on terror was a cover for these activities,” asserted the former ambassador. “That’s why they needed this false intelligence saying that the Uzbek opposition was all Islamic terrorists . . . the wellspring of the whole policy of the United States was the ruthless pursuit of sectional oil and gas interests, and that originated with Enron. Obviously, once Enron collapsed, those interests passed on to other major U.S. oil companies.”
The Bush administration was so tightly allied with the Karimov regime that it provided them with political cover for a notorious massacre in the eastern Uzbek town of Andijan. On May 10, 2005, protests began over the jailing of twenty-three businessmen who the Uzbek government claimed were Islamic extremists. The protesters broke the men out of jail, and in the process freed thousands of other prisoners. By May 12, the protests had intensified, and demonstrators tried to take over government buildings in Andijan. The Uzbek government responded by sealing off the city and then killing over seven hundred people.
Initially, the United States downplayed the killings. On May 13, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was asked whether the United States blamed the violence on the government of Uzbekistan. Boucher responded: “I would note that while we have been very consistently critical of the human rights situation in Uzbekistan, we’re very concerned about the outbreak of violence in Andijan, in particular the escape of prisoners, including possibly members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an organization we consider a terrorist organization. I think at this point we’re looking to all the parties involved to exercise restraint to avoid any unnecessary loss of life.”
Murray, who was no longer ambassador by that time, described the incident as “a dreadful massacre. I mean, what was happening in Andijan was effectively no different from the pro-democracy demonstrations that you saw in Ukraine or in Georgia, that brought down a dictatorial regime.” Which is just what the White House was afraid of.
Murray says he “was completely flabbergasted by the White House’s approach. On one hand, you’ve got unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators, and on the other side you’ve got the government troops with tanks and heavy weapons shooting them down, and the White House called for restraint on both sides. What do they want the people to do, die more peacefully? It really was a sickening response from the United States, but, you know, of a piece with their relationship with the Karimov regime, which they were trying desperately to maintain.”
Ultimately, Bush’s policy toward Uzbekistan failed in all of its goals. Despite the United States investing about $1 billion in the Karimov regime and even supporting them during the Andijan massacre, the Uzbeks eventually made their lucrative gas deal with Gazprom of Russia in August 2005. Then, on August 1, 2005, the Uzbek government ordered the United States out of the Khanabad military base within six months. Thus was lost a key staging area for the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Murray mused, “The Bush administration is trying now to put the best possible gloss on it and say, ‘We left because of the human rights situation.’ Absolutely untrue. The human rights situation seemed not to bother them at all. They left because they were kicked out. . . . They kicked out the Peace Corps, kicked out most American NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and USAID operations.
“We had the very pathetic sight of America having really kowtowed to this terrible dictator, then being humiliated by him and chucked out of the country. So all that loss of moral authority, all that waste of money and resources has come to nothing.”
Craig Murray did something remarkable. Confronting an onslaught of political and media pressure to look the other way in the face of horrendous abuse, he said no. He declined to pull the “fabric of deceit” over the suffering the Uzbek people. And he refused to treat human rights as just another bargaining chip for governments or oil companies to trade with tyrants.
“I think it’s just what any decent person would do,” Murray told Democracy Now! “I mean, when you come across people being boiled and their fingernails pulled out or having their children raped in front of them, you just can’t go along with it and sleep at night.”