An unlikely hero

When I was reviewing books for An Phoblacht, many memoirs came across my desk.

My basic rule was that if the author didn’t come across as being honest with their own personal flaws, then chances are, they weren’t honest about much else in the book.

This book by ex-British Ambassador Craig Murray is so honest it takes your breath away at times.

In the first two pages, he tells of attending the show trial in Tashkent of a political dissident.

The man is facing the death penalty for his alleged crimes.

Murray is greeted by the man’s sister, Dilobar Khuderbegainova, and she hopes that Murray, as representative of the UK government, can somehow intervene and save her brother from the firing squad.

Instead, the Scot was ogling her shape:

“This was the sister of the victim of this show trial. Yes, her eyes were filling with tears. Her brother was going to be executed, and I was trying to make out her legs through her dress. I was filled with self-loathing.”

That’s on page two, and he doesn’t hold back after that.

This is a memoir about a moment of epiphany and a life taking a very different direction.

At times it reads like a political thriller.

In 2002 Craig Murray became the youngest Ambassador to represent the UK.

Marked out as a highflier he certainly didn’t come from the usual demographic of British diplomats.

Firstly, he attended a state school, and he didn’t go to Oxbridge.

His book covers the two years from 2002 -2004 when he was in Uzbekistan flying the flag for Britain.

His was the time of the Blair government, post 911 it was all about the “war on terror”, and the drumbeat for war on Iraq was growing.

Murray makes it clear that he never believed his government’s confident assertion that the Baghdad regime possessed Weapons of Mass Destructions (WMD).

However, it was in Tashkent that he caused problems for both the White House and Ten Downing Street.

At the time, the Uzbekistan government was an important ally for the US State Department.

The former Soviet republic has a   mainly Muslim population.

This gave critical cover to the US stance that their war on terror was not a war on Islam itself.

There was also the small matter of the strategically vital airbase at Khanabad, known as K2.

This was an important staging post for the logistical effort to support military operations in Afghanistan.

Consequently, what the local dictator got up to with his own people was considered a mere detail.

Murray disagreed.

Early on into his tenure as British Ambassador in Tashkent, he acquired evidence that the government of Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov was torturing people to death.

One at least one occasion a prisoner had been boiled alive.

He sent off an official telegram to his bosses in London and copied in many other British embassies.

The reaction was that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was concerned that Murray was “overfocussed on human rights to the detriment of British interests”.

Britannia waives the rules…

What I found fascinating in the book was that Murray believed he was on the side of the good guys.

When he realised that he was actually Cruel Britannia’s man in Tashkent, he was crushed.

“I flew back to Tashkent deeply depressed and worried. This had a profound impact on me. I had served my country for 20 years, proudly, in the belief that being British entailed certain fundamental decencies of behaviour. Rejecting torture was one.; I now found that I was mistaken, and either the British government had never stood for, or had ceased to stand for, those basic values. I was profoundly disillusioned. The whole purpose of my working life seemed to have evaporated.”

The year that Murray took up his post in Uzbekistan, my friend and comrade John McGuffin was laid out in a black t-shirt with square red lettering, “Unrepentant Fenian Bastard”.

As I read Murray’s words, I could hear the searing words of the man that Britain had tortured in 1971.

Interned without trial McGuffin, would later become the “Brigadier” in An Phoblacht.

A decade after his time in Tashkent, I met the former Ambassador.

In 2012 Craig Murray was the speaker at a fringe event of the NUJ conference in Newcastle.

I was one of the organisers, and afterwards, we had dinner together.

He didn’t betray any state secrets, but he didn’t demur when your humble correspondent opined that Britain was no longer a major power in any sense of the word.

We also both agreed that the Prime Minister he served, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, should be on trial in the Hague for war crimes.

His talk at the NUJ conference was a decade after he had become Britain’s Ambassador at the age of 43.

As I read this fascinating account of his time in central Asia, I thought of the journey that he had been on from loyal functionary of an ex-imperial power to dissident whistle-blower.

After a failed smear campaign against him by his employers, Murray and the British state parted company.

By that time, his mental and physical health collapsed, and he ended up in St Thomas’ Hospital on suicide watch.

His marriage also fell apart, and he isn’t shy in admitting that he was entirely to blame for that.

World events quickly vindicated Murray when the scandal of Abu Ghraib Prison broke in November 2003 while he was still British Ambassador in Tashkent.

The world was shocked, and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw condemned the appalling images.

He also wrote to his ambassadors around the world and said that if they encountered any evidence of torture in then, they were to report it!

Alexa show me “Perfidious Albion”…

A year after Murray left Uzbekistan, the Karimov government massacred hundreds of peaceful demonstrators at Andijan in 2005.

The US imposed sanctions, and the dictator deftly pivoted towards Moscow and Uncle Sam lost access to the strategic Karshi-Khanabad military base.

Karimov had been a loyal functionary in the USSR before being a US client in the post 911 paradigm.

Therefore, it was easy to turn back to Mother Russia when the dollars dried up.

Murray is proud of his Scottishness, and he attended official diplomatic functions in his kilt.

The Scots were eager imperialists, and after their own failed attempts at creating colonies in central America, they provide the managerial class of the British Empire.

In that sense, Murray was treading a well-worn path down the Silk Road after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

However, he is now an ardent supporter of Scottish independence.

Therefore, he wants to break up the state that he loyally served for over two decades.

Well, I did say that he had been on a journey.

He finished his memoir with these words:

“As I hope this memoir has made clear, I am not a hero but a very fallible man. Yet I learnt of men, women and children being tortured, I had no doubt that the only overriding duty of any representative of the British people must be to stop it. Government must have some principles of conduct, and not torturing people is a fundamental one. For me, that came before my personal career.

“How have we come to this, that integrity in public life is now so rarer that some consider me a hero just for exhibiting the most basic human decency?”

 

Highly recommended.

 

Murder in Samarkand is available from the usual outlets.

£12.99 Paperback.

£4.99 Kindle version.