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The rendition row: history and hypocrisy

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‘This illustrates how dangerously out of touch the US State Department is with most of Western opinion’ Andrew Tyrie, chairman of Britain’s all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary renditions

By Hannah Strange in London for ISN Security Watch (22/03/06)

As Europe probes allegations that US intelligence flights involved in renditions of terror suspects passed through its territory, Washington is moving to bolster the case for the practice, which it insists is an essential tool in the fight against terrorism.

The policy of extraordinary rendition – under which individuals suspected of terrorism are transferred to detention facilities abroad – has been denounced by critics as immoral, uncivilized, and counterproductive. But the US administration is now attacking what it calls the ‘recharacterization’ of the policy, which it says was for decades widely regarded as an acceptable, and even heroic practice.

Renditions were ‘an important tool for all countries in fighting terrorism’, a senior US State Department official told ISN Security Watch earlier this month. It had been practiced ‘for many decades, by many countries’, and until its recent recharacterization had been an ‘accepted practice and not a dirty word’, he said.

‘The purpose of rendition is not to send people where they could be tortured,’ he said. ‘It is to ensure that people who are wanted for terrorist acts around the world are brought to justice.’

The practice had been reviewed and upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, he said, specifically in the case of Carlos the Jackal, a terrorist captured in Sudan in 1994 and rendered back to France, where he is now imprisoned. It used to be that finding terror suspects and bringing them to justice ‘was a heroic thing to do [‘] people were applauding this’, he continued.

Asked why terror suspects would be transferred abroad for interrogation if it was not to evade human rights protections, the official said that in the majority of cases, renditions took place because an individual captured in one country was wanted by another country. ‘What happens is, all intelligence agencies around the world share information with each other and cooperate with each other,’ he said.

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Canadian flies in to testify at EU probe on extraordinary rendition

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From the Toronto Star

It’s not surprising that Maher Arar travelled with some trepidation from Toronto to Brussels early this morning.

The 35-year-old Ottawa telecommunications engineer had his flight plan rerouted in 2002 by American authorities who believed he was a terrorism suspect, becoming one of the most famous victims of the controversial practice of rendition, in which detainees are transferred for interrogation to a country known to use torture.

Instead of allowing him to return to Canada from a family vacation abroad, U.S. authorities detained Arar during a stopover in New York and put him on a private jet to Jordan. He was then driven to Syria, where he was tortured and held for a year without charges.

Arar said in an interview yesterday he felt he had to overcome his fears of flying and the possibility of still remaining on some type of watch list, so he could testify this week before a European Union committee. His Toronto lawyers, Marlys Edwardh and Lorne Waldman, made the trip with him.

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The Truth About Lies

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From the Sydney Morning Herald

Truth or fiction? This lighthearted book shows you how to spot the difference.

Author: Andy Shea and Steve Van Aperen

Publisher: ABC Books

Lord Carlile, Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism laws, said last month that lack of public trust in the intelligence and security services over the terrorist threat was directly related to the way the Blair Government advocated war in Iraq.

“The trust issue,” he said, “has been very damaged by the intelligence information connected with the Iraq war which is perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be inaccurate.” Thus Carlile touched on a fundamental issue of our age: the public has an uncanny knack of fingering a liar, no matter how much spin is deployed to cover uncomfortable facts.

Andy Shea and Steve Van Aperen are experts in distinguishing truth from fiction. Shea is a former London police officer and Van Aperen is an FBI-trained polygraph examiner. Their book provides a light-hearted examination of the trade and provides skills to determine whether a loved one, politician or journalist is lying. The authors ask readers to acknowledge that we all lie at various points in life, but only some lies are truly damaging. Context is everything.

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Ex-UN chief: America has ‘lost its moral compass’

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From Times Online

The United States has lost its moral compass and fallen out of step with the rest of the world in the wake of September 11, the former United Nations human rights commissioner has warned. Mary Robinson expressed sadness and regret at America’s erosion of human rights as part of its “War on Terror”. In a speech in central London, Mrs Robinson praised the British courts for taking a global lead on interpreting international human rights laws.

Highlighting the US’s opposition last week to the creation of a new UN Human Rights Council, Mrs Robinson said: “It illustrates the seismic shift which has taken place in the relation of the US to global rule of law issues. Today, the US no longer leads, but is too often seen merely to march out of step with the rest of the world.”

She added that she hoped it was a “temporary loss of moral compass”.

