By Mohammad Ziauddin

This article was written in response to Craig Murray’s speech at SOAS on 20 June 2005

The word ‘tidemark’ now makes my skin crawl. I will not be able to go to the seaside again or clean a bathtub without thinking of boiled human flesh. And, indeed, why should I enjoy that privileged immunity? Bohemian Rhapsody spreads its wings from the jukebox of the Friend at Hand off London’s Russell Square where I am sitting trying to make sense of my notes after the short walk from the Khallili Lecture Theater at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Craig Murray’s atypically reserved discussion of the situation in Uzbekistan still rings in my ears. Two pretty girls wearing peasant dresses and ethnic accessories sing along in a careless salute to tragedy. What would they make of boiled human flesh this early in the evening?

No. There is no good way of dealing with the realization that the West has sold its soul to a geriatric gimp with a powerful lust for red corpuscles and a face like a tired bar of soap. I am confronted by the reality of it like a singularly depressing body blow. Perhaps a tune by Bryan Adams would better suit this moment of awful clarity? If you listen hard enough you can hear it singing down the wire from some marble palace in Tashkent:

‘Everysing I do, I do eet for zhou”

Islam Karimov loves to bring it on for the greater good. The President of Uzbekistan is not just another ally in the War-on-Terror. Karimov enjoys, if not a practical monopoly, then certainly a cartel position over the information that drives America’s feverish hunt for Osama bin Laden and his network of terrorists.

Like his counterparts in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and other morally-dead autocracies, Karimov dresses up his own repression in the ragged flag of the War-on-Terror. There is no opposition, there are no protestors, there are no dissenters, there are only terrorists by the boatload. The intelligence extracted from these hardcore extremists captured by their security services is the stuff the threat matrices and terror alerts that grab our attention on the six o’clock news are made of. Craig Murray was removed by the Foreign Office as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2004 for simply pointing out that this game is a dangerous scam.

When Murray began his job of defending British interests in Uzbekistan in 2002 one of his first experiences of that country was the witnessing of a trial. An old man was denouncing his nephews for their involvement in al-Qaeda. They had traveled to Afghanistan several times for training, he said. They had met personally with Osama bin Laden. Murray, who recalled that he was sitting only a few feet away from the accuser, could see the man shaking as he read aloud from the statement in his hands. Eventually the man paused in his testimony and then said with a passion that none of what he was reading was true, that the Uzbek security services had tortured his children in front of him until he agreed to read their lies.

Some time after this Murray began receiving suspiciously similar intelligence briefings from MI6, via the CIA and ultimately the Uzbeks. Uzbekistan was, apparently, riddled with al-Qaeda terrorists that had traveled to Afghanistan for training and met personally with Osama bin Laden. Murray’s exact response to this escapes me but I recall it was close to ee cummings’ declaration that, ‘There is some shit I will not eat.’

And so began the saga that led to a six-week stay at St. Thomas’s Psychiatric Hospital and Murray’s ejection from polite society. But polite society is overrated. Standing behind the lectern wearing a blue T-shirt and tan Bermuda shorts Murray seemed more like a man itching to buy an ice-cream from the nearest Mr. Whippie than a former ambassador privy to filthy secrets. But it was a hot day and the facts have a loathsome gravity of their own.

There are 10,000 political prisoners in Uzbekistan according to Murray’s estimate. Human Rights Watch puts the number between 6,000 and 7,000 but their methodology only counts those jailed on ostensibly political charges and not those put away on bogus murder raps and drug charges. But neither of these figures are particularly difficult targets for a legal system that enjoys a ninety-nine percent conviction rate.

In a bid to promote legal transparency the British Department for International Development installed tamperproof electronic court recording systems in Uzbek courtrooms. The American Bar Association was responsible for the implementation of the program and Murray recalled a conversation that went along the lines of:

Craig Murray: So how many trials have you monitored?

American Bar Association: Four thousand.

CM: How many acquittals have you seen?

ABA: None.

CM: Then why are you recording the trials?

ABA: So the information can be used in appeal.

CM: How many appeals have been won?

ABA: None, but’

One might expect their next stop would have been selling the footage to some late night World’s Best Political Show Trials program. There is, after all, an almost limitless supply of footage. People are accused of committing murders that a dozen Uzbeks have already been convicted for. Mass trials throw groups of defendants into buckets of pick and mix crimes, and so on. These are good strategies for a regime with too many dissidents and too little time.

