Murder in Samarkand - Hardcover

Craig Murray

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424 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1845961943 ISBN 13: 9781845961947

Publisher: MAINSTREAM, 2006

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Craig Murray was the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to Uzbekistan until he was removed from his post in October 2004 after exposing appalling human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of President Islam Karimov. In this candid and at times shocking memoir, he lays bare the dark and dirty underside of the War on Terror.

In Uzbekistan, the land of Alexander the Great and Tamburlaine, lurks one of the most hideous tyrannies on earth – one founded on cotton slavery and brutal torture. As neighbouring 'liberated’ Afghanistan produces record levels of heroin, the Uzbek rulers cash in on massive trafficking. They are even involved in trafficking their own women to prostitution in the West. But this did not prevent Karimov being viewed as a key US ally in the War on Terror.

When Craig Murray arrived in Uzbekistan, he was a young Ambassador with a brilliant career and a taste for whisky and women. But after hearing accounts of dissident prisoners being boiled to death and innocent people being raped and murdered by agents of the state, he started to question both his role and that of his country in so-called 'democratising’ states.

When Murray decided to go public with his shocking findings, Washington and 10 Downing Street reached the conclusion that he had to go. But Uzbekistan had changed the high-living diplomat and there was no way he was going to go quietly.

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About the Author:

Craig Murray was born in 1958. He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1984 and served in Nigeria, Poland and Ghana, before being appointed Ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002. He retired from the Civil Service in 2005. He now lives in London, where he works as a writer and broadcaster.

CHAPTER 1

Awakening

Chris looked pretty amazed. 'OK, let's go,' didn't seem to be the standard reaction from a British ambassador to the news that a dissident trial was about to start. The Land-Rover drew up to the embassy door and out I went, still feeling pretty uncomfortable at people calling me 'Sir', opening doors and stopping their normal chatter as I passed. We turned up outside the court, where a small wicket entrance led thorugh an unprepossessing muddy wall into a dirty courtyard containg several squat white buildings. Like much Soviet construction, it looked unfinished and barely functional. To enter the courtyard, we had to give passport details to two policemen sitting at a table outside the gate. They took an age to write everything down with a chewed-up pencil in an old ledger. I was to find that the concealment of terrible viciousness behind a homely exterior was a recurring theme in Uzbekistan. About a hundred people were hanging about the courtyard waiting for different trials to begin. I was introduced to a variety of scruffy-looking individuals who represented a range of human rights organisations. Puzzlingly, the seven or eight I met seemed to belong to the same number of groups, and most of them would not talk to one another. One short but distinguished-looking man with a shock of white hair and big black specs was so full of self-importance that he wouldn't talk to anyone at all. Chris, busting around doing the introductions, pointed to him and said, 'Mikhail Ardzinov - he says that it is for you to call on him.' I was puzzled, as the question of who called on who involved taking about eight paces across the courtyard. Chris explained that Ardzinov was feeling very important, as his group was the only one that was registered and thus legal. The others were all illegal. Peculiarly, Ardzinov's registered group was called the 'Independent Human Rights Organisation of Uzbekistan'. None of this meant much to me at the time, and I certainly hadn't been an ambassador long enough to feel my pride compromised by taking eight paces, so I went over and shook the man's hand. I received a long, cool stare for my effort.

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