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This speech was given at Chatham House by Craig Murray, UK ambassador to
UZbekistan until his recent sacking for criticism of US and UK collusion
with torture and repression in the name of 'the war on terror'.  Remember
the 'ethical foreign policy'?...

Nick


November 9, 2004

THE TROUBLE WITH UZBEKISTAN: SPEECH BY CRAIG MURRAY

Source: www.riia.org
Uploaded/Updated: 11/09/2004 11:55:56


Speech by Craig Murray
British Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan, 2002-04
Chatham House, Monday 8 November 2004

This speech is issued on the understanding that if any extract is used, the
speaker and Chatham House should be credited, preferably with the date of
the speech.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is most kind of you to come here on
an early November evening to hear me talk about a part of the World that,
for reasons I will endeavour to explain, merits greater attention than we
are apt to give it.

Let me first apologise for the comparative informality of my dress. I had
not anticipated being in London just now, and my suits still hang in a
wardrobe in Tashkent, vainly awaiting my return. As I expect may become
clear as the evening progresses, part of my heart remains there too.

That may sound a touch romantic, but you would need a serious deficit in
the soul department not to be touched by the country. It is the land of the
Oxus and the Jaxartes, where Alexander the Great was entranced by and
married Roxanne and held court for the longest period of stationary rule
anywhere in his short life; where the Greek state of Bactria flourished for
many centuries after his passing, producing art of rare beauty.

It is the land of Tamburlaine, the wrack of whose mighty monuments still
stand and whose tomb is still there, to bring us face to face with the
reality of legend. It is the land of the sweet airs and delicious fruits of
the Ferghana valley, for which Babur ever pined as he rode off into exile
to conquer India and found the Mughal dynasty.

It was also, of course, the very centre of Islamic culture. I had not
realised that the scientific advances which I learnt at school were brought
by the Moors into Europe, had in fact originated in a great cultural
flourishing in Central Asia. The great medic, Avicenna, and the inventor of
Algebra and other mathematical advances, both hailed from Uzbekistan, not
to mention the astronomy of the Emperor Ulugbek, the elegant remains of
whose observatory are for me the most arresting of all the wonders of
Samarkand. This same golden period saw great advances in architecture,
which spread, throughout the Islamic world. Sadly centuries of earthquake
and the almost equally devastating heavy-handed restoration of the Soviet
period, disastrously still continued by UNESCO, have left little of the
original. But there is still much to thrill the soul.

Samarkand has long held a place in the British poetic imagination that is
difficult to explain. A more recent layer of romance was added by the Great
game, of which Bokhara, Khiva and Samarkand are perhaps most redolent to
British minds today. To imagine myself in the footsteps of Alexander
Burnes, to wander the outside the Ark of Bokhara speculating where lie the
decapitated corpses of Stoddart and Connolly, and how to honour them, these
were to me great private joys.

The British Embassy itself has its own romance. It was the Kerensky family
home, birthplace of Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, who led Russia from
February to October 1917, in that brief dawn of hope when Russia might have
entered mainstream European history and economic development. It was he who
proclaimed Russia a Republic in September 1917. I used to hold
conversations with Uzbek dissidents in my office and wonder what other
whispered words those bricks had heard. Somewhere inside the building
Kerensky's brother Nikolai was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1922.

The Uzbeks today are a hard-working people, greatly hospitable to
strangers. Sadly they are living in a period of decline; economic decline,
decline in standards of living and population decline. You will find that
this short lecture is devoid of statistics; partly this is because I never
remember them, and partly because there simply are no reliable statistics
on

Uzbekistan. Government sees statistics as largely an instrument of
propaganda.

Furthermore this remains a command economy driven by production targets.
These are virtually always met on paper, which is the important thing. The
situation in the real world is quite different.

I may quote from the current US State Department background note on
Uzbekistan, from which I will be quoting further during this talk, it
states, "The government claims that GDP rose 4.1% in 2003; however the US
Government does not think it was greater than 0.3%".

The Uzbek government figure is outrageous; the US government figure is not,
but still I believe an overestimate. Based on what we know of industrial
production, of the cotton crop and prices and with an estimate of other
crops, I would say in 2003 GDP fell by approximately 2 per cent.