In one case Murray related, a jeweler was identifying the three men who had assaulted him out of a pool of six total defendants. After pointing out the three men with total certainty and some satisfaction he was informed by the judge that he had selected the wrong three men. It was an achievement of such staggering mathematical improbability that just reading about it is liable to bring a person a severe run of bad luck.

But this was of little concern to the judge who ordered the three men he wanted to fit the bill to stand up and then ordered the witness to identify them as his attackers. Craig Murray said that he would have been laughing out loud at the absurdity of the whole thing were the accused not being summarily executed.

‘Uzbekistan is an unreconstructed Soviet State,’ as Murray puts it. And there is much to this statement. Islam Karimov is less post-Soviet President than just the thug who was sitting in the chair when the Soviet Union collapsed. He was appointed Communist Party Secretary of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan in 1989 and like all officials who had a bone of power grabbed what he could when everything came apart two years later.

In Karimov’s case this happened to be the Republic of Uzbekistan. To celebrate he gave himself 86 percent of the vote in the 1991 election. He was still celebrating in 1995 when he gave himself 91.9 percent of the vote in an election the United States described as, ‘neither free nor fair and offer[ing] Uzbekistan’s voters no real choice.’

But the times they don’t change much, and America’s feeble tap on the wrist of a problem too distant to care about was never going to have any effect. Karimov is, quite literally, in charge of the entire country.

There is no reason why Uzbekistan is so poor, Murray says. It has the world’s eighth largest natural gas reserves. It is the world’s sixth largest producer of gold, the world’s third largest uranium producer and the world’s second largest producer of cotton.

As Martin Raiser, the Head of the World Bank mission to Uzbekistan has optimistically pointed out, ‘With a large population, cheap and educated labor, significant natural resources and a strategic geographic position, Uzbekistan would be a natural centre of gravity for investments and for production in Central Asia.’ Indeed, it would be, but it is not.

The Uzbek economy is controlled by state monopolies that pay the state farms, mines, mills and factories fixed allocations to cover costs. In the case of Khlopkoprom, the state cotton monopoly, this allocation is just three percent of the world price of cotton at which Khlopkoprom sells the cotton.

Sixty percent of the Uzbek population live on state farms and their salary, according to Murray, is two American Dollars per month. This works out to an annual wage of $24. This figure is almost twenty times less than the World Bank estimate of $420 for annual per capita income.

But the World Bank figure is simply total Uzbek national income averaged over the total number of Uzbeks. It cannot account for the kind of skewed distribution that occurs when state monopolies walk off with 97 percent of revenues and call them profit margin. To put the scale of this theft into perspective, agriculture accounted for 35.2 percent of the $9.9 billion Uzbek gross domestic product (GDP) in 2003.

For the multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and the European Reconstruction Bank Uzbekistan’s rosy future hinges on privatization and market liberalization and some vague steps to ‘ensure greater political openness.’ The EBRD, where Martin Raiser was previously Chief Economist, lays down the general direction like a strip of super-generic tarmac:

‘Opening of the economy to effective competition, including through the elimination of discriminatory barriers against foreign trade, improving conditions for entry of domestic businesses and protecting their property rights, acceleration of privatization through the sale of at least a few large enterprises and determined efforts to attract more FDI.’

Murray would not agree with this prescription. For him the cause of Uzbekistan’s arrested development is entirely political and comes in the shape of Islam Karimov. The woefully inefficient and kleptocratic state of the Uzbek economy is not the result of failed attempts to find the best road to the End of History. Instead it is a perfect reflection of Karimov’s rotten and perpetual quest for absolute power and total control.

In this light, Murray argued, the strategies of the multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the EBRD are not only pointless but dangerous. The former ambassador accuses these institutions of failing to confront the Uzbek regime’s serial deception and thus of complicity with Karimov’s brutality.

Murray recalled a conversation with the Uzbek Finance Minister during which the minister told him that the growth rates in every sector of the economy exceeded 10 percent. He concluded with great pride that national economic growth bowled along at an annual rate of 6 percent. The acceptance of such totally bogus Uzbek growth figures by the banks, Murray says, has deflected criticism from Karimov and reduced pressure for change.

