I just finished reading
Dirty Diplomacy (aka.
Murder in Samarkand), a book written by
Craig Murray - British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2005. It details his story of speaking out against the severe human rights abuses, among other problems, plaguing the country at the hands of yet another ruthless US-backed dictator, Islam Karimov. Of course, in light of Uzbekistan being an important partner in the War-on-Terror, pulling apart the facade of Uzbek progress (both economic and political)and denouncing a prime intelligence source (ie. torture, despite the fact that the vast majority of information gathered is total rubbish) doesn't go over well with the UK & US's current foreign policy stratagem.
On the question of style, of course I agree that the object of being an Ambassador is to maximize my influence. But you don't gain influence by being a pushover. You don't gain influence by never saying anything interesting, by sticking in the crowd. You gain influence by being more informed, intelligent, articulate and outspoken. You gain influence by being formidable, by being a factor that must be taken into account... I suspect that lurking behind what you say is a desire that I be so dull that no-one in Uzbekistan notices we have said something on human rights. Actually I think that outrage is absolutely the correct emotion at learning that someone has been tortured to death with boiling water. [pg. 100, excerpt from an letter sent to the UK's FCO]
One note to any one interested to check out this book: don't confuse Uzbek cultural with Islam, as certain details of each appear in a blatantly antithetical mix, such as the fact drinking/drugs/mistresses/etc. is widespread in a country that is allegedly over 80% Muslim. However, it's unsurprising such ignorance is widespread when you find out this is a regime that "tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day" and all the government-controlled mosques gather people for Friday prayer in order to give a speech discouraging regular prayer and fasting in Ramadhan (two of the main five pillars Islam is based on.)
"Possession in private homes of religious literature, including the [Qur'an], is likely to lead to arrest and torture, as is observing regular prayer." [pg. 77]
Not only is religious knowledge stifled and suppressed, but all aspects of education including literacy. Schools and Universities are shut down for the fall, shipping buses of students and staff out to the cotton fields in harvest season:
Even the massive labor forces held on the state farms are insufficient when it comes to harvest time. So, more forced labor is drafted in. Staff and students are brought from colleges and universities, which are effectively closed for the entire autumn term. An able-bodied university or college student will expect to spend three months in the cotton fields. Older school children will do the same, and even children as young as wight might expect to spend two or three weeks in the fields. Civil servants and factory workers can also be drafted as the size of the harvest and weather dictate.
Conditions can be appalling. The workers sleep in the fields, or in rough barracks. Sanitation is poor, food consists of a bare gruel, and water is taken straight from irrigation canals. The harvest regularly lasts into October or early November, when temperatures can drop below freezing....
Those drafted for the harvest are not paid, but they are, for the most part, successfully brainwashed by constant propaganda on television and radio, in newspapers and on banner and posters about harvesting the nations 'white gold.' It is chilling to hear a bedraggled ten-year-old in a field talking about the patriotic duty to pick cotton to fund the nation's Independence.[pg. 80]
The media, economy, political process, and environmental situation are all equally dodgy - Uzbekistan is home to the infamous
Aral Sea, a huge enviro disaster where an entire sea shrank to 20% of its size and is now a concentrated puddle of chemicals washed off from the poorly managed agricultural sector in which no fallow periods or rotation are practiced for a monoculture of crops, leading to soil exhaustion and thus heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
In terms of the broader world, it made me realize just
how much of media stories, interviews, and reports from governments and international organizations are flat out lies.
"[Bending the facts] is what the international community has done, consistently. The World Bank states that from 1993 to 2003, Uzbek GDP fell from 13.1 billion dollars to 9.9 billion dollars. Yet the IMF has accepted a positive growth figure for all but one of those years, and an average growth figure of 4.2 percent in this period. The best bit is that the World Bank still carries both figures in impossible combination in its Uzbekistan briefing paper." [52]
"I knew enough , from my insiders view of the first conflict, not to believe the propaganda about the clinical accuracy of our weapons. ...The double-speak amazed me -- one news bulletin had an expert explaining that, unlike last time, weapons were now so accurate they could take out military targets and miss civilian targets next door. Much lower down in the very same news program, it was reported that two of our missiles, aimed at Baghdad, had hit Syria by mistake." [172]
And I'm not even going into the planting of evidence, silencing of dissent (ie. speaking up against human rights abuses), kangaroo courts which accept "confessions" clearly given under torture, and the whole role of the exaggerated "Islamic extremists" excuse and fabricated linking of everything to Al-Qaida -- within the Uzbek government and Western governments.
We all know about these to some level, and distrust of the accuracy of the mainstream news media is variably widespread. However, much more than the common vague sense of misinformation or a bulk of separate incidences exposed, for brevity's sake, in the length of a single paragraph, this book gave me instead a sense of all the details and background, the concrete evidences and a plethora of examples, the interconnectedness and complete unified trend of this particular series of lies.