Speaking at an event organised by human rights and law reform group Justice, Mrs Robinson – who is also the former President of Ireland – criticised government’s use of Big Brother-style language to cover up their activities. “Misuse of language has also led to Orwellian euphemisms, so that ‘coercive interrogation’ is used instead of torture, or cruel and inhuman treatment; kidnapping becomes ‘extraordinary rendition’,” she said.

The former Irish leader disputed the argument that the post 9/11 world meant that human rights could be curtailed in the name of security. This would lead to democracies “losing the moral high ground”, she said. “Almost five years after 9/11, I think we must be honest in recognising how far international commitment to human rights standards has slipped in such a short time,” she told an audience at Middle Temple Hall.

“In the US in particular, the ambivalence about torture, the use of extraordinary rendition and the extension of presidential powers have all had a powerful ‘knock on’ effect around the world, often in countries that lack the checks and balances of independent courts, a free press and vigorous non-governmental organisation and academic communities.

“The establishment of an off-shore prison in Guantanamo (and) its retention in the face of the most principled and sustained criticism … are all aspects of this situation.”

Mrs Robinson went on: “The tables have turned, and it is UK rather than US courts which are taking a lead as interpreters of fundamental human rights, on the basis of the European Convention and – by extension – the body of international human rights treaty law.

“This new situation is well illustrated by recent House of Lords decisions, most notably their ruling that evidence obtained through torture is inadmissible in any proceedings before UK courts.” But she warned that “political decisions” in Britain – such as pre-trial detention periods or limiting the right to peaceful demonstration – could become examples used to justify the behaviour by the state in less democratic countries.

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UN Refugee Agency expelled from Uzbekistan

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From BBC Online

The UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, says it has been ordered to leave Uzbekistan within one month.

The agency said that on 17 March it received a communique saying its entire office must shut, an order which it told the BBC was “a rare occurrence”. According to the agency, Uzbekistan’s ministry for foreign affairs said the UNHCR, which has been in the country since 1993, had fulfilled its role.

The Uzbek authorities are yet to comment on the decision. According to the UNHCR, the government statement said the agency had “fully implemented its tasks and there are no evident reasons for its further presence in Uzbekistan. With this regard, the ministry requests UNHCR to close its office in Tashkent within one month.”

UNHCR spokesperson Astrid Van Genderen Stort told the BBC the decision “came as a surprise”. She said usually individuals were asked to leave a country rather than an entire office ordered to shut down. UNHCR has two international staff in Uzbekistan.

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‘The time for accounting is now’

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By Andrew Murray in The Guardian

Tony Blair’s announcement that he will henceforward account only to God for the Iraq war makes perfect sense. Every secular reason he has concocted for the catastrophe has turned out to be the reverse of the truth: there were no weapons of mass destruction, we are less safe from terrorism, the Iraqi people themselves do not want us in their country. No more of his excuses for this epic man-made disaster stand an earthly chance of being believed.

As the third anniversary of the calamity draws close, the final argument used by what little remains of the brave army of pro-war punditry that set out with the prime minister in 2003 has gone belly up. Far from preventing a civil war, the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is provoking one. It is doing so through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has entrenched and inflamed the Sunni-Shia divide beyond anything in Iraq’s history, and through its refusal to afford Iraqis the unfettered exercise of national sovereignty, which is the only framework for overcoming such differences.

There is scarcely even a pretence that Iraq is permitted such sovereignty at present. Both Jack Straw and the US ambassador to Baghdad have recently been instructing the Iraqis as to what sort of government they must form – three months after the supposedly decisive national elections took place.

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‘Rendition flights’ landed in NI

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From BBC Online

The transport secretary has revealed that aircraft allegedly operated by the CIA to take prisoners out of the USA landed at airports in Northern Ireland. The planes landed at Belfast International and City of Derry airports after January 2001.

Alistair Darling said the government had no information about the flights’ purposes as they were “non commercial”. Anti-Iraqi war campaigners said they were used to fly prisoners to states where torture was used.

A total of six US planes linked by campaigners to “extraordinary rendition” used UK airports 73 times since 2001, Mr Darling confirmed. Campaigners claim to have details of planes used by the CIA to transfer terror suspects to countries where they could be tortured.

Mr Darling confirmed the serial numbers of planes that had landed in the UK matched those on the campaigners’ list. But he said he had no evidence they were involved in rendition.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has denied the US uses torture, but insisted the practice of extraordinary rendition was not unlawful, adding: “Renditions take terrorists out of action, and save lives.”

