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07/14/2004:

"The Envoy Who Said Too Much"

The Guardian UK
Six hours after Jamal Mirsaidov met with the British ambassador, the limp and mutilated corpse of his grandson was dumped on his doorstep. The body was battered and one arm appeared to have been immersed in boiling fluid until the skin had begun to peel off. Mirsaidov is a literature professor in the ancient city of Samarkand. His mistake had been to write a letter to Tony Blair and George Bush alerting them to the daily torture meted out to dissidents in Uzbekistan, their new ally in the war on terror.

Mirsaidov and the ambassador, Craig Murray, doubt the letter was ever delivered but Murray ensured his message was. And though the local prosecutor concluded that the 18-year-old had died of a drug overdose, Murray is convinced he paid the ultimate price for his grandfather's dissent. "The professor has no doubt at all that his grandson was murdered in response to my visit. I wrestle with my conscience greatly over whether I caused that boy's horrible death."

Murray has paid a more direct price for his decision to step out of the bubble of isolation and immunity in which most diplomats live and challenge such abuses. His distinctly undiplomatic assessment of Uzbekistan's human rights record propelled him into a lengthy battle with the Foreign Office. He was subjected to a humiliating disciplinary investigation, had his personal life publicly shredded and suffered a string of health problems. He became the rogue ambassador. Not so much Our Man in Tashkent as Our Uzbekistan Problem.

...Murray was determined not to let the regime's abuses be drowned out by the country's newfound strategic importance. Uzbekistan had allowed the Pentagon to hire a vital military base in the southern town of Kharshi to aid the hunt for Osama bin Laden in neighbouring Afghanistan. In return, Tashkent got about half a billion dollars in aid a year. Some of the aid itself highlighted American double standards. In 2002, $79 million went to the Uzbekistani security forces and law enforcement (in 2002, the US aid budget to Uzbekistan was $220 million in total) - the same people whom the State Department accused of "using torture as a routine investigation technique".Full Article

Pentagon Papers Whistleblower [Ellsberg] Calls for National Security Leaks-commondreams.org