This claim prompted a choking guffaw from a well-manicured boy in the second row. By the end of Murray’s talk this cheap snicker had evolved into a full-blown conniption fit that threatened to consume the kid’s very existence:

‘Who are you to say the banks are wrong, they have the statistics and all you are saying is that you’re always right and they’re always wrong. I mean, how can the banks be wrong, they’re the banks and they know how to measure growth, you don’t know how to measure growth”

His petulant whine climbed to such a pitch I was struck by the distinct possibility that a swarm of over-indulged mosquitoes had temporarily come together in human form.

‘I mean, you throw out these figures, percent this, percent that, but you don’t know, you don’t know, how do you know? Did you go out and measure these figures, did you? No, I don’t think you did. I think the banks and the development people know more than you.’

Which is an interesting assertion that demands closer inspection. A UNDP website for Uzbek statistics claims that the private sector grew by 14 percent in 2004 alone to a 35.6 percent share of the economy. Murray had claimed that privatization efforts are a third-rate whitewash. State farms, for example, are ‘privatized’ by leasing part of the farm to a subdivision of the same state farm.

The few farmers who ostensibly do own their own land are told what they must grow, what price they must sell the state at, and what price they must buy their inputs at. This is not exactly free enterprise. Other smallholding farmers without legal title to marginal land halfway up a mountain have been designated the vanguard of the new privatized economy. There are stories of artisans with 12,000 employees. These captains of industry can evidently not get enough of all that cheaper than dirt-cheap labor.

The fact of the matter is that despite a presidential decree to privatize the economy and the na’ve optimism of the banks almost all land is still owned by the state. A fact borne out quite simply by a US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service report on Uzbekistan agricultural production which says exactly that. Owned by the state.

According to the UNDP source the Uzbek economy grew at 7.7 percent in 2004, a slight increase from previous years. An economy that grows at 7 percent a year will double its money in ten years. But despite this stupendously impressive growth figure Uzbek GDP is falling as are salaries and living conditions. But the banks statistics seem to exist independently from any kind of objective reality.

The World Bank, IMF and EBRD figures are more conservative, reporting growth rates between 3.2 and 4.4 percent. Yet the question remains, if the economy is growing why is the country going backwards? The World Bank economic indicators for Uzbekistan put this issue in its squarest terms. The Bank reported that between 1993 and 2003 the economy grew at 3.2 percent. For the same period the Bank states that GDP fell from $13.1 billion to $9.9 billion. This combination is impossible.

But who needs rising salaries when the state will take care of its citizens? Unemployment in Uzbekistan stands at one half of one percent. This is, of course, the official statistic. Murray estimated that the real figure is closer to 30 percent. In some places such as Andijan, he says, it may be as high as 60 percent.

Ah, Andijan, the name that should have the same resonance for the futility of the War-on-Terror that Guernica has for the vicious bankruptcy of fascism. Precipitated by the trial of 23 local businessmen on terrorism charges, the Andijan Massacre of May 2005 occurred against a background of increasing national unrest with the political and economic situation.

Between May 10 and 12 more than 4,000 protestors in their best clothes lined the streets outside the courthouse to say enough to injustice and enough to repression. For a totalitarian state this gathering was more than unprecedented. It encapsulates Nelson Algren’s sense of bewilderment as to why it is always the weakest in society who seem to have the greatest faith in humanity while it is the powerful who best know fear and possession.

Four hundred to six hundred people were killed by the army between May 13 and 16 after they swept through the town to restore order. Rebels had overrun a garrison and prison and had taken over the regional administration building. The Bush Administration was ‘deeply concerned’ about ‘terrorists’ on the loose.

The situation could have neither persisted nor spread, not in a country where Karimov has total and almost personal control over the media. His daughter owns the country’s one cable television company, which she turned off during the massacre. Murray said that he had called friends in Tashkent when the killings where being reported on British news and they had no idea it was happening.

And yet the stand in Andijan prevented those 23 businessmen being milled and processed into highly consumable reports on the vaguely definite Plans of Osama bin Laden. Something that would have led the War on Terror into even weirder territory.

That trial that never was is, in itself, fascinating and speaks volumes for the gross failure of the international financial institutions to have any impact on Uzbekistan beyond giving the Karimov a helping hand.

The dictator’s loathing of free enterprise and the independent power base this can give to any emerging middle class is revealed by his targeting of businessmen. His position and power would be severely threatened by this development, a possibility a beast with as much blood on his hands as Karimov should rightly fear.