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‘Talking to terrorists’ opens in the US

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Robin Soans’s play finds the normal in the extreme

By Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe

There was a moment when she was reading Robin Soans’s script for “Talking to Terrorists” that Carmel O’Reilly found herself almost unconsciously nodding in recognition. It was the line in which a British Army colonel remarks that had he grown up in Crossmaglen, a village hotbed of the Irish Republican Army, “I would have been a terrorist.”

O’Reilly, artistic director at the Sugan Theatre Company, grew up in a small village in County Fermanagh, a rural corner of Northern Ireland, and Catholic boys she knew joined the IRA after they’d been beaten or humiliated by British soldiers in the early 1970s. She became a teacher in a technical school, and one night she was stopped by masked men who had mounted a checkpoint. But the masked men weren’t men, they were boys — Protestant teenagers who had joined a loyalist paramilitary group to battle the IRA — and she recognized their voices behind the masks. They let her go.

The next day in school, she and the boys behind the masks greeted one another as if nothing had happened.

Now O’Reilly is directing Sugan’s production of “Talking to Terrorists,” which makes its US premiere tonight at the Boston Center for the Arts. Drawing on interviews with those who have committed, witnessed, or been victims of terrorism, the play suggests that terrorists are not psychopaths but often shockingly normal — extremists made by extreme situations.

O’Reilly doesn’t have to be convinced that, given a particular set of circumstances and experiences, anyone can become a terrorist. “I’ve seen it,” she says, “with my own eyes.”

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Craig Murray to speak at London anti-war demonstration tomorrow

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On Saturday 18th March, three years after the start of the war in Iraq, a large anti-war demonstration is taking place in central London. The demonstration is assembling in Parliament Square at 12 noon where there will be street theatre and music.

An art installation by David Gentleman, representing the 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, will cover much of the Square. The march will then set off along Victoria Street, passing the Attorney General’s office on its way to Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square.

As well as Craig Murray, other speakers include Brian Eno, Jenny Tonge, Ken Livingstone and representatives from Iraq and Palestine.

For further details go here

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RAF doctor may face court martial over Iraq

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“If the judge rules in Flt-Lt Kendall-Smith’s favour, the case will have wide implications for all members of British armed forces serving or preparing to serve in Iraq.”

By Robert Verkaik in The Independent

An RAF officer who refused to serve in Iraq because he believed the war was unlawful was told that his concerns were “irrelevant” and that he should now face a court-martial.

Flight-Lieutenant Dr Malcolm Kendall-Smith, a doctor in the RAF, disobeyed an order to return to Iraq even though he had served two tours of duty there. Yesterday, his barrister told a pre-trial hearing in Aldershot that he “honestly” believed the war breached international law and therefore the orders he was asked to obey were unlawful.

Philip Sapsford QC, for the defence, said the officer believed that, because Iraq had not attacked the UK or one of its allies, there was no lawful reason to enter Iraq. Mr Sapsford said he now proposed to call a former SAS soldier to give evidence to support the doctor’s position. Ben Griffin, who left the SAS this year, has said he expected to face a court martial for his refusal to serve in Iraq but instead was discharged with a glowing testimonial.

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Aegis still in the money and back in the news

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By Ben Russell in The Independent

Tony Blair has been challenged over the “scandal” of vast profits being made by British firms with reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

The Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn attacked the Prime Minister after The Independent revealed that British businesses have profited by at least ‘1.1bn since Saddam Hussein was ousted three years ago. Top earners include the construction firm Amec and the security company Aegis. Heasked: “Does he not think it is time to set a date for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, to end the occupation and end the growing scandal of the huge profits being made by British and American companies from reconstruction and that the continued presence represents more of a problem than a solution?”

Mr Blair said Britain should continue to support Iraq’s efforts to achieve a stable democracy.

See also: The Name Game

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MI5, Camp Delta, and the story that shames Britain

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By George B. Mickum in The Independent

Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna are among eight British residents who remain prisoners at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They are jailed because British officials rendered them into the hands of the CIA in Africa, a fact that may explain why the British government refuses to intercede on their behalf. Bisher and Jamil have been wrongfully imprisoned now for more than three years. This is the story of their betrayal by the British government and their appalling treatment at the hands of the CIA and the U.S. military.

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More evidence of Foreign Office complicity in torture

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From the Scotsman: Taking prisoners to the edge of drowning ‘not torture’ says FO, by James Kirkup

FORCING a prisoner’s head under water until they believe they are drowning does not necessarily constitute torture or abusive treatment, the Foreign Office has said.

The equivocal statement has fuelled suspicions that Britain is turning a blind eye to practices by its allies that many international lawyers believe are illegal.