Figures are made difficult by the fact that much state production,
specifically in the important minerals sector and including gold, is a
state secret. I would give my 2 per cent calculation a margin of error of
2.5%. So State Department could be right.

You can extend this dispute over true figures beyond GDP to almost any
other economic statistic inflation, incomes, money supply etc. Uzbekistan
is largely a state controlled and non-transparent economy where it is
easier to feel than to measure what is happening.

But the dispute over statistics is significant. At numerous meetings I have
taken issue with the IMF in particular over their willingness to accept
compromise statistics much too close to the Uzbek government's figures. I
think I am right in saying that that in 2003, for example, they accepted a
GDP growth figure of 2%. But if the IMF keeps, as they do, year on year
publishing a figure that is over-optimistic by three or four per cent,
after a very few years the cumulative effect is a figure on GDP per capita
for Uzbekistan which are profoundly wrong.

Similarly, a World Bank report on comparative living standards in
Uzbekistan between regions and over time was of very limited value because
it was based entirely on extensive analysis of Uzbek government provided
figures. International institutions have a great deal of difficulty in
dealing with a member state that practices a policy of deliberate
dishonesty.

The combination of state control and lack of transparency makes possible
corruption on a grand scale. I have called the Uzbek government a
kleptocracy, and I believe that is the correct term. A look at the massive
state mining operation is instructive. Uzbekistan is perhaps instructive.
Uzbekistan is the World's seventh largest producer of gold. Gold, uranium
and other minerals are produced by the Navoi based state kombinat. The
sales of the products of this company have no bearing on its revenues. It
receives a budgetary allocation from central government. The gold and
uranium produced are sold on the international market; the quantity of
output and the revenue from sales are both secret. The revenue goes not to
the company but to the Ministry of Finance, into the secret bit of the
state budget. I am informed by sources in a position to know, and whom I
trust, that ten per cent of the sales revenue is diverted into bank
accounts under the personal control of President Karimov. This is the
principal source of his own fortune.

The bulk of the nomenklatura are kept happy with wealth from what
Uzbekistan calls its "White Gold", cotton. This is grown by state
collective farms and sold to state trading companies through which it comes
to the international market. While there is corruption at the trading level
in particular, here money is spread to the party cadres through a more
institutionalised system of transfer pricing. The collective farm obtains
very little indeed, and the managers largely take what it does receive. The
state trading companies, for example, were last year paying for cotton at
4% - yes 4% - of the farm gate price in neighbouring Kazakhstan, where
production has been privatised.

This of course opens the way for great rewards to the state trading
companies, whose headquarters are pictures of opulence compared to the
squalor of the farms, and whose staff amongst the most pampered of the
elite. This transfer pricing also provides the bulk of revenue to state
budgets. This pays for the sheets of blue plate glass that now cloak the
exterior of crumbling Soviet offices throughout Tashkent.

Sixty per cant of the population of Uzbekistan is based on the State farms.
I visited a farm in Kitab, last year, which had 12,000 hectares and 16,000
employees. They were paid 2,000 sum that's two dollars a month each in
salary. They also had a small vegetable patch per family, which they lived
on.

I visited that farm because I received an appeal for help from a small
farmer. In 1995, when there was a brief start to liberalisation, three
brothers had leased eleven hectares from the collective farm. The
collective now wanted it back. In consequence one brother had been
murdered, another was in jail on a charge of selling his apples privately
and not to the collective. The third had come to Tashkent to find me. I
went down there and found that the collective had chopped down all the
brothers' apple trees and that their 82 year old mother, who tried to
defend the farm, had been knocked to the ground and beaten with sticks. She
showed me her terrible bruises.

Let me now say something about private farming. Uzbek government propaganda
claims there is a vibrant private farming sector. This is not so. There are
no property rights in Uzbekistan. Farmers have been able to lease plots,
typically eleven hectares, from the state farms on long leases. But they
are told what they must grow, on which bits of their land, down to the last
half metre. They are told how much of it they must produce, to whom they
must sell it and what price they will get for it. They then face a struggle
actually to get paid. I visited a collective of small farmers near
Samarkand, with whom DFID had previously done work on marketing, which in
the event they were not allowed to put into effect. They had been
instructed to grow largely wheat in 2003. They had fulfilled and delivered
their quota, but been told they would be paid not in money but in
fertiliser.

