The former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has an article in the Washington Post about his experiences there. It is well worth reading, and quite sad.
…an envelope landed on my desk; inside were photos of the corpse of a man who had been imprisoned in Uzbekistan’s gulags. I learned that his name was Muzafar Avazov. His face was bruised, his torso and limbs livid purple. We sent the photos to the University of Glasgow. Two weeks later, a pathology report arrived. It said that the man’s fingernails had been pulled out, that he had been beaten and that the line around his torso showed he had been immersed in hot liquid. He had been boiled alive.
The West has had an uneasy realtionship with Uzbekistan, largely in reaction to their harsh record on human rights. But it now appears that the West is seeking to reingage with President Islam Karimov.
“The West is not what it was a year ago. Why? Because the West understands it’s impossible to keep Uzbekistan in isolation for too long, and of course there are countries that have their own interests,” said one Western diplomat.
“It’s impossible for the US to act without Uzbekistan in its war against terror because of Uzbekistan’s strategic location,” the diplomat said. “It’s been a year since the EU imposed its sanctions, and there has been no result.” The trend towards re-engaging Uzbekistan was echoed by other foreign officials who spoke to Reuters but did not want their comments published.
Uzbekistan kicked U.S. troops out of their country last year after we protested their violent crackdown of an internal uprising in Andizhan. Our base there had been vital during our invasion of Afghanistan, but our interests in Uzkekistan extend beyond the War on Terror.
Uzbekistan, lying on top of vast but largely undeveloped gas reserves, is also the only Central Asian state to border all the other four “stans” of Central Asia — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
This is the world of realpolitiks. We want access to their gas reserves and we want intelligence on radical Islamists. So, we are willing to overlook the fact that the regime boils people alive.
I don’t want to suggest that we have an obligation not to have any relationship at all with Uzbekistan. It is not our responsibility to fix every oppressive government in the world, and we have some important interests that make it hard to cut off all connections to this former Soviet Socialist Republic. But I do think it important for the United States to make clear that we do not find boiling people alive acceptable and to use what little leverage we have to try to make an impression on the government in Tashkent. I understand that this has already cost us our military base there. Obviously, our influence is limited. I also understand that China is capitalizing on our estranged relations to sign natural gas deals with Uzbekistan.
As Murray makes clear in his article, we have received a lot of bad intelligence, derived from torture, from Uzbekistan.
One piece of CIA intelligence named a Muslim terrorism suspect with alleged links to al-Qaeda, except I happened to know that the person in question was a Jehovah’s Witness, not a Sunni Muslim extremist. Another gave a specific location for a terrorist training camp in the hills above Samarkand, a spot I knew was empty.
This is a big problem, not only because bad intelligence can lead us on wild goose chases, but because it creates a major image problem. There is some evidence that Uzkekistan is taking steps to improve their Human Rights record, and that should be applauded. I know it is not easy to change the practices of a foreign government, especially while seeking to do business with them. It must be frustrating to lose lucrative business to the Chinese because we have problems with how Uzbekistan treats its dissidents. But, in a global war on terrorism, however you want to define that, we cannot be successful if we are willing to turn a blind eye to the most horrific abuses in one country, while seeking to use similar abuses in another country to justify intervention and/or regime change.