Yet the banks insist that economics and politics are distinct spheres and that privatization and market liberalization is not connected in any way with power. Karimov is expected to pursue economic reform because in their minds presidents are supposed to have the interest of the people at heart. The aim of the weak package of political reforms suggested by the banks is merely the enhancement of economic reform rather than any independent political goal.

The reality that the economy is a product of the power structure, as are all economies, is beyond their technocratic ken. Karimov cannot and will not make serious changes unless he one day wakes up with a severe death wish. So the banks push economic reform, Karimov blows smoke in their faces, the banks walk away in a happy liberalized daze. But this is fast becoming a hopeless Hegelian digression and Andijan is still calling’

Murray, quoting from a Human Rights Watch account of the massacre, said that the wounded were left in the street and denied medical attention. Anyone who went to help them was shot. Anyone who moved was shot. When the soldiers eventually walked down the street they shot everyone who was still alive.

There are also at least two large groups of wounded from the massacre that have simply disappeared, Murray said. Three doctors were also killed when an ambulance was shot up by soldiers.

It is barely on the far edge of reality, Murray said, that Karimov did not order the lethal break up of the demonstration on May 13. But he added that it is wholly inconceivable that in a totalitarian state as efficient as Uzbekistan that Karimov did not order the continuation of violence over the following days.

After the massacre Scott McClellan, the fat and smug White House Press Secretary, called for calm and restraint on both sides. Less than a week before Bush had been in nearby Georgia praising its people’s establishment of democracy. And a few months prior to that he had been championing Ukraine’s so-called Orange Revolution and another victory of democracy over tyranny.

But Bush offered no support to the democratic rebels in Andijan. It is unclear whether the situation in Uzbekistan stuck in his craw or whether his mind was simply incapable of registering his own grotesque hypocrisy. The protestors were misbehaving, Bush said, and had to follow The Due Course of Law. Yes, follow the law that leads straight to the gallows via a 99 percent conviction rate. It is a fair bet, though, that Karimov improved his average after Andijan.

But what does Karimov care about any of this? After September 11 he signed up for a bumper order of Alliance: the new White House fragrance for the murderous dictator who has everything but the love of his own people.

Uzbekistan’s jails are deep, dark holes for all those terror suspects we would rather not dirty our hands with. When Murray first brought up his reservations over the quality of the intelligence being produced by the Uzbek security services and used in our War on Terror he was summoned back to London for a pep talk by Michael Wood, the Foreign Office legal adviser.

Wood told him that by his reading of the Convention on Human Rights it was not illegal for Britain to use intelligence extracted through torture if Britain had no knowledge of that torture and no part in that same torture. That rationalization will be cold comfort to Mrs. Avazov.

Her son’s body was delivered to her in a sealed coffin by the Security Services after he had been pulled in for a chat. The goons delivering the casket muttered about falling down the stairs or running with scissors before driving away in their truck. Mrs. Avazov secretly opened the coffin ‘ a crime punishable by hard-labor ‘ to discover how her son had been killed. She took photographs and sent them to Craig Murray who was by that time developing a troublesome reputation as a champion of human rights.

Murray didn’t know what to make of the photographs so he sent them on to a pathologist in Glasgow. The pathologist’s report concluded that all Mr. Avazov’s fingernails had been ripped out. That he had been heavily beaten with special attention given to his head. And finally that he had been boiled to death.

The pathologist could tell that the body had been immersed in boiling liquid and not merely splashed with it because there was a visible tidemark across the top of the chest. So there you have it’

Where does take us? Uzbeks hate Karimov. But because of his monumental repression the only kind of opposition groups that the disaffected are likely to encounter will be radical Islamic ones. As what could pass for a moderate opposition fails to have any impact on the suffering of the people it will lose support as extreme options become more appealing. The notion that there could be pro-Western opposition, Murray says, does not exist.

The former ambassador lamented that he could not hold it against any Uzbek who took up arms. The situation which is forced upon them by Karimov with the material support of the United States and Britain is impossible and inhuman.

But what is the value of intelligence tortured out of farm-boys and small-businessmen? How can the testimony of an old man ruthlessly compelled to denounce his own nephews be useful in the fight against al Qaeda? And where are the thousands of al-Qaeda-in-Europe that Karimov’s security apparatus assures us will begin destroying our civilization at any moment? It is all utterly fraudulent yet the CIA and MI6 describe the material as prime grade stuff and it forms the rotten heart of the War on Terror.

