|
FEATURES Our son of a
bitch President Karimov is a ruthless
tyrant, says Daniel Hannan, but he supports the war on terror
and is backed by the West. He shouldn’t be A strange little row has been bubbling away over the
past two months concerning our ambassador to Tashkent. You may have
seen the odd headline about it in the inside pages of the
broadsheets but, unless you have a particular interest in diplomatic
affairs, I suspect your eye will quickly have skipped on to the next
story. Why, after all, should we be especially interested in
Uzbekistan? A tremendously important region for Britain during the
Great Game, of course, but hardly of vital strategic interest today.
Yet the curious recall of Craig Murray ought to interest us
for two reasons: first, it tells us a great deal about how the
Foreign Office operates; and second, it raises serious questions
about our conduct of the war on terror.
Before we come to
that, though, I ought to declare an interest. I have been associated
with Uzbekistan for several years through the European Parliament.
(Under the rules, each MEP is automatically put on a foreign
delegation. Goody-goody federalists get America or, if they prefer,
the Caribbean; I got Uzbekistan.) It is a mesmerising country.
Simply reciting the names of its cities — Khiva, Bukhara, Tashkent,
Samarkand — makes me feel as though I am reading Omar Khayyam. But
it is run by a gang of former communists who treat it more or less
as their private property.
Since the break-up of the USSR,
Uzbekistan has actually become poorer and less free. Opposition
parties have been proscribed, critical journalists silenced and some
7,000 dissidents incarcerated. Despite the overthrow of communism,
many Soviet-era regulations remain, including a ban on the private
ownership of land. Whereas Uzbeks used at least to be able to move
within the USSR, they are now effectively prevented from travelling
beyond their borders.
The regime has become especially
repressive since 11 September 2001. President Islam Karimov was
quick to support the war on terror, granting the US a base from
which to conduct operations in Afghanistan. In return, he has been
allowed a much freer hand against his opponents. Anyone who
criticises the regime is now labelled an Islamist, ensuring that
there will be little international protest if he is mistreated.
When Craig Murray arrived in Tashkent, he did not like what
he found. There are limits to what an ambassador may do, of course,
but, within the parameters of diplomatic protocol, he did his best
to push for liberalisation. Sensibly, he focused on economic reform,
calculating that if private property and free contract were
established, democracy would follow. Human-rights activists in
Uzbekistan were delighted, believing that their association with the
British embassy would bring them a measure of protection. The
apparat, conversely, was horrified.
Murray is one of the few
British ambassadors to whom I have warmed. Many of our diplomats
compare poorly with their EU counterparts, often giving the
impression that they are carrying out their contracts to the letter,
like the bolshiest kind of public-sector worker. But here was a man
who was passionately interested in his host country and in Britain’s
influence there. I was just beginning to revise my opinion of the
FCO when it recalled him.
Why it did so is still not clear.
In late August, Murray was ordered to London, presented with
accusations about his private life, and instructed to resign or face
disciplinary procedures. He rejected the allegations and flew back
to Tashkent, only to find himself barred from his office. He then
returned to Britain. The Uzbeks claimed that he had been sacked,
while the Foreign Office insisted that he was undergoing medical
treatment (it would not say what kind). At this stage, a minor
squall began to blow up: articles appeared in newspapers, questions
were asked in Parliament. Then, last week, Murray was mysteriously
reinstated.
While it is obviously impossible to know whether
there was any substance in the complaints against him, it is hard to
avoid the suspicion that Murray would have been fired but for the
fuss kicked up on his behalf by a handful of politicians and
journalists. Which raises the scary question: how many other able
diplomats have been quietly dropped simply because they did not fit
in with the FCO’s steady-as-she-goes, Europhile, anti-democratic
assumptions?
For it is beginning to look as though Murray’s
real crime was to criticise a regime which the Western allies want
on their side. Since the Afghan campaign, the US state department
has indulged Karimov in an old-fashioned, Cold War sort of way: ‘He
may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.’ In such a
climate, it is inconvenient to be told that Karimov is doing some of
the things that are now cited as reasons for having deposed Saddam.
Poor Murray is in the position of someone trying to publicise the
Katyn massacre in 1943: it does not fit the narrative, so no one
wants to hear.
Yet we should remember the whole purpose of
the war on terror. The idea, as I understood it, was that it was no
longer enough simply to round up the bombers one by one. Rather, we
had to drain the swamps in which they hatched by spreading freedom
through the Islamic world. Indeed, Tony Blair retrospectively
justifies the Iraq war almost wholly on the grounds that it toppled
a nasty tyrant.
Yet in Uzbekistan we are propping up
precisely such a regime. In an eerie repetition of what we did in
Iraq during the 1980s, we are supporting a brutal dictator simply
because he has had the wit to call himself an opponent of Islamism.
The worst of it is that by doing so we are helping to create
the very thing we fear: Islamic fundamentalism. Islam has never been
strong in Central Asia. Even before the Russians came, alcohol was
widely drunk, prayer observed fitfully. Now, after 70 years of state
atheism, the old faith has all but disappeared. A visitor sees
neither beards nor headscarves, and hears no calls to prayer.
Yet official persecution could give the fundamentalists
their first opening in the region. Ordinary Uzbeks, constantly told
that all opponents of the regime are Islamic radicals, are
understandably wondering whether there might not be something in
this ideology.
President Karimov’s contention that he is
besieged by Muslim extremists will eventually prove self-fulfilling.
The few secular dissidents in Uzbekistan are confined to the
Russian-speaking cities, and in any case seem more interested in
picking up awards from Western human-rights groups than in building
a popular opposition movement. The Islamists, by contrast, are
prepared to share the privations of the masses and to risk torture
and death.
They could easily be defeated, of course:
economic reforms, private property and free elections would see to
that. Instead, we are leaving them as the only genuine alternative
to a hated regime. We made the same mistake in Iran, and seem bent
on repeating it in Saudi Arabia. Will we never learn?
Daniel Hannan is Conservative MEP for South-east England.
Return
to top of page · Send comment on this article to the editor of the
Spectator.co.uk · Email this article to a friend
© 2003 The
Spectator.co.uk
| |