Holding mock executions is banned in international law, yet simulated drowning is specifically intended to persuade subjects that they are about to die.

Known as “waterboarding,” forms of simulated drowning have been used to torment prisoners since the Middle Ages. Victims experience an automatic gag reflex and acute terror, quickly and inevitably pleading for the ordeal to end.

In a written parliamentary exchange, the Foreign Office was asked whether “the infliction of simulated drowning falls within the definition of torture or cruel and inhumane treatment used by the government for the purposes of international law.”

Replying, Ian Pearson, a junior Foreign Office minister, gave what some saw as a vague answer. “Whether the conduct described constitutes torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment for the purposes of the UN Convention Against Torture would depend on all the circumstances of the case,” Mr Pearson wrote.

Waterboarding is one of the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” that US intelligence officers are said to use against suspected international terrorists.

The CIA version of the technique sees the subject strapped to a board, feet raised. Cellophane is wrapped over the nose and mouth and water is poured over the head.

The technique has since been used on senior al-Qaeda figures in US custody, intelligence sources say. US officials have never denied those claims.

There is no suggestion that British military or intelligence officers have used waterboarding directly against prisoners.

Human rights groups yesterday condemned the Foreign Office’s ambiguous legal position on simulated drowning.

James Welch, the legal director of Liberty, said Mr Pearson’s answer suggests ministers are ignoring international treaty obligations. “It is incredible that a government minister, mindful of our obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, UN Convention Against Torture and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, could possibly consider that holding someone under water with the intention of making them think they were going to drown was anything but torture,” he said.

Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s UK director, said the government must take a much clearer position against techniques like waterboarding.

“Instead of equivocating the government should be clearly condemning all forms of torture, including partial drowning, death threats, sensory deprivation and indeed all forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” she said.

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“Get away from me. I will not be insulted by you. This is an insult” – Charles Clarke’s words to the father of a 7/7 survivor who challenged him about the lack of a public inquiry

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From Rachel North

My dad, who is a parish priest and honorary Canon, read my draft article on Forgiveness (‘The F-word’) last night, and it so happened that he was going to to a clergy meeting this morning at Norwich Cathedral where the special guest was the Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

Clarke is my father’s MP.

Clarke, in his speech to the assembled clergy, made much of the fact that he had spoken to the PM ”only yesterday” and the PM was at the time considering the problem of an angry Sedgefield constituent about the closure of a school. Clarke remarked upon this system of top executives still being MPs and responsible to their constituents, how unusual this was compared to most Parliamentary systems. You lucky people, even though I am the Home Secretary, I am still also your M.P and here to help with all your little problems and enquiries. Etc.

He didn’t actually say ‘ you lucky people”, Dad said, but that was the inference. Dad was pleased that he could finally ask his M.P, Charles Clarke, the question he has been keen to ask for some months. Dad waited eagerly to ask his question; he had already written to Clarke in December 2005 with his question. But Clarke had not replied.

Dad was therefore very keen to be part of what was advertised in the meeting notes as ”30 minutes of reflection” after Clarke spoke. (In these meetings, ”30 minutes of reflection”means ”30 minutes of debate”. But it a clergy meeting, so they all ”reflect”, rather than shout and argue. It’s more dignified and godly, see. )

Unusually, according to Dad, on this occasion there was not a debate and questions from the floor, as is usual with these meetings at which Clarke was the special guest today: there were instead only 3 questions which Clarke answered at length, the questions seemed to Dad to be pre-prepared to give Clarke an opportunity to talk about things like prisons and police in a self-congratulatory way.

Dad was not able to ask his question, the last question finished and it was announced that there would be Eucharist in 2 minutes. Dad was very angry that ”the Eucharist was being used as a filibuster.” And still he had not had a chance to ask the question that was by now burning him up inside. It was time to break bread together; people began to leave the room.

My father tells me he at this point left his seat and strode up to Clarke, because he wanted to ask his question, and he said,

”Congratulations on fixing the meeting so that nobody can ask questions! You will have heard about Rev Julie Nicholson who is so angry she cannot forgive the bombers who killed her daughter on 7th July , well, I have a question, my daughter was feet away from the 7/7 Kings Cross bomb, and she and some other surivors have said they are not angry with the bombers, but with the Government, because there was no public enquiry. Why is there no public enquiry?”

Charles Clarke looked at my father ”in a very nasty way”, and then he said to my father

” Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult’.

And he stormed past, and Dad was so upset he could not share Eucharist with this man,

and my father left the cathedral in despair.