If this mind-bendingly stupid system of ‘intelligence’ gathering were terminated right now our intelligence would be no worse and certainly a damn sight more accurate. The massive downside is, of course, that we would all feel incomplete without the terror alerts and pundits yammering about Imminent Destruction and Total Enemies. So this perverse situation of unreality persists, twisting and simplifying the real nature of the threat. And not just in Uzbekistan but also in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and all tin-pot, third-rate US-allied regimes where suspects have been extraordinarily rendered.

But of course US policy in Uzbekistan isn’t just about the War-on-Terror. Murray had started his talk by reading a letter written by Ken Lay, the former CEO of the former energy trading company Enron, to George W. Bush, then Governor of Texas. Enron, headquartered in Texas, had just opened an office in Tashkent and was looking for George to strike up some good relations between Uzbekistan and Texas for the corporate good.

Enron had made a business out of screwing people before its spectacular implosion in 2002. The company single-handedly caused the California blackouts of 2000 by switching off power stations. It then turned round and claimed the market was too heavily regulated, that the red tape protecting consumers was hopelessly inefficient and had to go.

Never let it be said that there are problem’s like that in Karimov’s Uzbekistan. Long story short the dictator is Bush’s kind-a-guy. He knows how to get things done.

Murray quipped that the letter shows just what Bush’s priorities are when he thinks of Uzbekistan. US policy toward the country makes no sense in terms of justice but it does make perfect sense in terms the region’s oil, he says. And it is far easier to deal with a savage and irredeemable dictator than to take a chance on a real democracy.

For good measure the United States has also acquired a massive airbase in Uzbekistan. It is one of the many ‘Lilly-pads’ that sit in a menacing ring around the broader oil-rich Middle East and can be rapidly expanded to project massive force onto any joker. But though ‘American’ oil is safe these policies make a blaring mockery of even a half-hearted attempt to define what the US is hamfistedly doing in the Middle East as spreading freedom.

As I left the auditorium with these thoughts reeling through my mind the kid’s sawing whine started up behind me. Out of sight but in my mind like a splinter, I imagined that if I turned around I would see a morbidly obese two-dimensional eight year old with a red jacket and a baby-blue beanie hat.

‘How does he know Saudi Arabia and Egypt torture people?’ He demanded from his unfortunate friend. ‘I’ll tell you, he doesn’t. He’s saying knows everything. But has he been tortured there? I don’t think so, so how can he tell me that they torture people. He doesn’t know anything”

Just like Eric Cartman. That same victimized ego propped up on the scaffold of its own delusional self-concept. ‘I’m not fat, I’m big-boned.’ Indeed. He followed some distance behind me sounding ever more like something nasty and electric. As he whirred his solipsistic retreat into denial I was reminded of something that the Saudi dissident author Abdelrahman Munif had said when asked why he had given the name Cities of Salt to his novel about oil exploration in the kingdom.

‘Cities of Salt means cities that offer no sustainable existence,’ he had said. ‘When the waters come in, the first waves will dissolve the salt and reduce these great glass cities to dust’ It is possible to foresee the downfall of cities that are inhuman.’

That is wisdom for Bush and Blair just as surely as it spells Karimov’s ultimate end.

Transcript of a Speech given by Craig Murray at the Policy Exchange 28.6.05.

Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan

I will take quite a lot of background as read. If I can recommend to you my website, www.craigmurray.co.uk, you can bore yourself rigid with longer speeches of mine if you so desire, and find a lot more background.

But I’ll concentrate this evening on the remit I was given – what the West has done wrong, in my view, what we should be doing to put it right. I’ll start off with just a couple of facts. The first one comes from Human Rights Watch’s report on the Andijan massacre, which I’d recommend to you. They interviewed over fifty eye-witnesses; it’s a very good report. And it wasn’t just that the crowds were fired on, and fired on continually, and chased and fired on as they ran, on the May 13th, but afterwards Babur Square, where the main massacre happened, was sealed and the wounded were left lying, left overnight with no care, no attention, no medical treatment. And the next morning troops walked through the wounded finishing them off with shots to the head.

To anyone who knows Uzbekistan it is conceivable, though extremely unlikely, that troops could have opened fire on the 13th due to some situation that developed and got out of control locally. But it is completely inconceivable that twenty-four hours later troops would be walking through the streets shooting people without having authority right from the top of what is an extremely efficient totalitarian dictatorship.