Furthermore they had to collect the fertiliser from a plant in the Ferghana
valley, something they could not possibly afford to do. When I last saw
them, the prospects looked bleak for the continuation of this private
venture.

British American Tobacco is the largest foreign investor in Uzbekistan.
They deserve congratulation on their efforts to improve the lot of the
farmers who supplied them and to encourage real private enterprise. But
they face continual difficulties. They were allowed to pay only 40 per cent
of the price of the tobacco to the farmers; sixty per cent had to go to the
local authority and the collective farm in theory in return for services to
the farmer, in fact largely for peculation. They were trying hard to
increase the farmers' share to 50%.

Following the measures to restrict economic activity still further last
year, they were not allowed to pay the farmers in cash, only be bank
transfer. This caused great difficulty for the farmers; with physical
access to banks a real obstacle. But even worse, as indeed faced by all
Uzbek bank customers on a regular basis, they found they could not get
their money from the bank.

Banking in Uzbekistan is a state monopoly. The banking system is used to
control the money supply by simply refusing, on a regular basis, to allow
people to draw out any cash.

This hits foreign companies. Cash shortages have several times this year
caused a reverse black market you have to pay a premium in dollars to get
sum.

Officially this is to control inflation, but in fact it is part of a series
of draconian measures to exert full control over the economy by the ruling
elite, operating sometimes through the state, sometimes as state-enforced
commercial monopolists.

This started with the closure of bazaars in November 2002, and their
subsequent re-opening on a much smaller scale. The informal trading
structures, which were endemic to Uzbekistan for centuries, were wiped out
with remarkable thoroughness, and tens of thousands thrown out of
employment from the trading sector. At the same time the land borders were
effectively sealed to trade. This physical blocking of trade remains in
force, with in the Ferghana Valley several bridges destroyed to prevent
cross-border movement.

In addition to this extraordinary physical isolationism, tariffs were
increased and non-tariff barriers introduced in terms of certification and
safety procedures and Uzbek language labelling, inter alia. Next there were
measures making most cash transactions illegal necessitating commerce to
operate through a State banking structure which itself became deliberately
obstructive.

The result of this is economic disaster. What private sector activity there
was has withered, living standards are in steep decline. Against the
background of these restrictions on economic activity, the introduction of
sum convertibility became meaningless. There is much anecdotal evidence of
living standards in terms, for example, of ownership of household goods.

In this climate it is not perhaps strange that foreign direct investment in
Uzbekistan is virtually insignificant. There has been a small amount of
recent activity in the gold sector, but it has been announced no further
foreign investment will be sought there. There has been some promise of
Russian investment in the energy sector.

But the climate for foreign investors is dreadful. In effect there is no
respect by the government of Uzbekistan of private property rights or the
sanctity of contract. The civil, just as the criminal, courts entirely lack
independence and follow government instruction. I know of one British
company which one morning found that its 60 per cent share in a joint
enterprise with an Uzbek state entity, had been reduced to 30 per cent by a
court case they had not been told was happening. Jahn International, a
Danish investor, had approximately

$1 million simply removed from its bank account as "excess profits".
Another British businessman this year had his assets awarded to an Uzbek
former partner, with the Uzbek court refusing to acknowledge British
legalised documents showing the partner had sold out and been fully paid
up.

The anti-trade measures, the lack of redress, and the petty and continual
interference of corrupt officials thriving on massive over-regulation, make
Uzbekistan a very poor investment prospect.

So the population of Uzbekistan are poor, and getting poorer. There is, as
you might imagine, widespread disillusionment with the government. But just
as economically the reinforced Soviet system crushes the hopes of the
aspiring, so the political system crushes all who oppose.

There is no democracy in Uzbekistan. President Karimov's term in office has
been repeatedly extended by rigged elections and referenda. This December
will see parliamentary elections, but all five so-called political parties
are Karimov supporting. The genuine democratic opposition, Erk, Birlik, the
Free Farmers etc none of these were allowed to contest.

