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James Langford
TORTURE - The Use of Torture in Uzbekistan
29th November 2007
Craig Murray, Britain’s former Ambassador to Uzbekistan was at The Malvern Theatres recently to talk about his experiences and one our students, James Langford, was there to report for The Review.
The theatre was packed. Looking around, I sensed I was the youngest there. We had come to hear Craig Murray, the UK’s former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and to hear him explain why he had to quit his job after discovering how torture was used in the country.
Former Ambassador Murray began by giving us a little background about his career. He’d worked for the Foreign Office for most of his life and had held a variety of senior diplomatic posts. He was a former Deputy High Commissioner in West Africa before, in 2002, being posted as British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.
He accepted the posting, recognising that Uzbekistan was of strategic importance to the UK and its allies in the fight against terrorism as it bordered Afghanistan. The Americans had an agreement with the local government that they could use an airfield in Uzbekistan to stop and re-fuel. The Ambassador was told that the Uzbekistan government were allies of the West in the war on terror. Of course, at the time of his posting, Mr Murray anticipated he was heading to a nice stable country.
However Uzbekistan is controlled by the Karimov regime, a dictatorship. Its citizens have very little freedom. Mr Murray told us how his staff were afraid and were initially reluctant to talk with him about things that were going on in the country, and he was continually reminded that Uzbekistan was an ally to the West.
Mr Murray began to realise the West weren’t much interested in the affairs of Uzbekistan so long as America continued to have privileged access to their air base. Increasingly he became uneasy about what he was seeing in the country - and things were to get worse for him.
In late 2002 he was sent some disturbing photographic evidence of a dead body. He contacted a friend of his in the UK who was a pathologist to review the material he had been sent. The evidence suggested that this man had been slowly lowered into boiling hot water before dying.
This was clear evidence of torture in Uzbekistan. The Ambassador immediately contacted the Foreign Office by “telegram” to notify them. Initially it elicited no response from the Foreign Office so he persisted to contact different officials and began to dig deeper into the workings of the country.
People began to come to the Ambassador with their stories, people who had been tortured. The Ambassador heard of numerous cases of victims’ arms or legs being dipped into boiling hot water.
But what was the point of this torture?
Mr Murray discovered those who were being tortured were being asked to confess to being members of Al-Qaeda or to identify lists of names of people who they knew to be members of that group. Frequently these lists were of names they’d never heard previously – and, of course, those who were being tortured would sign anyway, whether they knew the names or not.
Eventually the Ambassador received information from the Foreign Office warning him not to get involved. Nevertheless Mr Murray continued to discover things and report them to the Foreign Office.
In 2004 he was re-called to the Foreign Office in London for a meeting with some of the most senior officials. He believes firmly that Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary at the time, was well aware of the meeting and what it was that his Ambassador was protesting about.
What Mr Murray shared with his Malvern audience is shocking in the extreme. Foreign Office officials explained to him that the information being received from Uzbekistan was “useful”. Mr Murray did not immediately understand this but soon realised that this was where the West was obtaining its lists of terror suspects.
He protested that this information was unreliable, but continued to be told that it was “useful”.
He was also advised that, unless he resigned within twenty-four hours, he would be sacked because of “illegitimate relationships with members of his staff in Uzbekistan.” The officials, allegedly, even had a number of signed confessions supporting those allegations.
Mr Murray then went to see his doctor in London knowing that he was close to having a mental breakdown. He told the doctor the whole story. By a stroke of luck this doctor knew some of the best human rights lawyers in this country. He immediately contacted them to ask them to represent Mr Murray and – surprise, surprise - the allegations disappeared immediately.
We then heard that the Ambassador returned to Uzbekistan and continued his work. In late 2004 he was sacked.
Since then he has written a book about his time in Uzbekistan and the appalling things he discovered there, and has received numerous invitations to give talks about it.
What we heard that evening was both informative and shocking. To many in Mr Murray’s audience it was clear that the Foreign Office was acting improperly, some even suggested corruptly, especially as the chain of information about the illegal use of torture appeared to reach the Foreign Secretary.
More worryingly, however, it is the information obtained from this torture that is fuelling the war on terror. How can this war be real, if the information being used is so clearly false and unreliable?