I’ll give you another interesting fact. One of the Uzbek opposition leaders, a gentleman who’s in exile, Muhammed Salih, fought the only vaguely democratic election that President Karimov has ever faced when he opposed him in the presidential election in, I think, ’92. It wasn’t a very democratic election. The media was 100% government controlled. Salih had no access and no coverage except complete vilifications. His supporters were subject to violence and arrest and the polls were rigged in every conceivable way. He still officially got about 15% of the vote, which was quite extraordinary in the circumstances. He now lives in exile in Germany.

Last August when I was still British Ambassador I suggested that we invited him to the Foreign Office to perhaps meet a junior minister or senior officials. My suggestion was greeted with stunned horror in the Foreign Office, where I was told – Did I not know that he’d been convicted of terrorism? I said, ‘nobody, but nobody, believes Muhammed Salih is a terrorist. It’s a propaganda conviction.’ The Foreign Office checked with its research analysts, who confirmed that absolutely nobody thinks Muhammed Salih is a terrorist. I was then told that OK, he may not be a terrorist but he has been convicted of terrorism and therefore it would be awful insulting to President Karimov, were we to speak to him. And I was also told off for having even suggested it, and Muhammed Salih was not invited to meet anyone in the Foreign Office.

Subsequently last autumn, PEN, the campaign group for imprisoned writers, and the BBC World Service, invited Muhammed Salih to the UK anyway, and the government refused him a visa. They did so on the grounds that he might seek to illegally immigrate here. The facts are that he already has political asylum in Germany, he lives in Germany with his family, he speaks German and he doesn’t speak English – but it was plainly just not on to have anyone from the democratic Uzbek opposition walking around the streets of London, because it might upset our dear friend Mr Karimov. And to my knowledge still to this day, certainly since September 11th 2001, neither ministers nor senior officials in the Foreign Office have met anyone from the Uzbek opposition.

This is not typical of the way the Foreign Office works. The Foreign Office is usually very open to meeting democratic opposition figures from dictatorial states. And I give it to you as an example of the way the Foreign Office’s attitude, the British Government’s attitude to Uzbekistan does not stand up anywhere near official British Government policy on democracy and human rights.

The situation in Uzbekistan is dire. There is, I think, general agreement among academic authorities, that poverty is increasing, that the major drive behind events in Andijan, the major cause of the unrest, the reason taxi drivers are so grumbley, is that people have declining access to household goods and declining diet and yet the West fails to stand up to the reality of the situation. The IMF and the World Bank still now, today, will tell you that the economic growth rate in Uzbekistan this year is 4.4%. The IMF and the World Bank have given a positive growth rate for Uzbekistan every year since 1993 – for most of which time, and certainly for the last ten of those years, the economy has been in headlong decline. Interestingly, if you look another lot of World Bank figures they tell you that in 2003 total Uzbek GDP was $9.9 billion whereas in 1993 it was it was $13.1 billion. Which means that it had declined by 30% in the ten year period during which it had increased every year.

This is absolutely typical of the failure of the West to tackle or even acknowledge what is happening in Uzbekistan. When the Uzbek government say to the IMF delegation ‘our automotive production is up by 12%, our oil and gas production is up by 25%, our agricultural production is up by 17%’, the IMF don’t say ‘you’re lying,’ which would be the honest response. They say ‘oh yes, hmm.’ And they hum and hah and they negotiate a bit, which is much more than the UN do.

The UN this year will give you just the official Uzbek government figure, which is of economic growth of 8.9%. You’ll find that on the UNDP website. The IMF, to be fair to them, don’t agree with that. They just accept a figure, after a little bit of negotiation, that somewhere in between the truth and the Uzbek government figure – but a lot closer to the Uzbek government figure than the truth. So we have this paradise, where people are enjoying much better rates of economic growth then any of the developed world, but where at the same time everyone is getting poorer and the West doesn’t face the fact.

The same is true of our approach to the internal situation. ‘Muhammed Salih is a terrorist, so we don’t meet him.’ ‘He’s not a terrorist.’ ‘Well, OK, maybe.’ In March of 2004 there were – and you’ll find this reported in pretty well every authority including academic authorities – there were a series of suicide bombings in Tashkent. Each one, according to the Procurator General of Uzbekistan – speaking at a press conference to which the diplomatic corps and the media were invited – each one was committed using a suicide belt containing an equivalent of 2 kilos of TNT; and in each about thirty or forty people were killed.