Dad has cheered up a bit now, but he was almost in tears at being so insulted by Clarke when I spoke to him: he did not think he had insulted Clarke at all.

Why is it an insult when the father of a bomb survivor, a gentle man of God, who has never caused trouble in his life, asks for a public enquiry? Why is his question not answered?

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Government washes its hands of weapons sales to the Uzbek government

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The British government has tried to circumvent restrictions on the supply of military vehicles to the Uzbek government by allowing the sale of land rovers to be modified for military use by a third party.

From Hansard

Q56 Richard Burden: One thing that was in your submission was the Land Rovers, the Turkish made Land Rover Defender 110 military vehicles which were used by Uzbek troops during the massacre of 2005. What you have said about that in your submission is that they were a gift from the Turkish government to the Uzbek government, and you think it is likely that they were produced under licence from the UK by Otokar, the Turkish company, although 70 per cent of the components were exported from the UK and therefore you say there is a loophole. We actually put this to the Government and said what do you say about this then, and I would like to read out to you what the Government said in response to that, and then perhaps you can give your response to that. What the Government told us was: “We understand that Land Rover sells flat-pack civilian Land Rover Defenders to the Turkish company in question, which then assembles and re-badges them for onward sale under its own name, using its own products and components, and according to designs for which that company holds the intellectual property rights. It is the Government’s understanding that these are not Land Rover approved products and it is therefore inaccurate to describe the company concerned as an overseas production facility for Land Rover. Under the EC Dual-Use Regulations … the UK has no power to control the export of civilian specification Land Rovers. To the extent that the buyer in Turkey converts the civilian vehicles using his own technology and without UK involvement, this is a matter for the Turkish authorities as regards any export from there.” That is what the Government said to us and I would be interested in your reaction to that.

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Book review: The Railway

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From the New Statesman

The Railway

Hamid Ismailov Harvill Secker, 224pp, ‘12.99

ISBN 1843431610

Reviewed by Craig Murray

Like almost all decent Uzbek literature, Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway has been banned in Uzbekistan. It is not a political work, but it presents a kaleidoscopic view of the extraordinary ethnic, cultural and political mix of Uzbek society across a period ranging from about 1880 to about 1980. It consists of a series of tales structured loosely around a remote village, Gilas, and the effect on the lives of the inhabitants of the railway built through it.

This mixture is, like Uzbekistan’s ethnic composition, so rich as to be almost indescribable. However, the two main strands are the folklore of the Asiatic peoples of the steppe, desert and mountain, and the subversive literature of communist states, with their suppressed individualism. We have mythic stories of heroic nomads performing impossible physical feats alongside the tale of Ulmas Greeneyes, nicknamed Mullah, a naIf swept along by events beyond his comprehension, who becomes a cog in both Stalin’s and Hitler’s interchangeable machines. Ismailov’s text is itself a product of Uzbekistan’s remarkable history. Discernible influences range from Omar Khayyam to Bulgakov, all overlain with the country’s cultured and tolerant version of Islam.

Indeed, Ismailov’s writing appears deeply infused with a rich heritage of Sufic thought. The translator, Robert Chandler, has brilliantly reproduced the rolling rhythms of the incan-tatory, mesmeric prose. Some of these stories could have been told by Scheherazade. Ismailov is a skilled craftsman, completely aware of the tradition on which he draws, and the book is peppered with scholarly allusion, but brilliantly done in a manner not distracting to the uninitiated. If you are familiar with central Asia and its literature, you will find the foreword masterly and will wallow in the footnotes. If not, I would advise you to ignore both and just drink in the novel.

The society Ismailov paints is recognisably still the Uzbek society of today – it made me yearn to go back. While the novel makes no direct criticism of the current regime, many of the incidents described, often casually, are features of modern Uzbekistan. In particular, The Railway details the sexual blackmail of women by the police, the huge corruption in the state cotton industry and the capriciousness – sometimes lazy, sometimes vicious – of the government (a poet is executed).

Thanks to the human-rights campaigns of the past couple of years, far more people in Britain now know something of Uzbekistan. Ismailov’s novel will further advance our understanding of this fascinating land. It is a work of rare beauty – an utterly readable, compelling book.

Craig Murray is Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan

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Tessa Jowell’s husband may be put on trial with Berlusconi

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From BBC Online

Italian prosecutors have asked a judge to let David Mills, the husband of Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, be put on trial on corruption charges. Judicial sources said prosecutors had also asked for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to be indicted.

They claim Mr Berlusconi paid Mr Mills $600,000 (‘344,000) for giving helpful testimony in two court cases.

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