There are some difficulties with this. I got myself to the site of each of the blasts within hours, and in one case within forty minutes, of the blast going off. One of them took place in an enclosed courtyard not that much bigger than this room. It had a tree in the middle, buildings round, and not a pane of glass was shattered, and not a twig was torn from the tree. Apparently six policemen had just died there in a bomb blast.

At one of the other places there was supposed to have been a car bomb. I was there within two hours. No sign of any blast whatsoever.

The facts did not in the least bit relate to the stories. I reported this back to London, who didn’t want to know this. It was much more convenient that it was Al Qaeda and this came, very conveniently actually, one week before Colin Powell had to make his determination on whether Uzbekistan met the Human Rights criteria for continued UN aid.

But much more interestingly we had intelligence material. We had telephone intercepts. Satellite telephone calls from known senior Al Qaeda officers in the Middle East and in Pakistan – and incidentally if anyone thinks I’m revealing a secret and they don’t know their phones are tapped, they must be extremely na?ve people. And they were saying to each other ‘what the hell is happening in Tashkent? Bombs are going off in Tashkent. Does anyone know what’s happening?’ This was Al Queda talking to each other. These were actually NSA American security intercepts.

Despite that, the next day Colin Powell stands up and says ‘Al Qaeda have launched a dastardly attack on our great ally, President Karimov. We must give more support to Uzbekistan.’ And he knew he was lying. That’s what I’m telling you. We knew that intelligence wasn’t true, because we knew Al Qaeda didn’t know what was happening in Tashkent.

The truth is that the West has got itself into bed with an absolutely appalling dictatorship, and a dictatorship which is not going to reform.

I’d only been in Tashkent for a very few weeks when I attended the opening of Freedom House in Uzbekistan. The American Ambassador got up and welcomed the abolition of censorship and welcomed the increase in private ownership of enterprises and welcomed something else, and none of those things had happened at all. They were all entirely fictitious. They were simply untrue; they were lies. I got up and I said Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, neither is it moving in the direction of a democracy; a fact which was actually self-evidently true but contradicted everything the American Ambassador had just said. And this capacity for delusion on the part of the West has to be tackled.

You’ll see for example claims from Uzbekistan that now 35% of GDP is in the private sector. Completely untrue. Claims about the privatisation of farming. They’re based on the sub-division of state farms into smaller state farm units, which are simply accounting transactions which actually aren’t setting up any kind of market and have no effect whatsoever. The truth is that Uzbekistan is still a country where sixty percent of the population live on state farms, on kolkhozy, where they can’t leave the farm. It’s a country which maintains not just exit visas but internal movement visas. It’s a country where you can’t go five miles on any road in the country without encountering a police road check. If you’re born on the farm you’ll die on the farm in most cases. It’s a country where an enslaved population suffers at the hand of an entirely rapacious government that has no intention of reforming: no intention of reforming.

And so far, because we decided post September 11th that Karimov was our great ally in the region against Islamic fundamentalism, we’ve maintained our support on the basis of deluding ourselves that he is reforming, that he is changing. If you’re going to continue to maintain, as this government does, that its policy is one of constructive engagement – which it calls now ‘critical engagement’ in order to avoid comparison with Mrs. Thatcher’s policy towards South Africa – you have to show progress for your critical engagement, and there isn’t any.

There is no free media in Uzbekistan: None. There is no legal opposition in Uzbekistan: None. On 26th December parliamentary elections were held in Uzbekistan in which the opposition parties were not allowed to compete. There is no religious freedom in Uzbekistan. And the last couple of weeks, it’s worth noting, have seen a renewed clampdown on Protestant churches, with a number of new arrests of Protestant ministers, so it’s not only Islamists who suffer. It’s really a disaster.

How do we make it better? Well I would say first of all we face the facts. We face the facts. We face the facts as I’ve outlined them to you. We stop hiding behind this delusion that reform is happening, Karimov is a secret reformist who’s just hidden it very well for the last fifteen years. We stop accepting the propaganda about all opposition being Islamists.

I agree absolutely about the huge potential for violence because there is no opposition, but that’s because we have done nothing to help the opposition. We’ve put all our eggs in the Karimov basket. Just as I couldn’t get Salih a visa to come and talk to our ministers, I couldn’t get any money at all to help Democratic Forum, an opposition grouping which tried to get going last year, bringing together the various democratic opposition elements in Uzbekistan. Neither the Foreign Office nor the US government was in the least bit interested. The sad thing is that this is actually going to lead to Islamic extremism in a country which has had very little of it in the past, because people have no alternative. They’re not given any kind of Western alternative. And it’s a policy which, in itself, will build a hatred of the West, because we are seen as backing and supporting a dictator who is himself hated by his own people. It’s a self-defeating policy on our side.

Let me put it to you bluntly. If someone took my brother and boiled him to death, I know what I’d do. We are creating terrorism ourselves by our foolish refusal to face up to what kind of man Karimov is, and the fact that this is not a government with which you can do business in the normal way. There are creative ways of helping democratic opposition to flourish. For example, in Bishkek [the capital of Kyrgyzstan], the Americans put in a printing press, in order to help encourage free media. No initiatives of that kind have been undertaken in Uzbekistan.

And we also have to look at what it does to international institutions, to allow in them members who simply do not agree with the basic tenets of the organisation. Uzbekistan is a member of the OSCE for example. Uzbekistan believes in none of the fundamental tents of the OSCE. It doesn’t believe in democracy, has no intention of ever becoming a democracy. It doesn’t believe in economic reform. Why is it in? It’s not in Europe anyway. Why is it in? It’s in because it’s part of the former Soviet Union. But how can the OSCE continue to have a member which actually doesn’t hold to the rules of the club or intend to hold to the rules of the club? It’s not a question of how fast it’s moving in the right direction; it’s the fact that if it’s moving in any direction, it’s the wrong direction.

The only institution that has actually faced this squarely is the EBRD – which was forced to do so because it held its AGM in Tashkent in 2003 and completely uniquely, I believe, in its history, decided to limit lending to Uzbekistan on the basis of its poor record on human rights and democracy, in line with article 1 of its charter. For once, the EBRD actually decided to follow its own charter and insist that members stick to the rules or effectively be suspended. And in effect Uzbekistan was suspended.

NATO similarly. Uzbekistan is in the Partnership for Peace. It absolutely sickens me that British troops were last year – and I don’t just mean training for officers, though we do that in the UK for Uzbek officers – British troops were last year training alongside Uzbek troops in Uzbekistan in company strength, in formation, doing NATO P4P peacekeeping exercises. British troops were quite possibly training alongside some of the soldiers who shot wounded people in the head as they lay oh the ground in Andijan.

What signals have we sent to Karimov since? Well, though Karimov has been killing people for years – he’s had lots of practice – he hasn’t generally killed 700 people at once. Today he’ll be thinking that even if you kill 700 opponents at once, nothing bad happens to you, because nothing has. Why do we treat Lukashenko and Mugabe as pariahs, subject to personal travel restrictions, to a range of targeted sanctions, but not Karimov? The answer to this, of course, is an obsession with the Karshi-Khanabad airbase, as one of the most important of Rumsfeld’s ‘lily-pads’ – bases which can be rapidly expanded, and from which massive military force can be quickly projected into any area of what they call the Wider Middle East in the Pentagon – which means the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which is of course the great band of oil and gas reserves.

But is it worth the candle? Are we really getting such a benefit? I can tell you for certain that part of American thinking was that if you are looking at contingencies regarding Iran, it would cause enormous difficulty to use bases out of Afghanistan to attack Iran, enormous difficulty in terms of Afghan public opinion, but public opinion had never been a factor that needed to be considered in Uzbekistan.

But this is war on terrorism thinking, this idea that Karimov is on our side, that he’s an ally, that Uzbekistan is an ally, that Uzbekistan is part of the coalition of the willing. I was under instruction to refer to Uzbekistan as an ally every time I spoke in public, whatever I was saying. It didn’t matter what subject, I had to start off ‘We enormously appreciate Uzbekistan’s contribution to the coalition in Iraq; Uzbekistan our great ally in the War on Terror. Now I’m here to open this nursery school’ or whatever. That ‘you’re with us or against us’ thinking, the idea that it doesn’t matter how nasty you are, that the world is divided into two camps, there’s us, the civilised people of the universe, and there’s all those nasty rather damned Muslim people; that thinking, which dominates American policy, is what has driven Western policy towards Uzbekistan, and unless we get out of it we’re going to bring disaster both on the people of Uzbekistan and upon ourselves.

Thank you.