But on an everyday basis, there is also no way to protest. There is no
freedom of the media, no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, no
freedom of assembly. A regime so harsh to the many, so luxurious for the
few, rules only by the harshest of repression. There are not only exit
visas, but still the propusk system of internal movement control. Almost
all of those born on state farms are condemned to be, in effect, serf
labour for life.

Bill Rammell at the FCO instituted a freedom of expression panel. The FCO
and NGO's together meet quarterly to choose ten imprisoned writers
worldwide whose cause the FCO will take up. The first two meetings alone
chose three Uzbeks. Not a word of dissent appears in the Uzbek media indeed
not one word of my speeches ever did. Strangely the US Ambassador's
comments were often carried at some length.

In Uzbek schools and Universities, pages are still torn from textbooks
before they are issued. The Open Society Institute funded a library at the
University of Tashkent, from which all the books on Central Asia were
mysteriously "stolen" in the night. The OSI itself was, of course, kicked
out of Tashkent earlier this year, while strict restrictions were placed on
remaining international NGOs.

I am not going today to produce an exhaustive list of human rights
offences. I do not think the appalling human rights record of the Uzbek
government is in dispute. There remain many thousands of political and
religious prisoners, and torture and brutality remain the instruments by
which the regime maintains its fierce grip. I came personally, very close
to incidents and victims. When I had dinner with Professor Mirsaidov and
other leading dissidents in Samarkand at the end of March 2002, some four
hours after I left the house his grandson's body was dumped on the
doorstep.

The lad was eighteen. His knees and elbows had been smashed by blows with a
hammer, or perhaps a spade or rifle butt. One hand had been immersed in
boiling liquid until the flesh was peeling away from the bone. He had been
killed with a blow that caved in the back of his skull.

The professor was sure that he had been killed as a warning to the
dissidents for meeting me. I was unsure until a fellow Ambassador with
excellent contacts with the Uzbek intelligence services told me it had
indeed been a political warning, and had been ordered by the regional
hokkim. That gentleman is now Prime Minister of Uzbekistan.

It was in my first few days in Uzbekistan that I was confronted with the
pictures of Avazov, with Azimov boiled to death in Jaslyk prison. The
University of Glasgow pathology department studied the detailed photos and
concluded that this was immersion in, not spattering with, boiling liquid.
There was a clear tidemark. The fingernails had also been pulled.

So how should the West react to this regime? There is no doubt that
Uzbekistan occupies a vital geo-strategic position. Immediately north of
Afghanistan, it borders every Central Asian state. It has almost half the
population of Central Asia and the Region's largest and most effective
military forces. It is less than two hours by military jet to Russia, Iran
and China, among others.

Uzbekistan is a member of "The coalition of the willing". It provides the
United States with an airbase, garrisoned by thousands of US troops and
airmen, which is useful, if no longer central, to operations in
Afghanistan. But it is absolutely essential as the easternmost of the ring
of so-called lily pads, US airbases surrounding the "Wider Middle East". It
is also a projection of US military force into the centre of a region which
will become increasing essential in the next fifty years in satisfying
Western demand for oil and gas. In the eyes of a Pentagon hawk, there is
every reason to cosy up to Karimov.

There should be no doubt just how cosy this relationship is. Let me quote
more from the current State Department briefing paper:

"US/Uzbek relations have flourished in recent years and were given an
additional boost by the March 2002 meeting between President Bush and
President Karimov in Washington, DC....High-level visits to Uzbekistan have
increased since September 11 2001 `including that of the US Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of State Colin Powell and numerous
congressional delegations...."

"The US has consulted closely with Uzbekistan on regional security issues,
and Uzbekistan has been a close ally of the United States at the United
Nations...on foreign policy and security issues ranging from Iraq to Cuba,
from nuclear proliferation to drugs trafficking...Uzbekistan is a strong
supporter of US military reactions in Afghanistan and Iraq and of the
global war on terror..."

"The United States, in turn, values Uzbekistan as a stable, moderate force
in a turbulent region".

To be fair, the document goes on to list areas where improvement in human
rights is needed, but that has not prevented the US from lubricating the
relationship with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, including
military and political aid, and all the political support they can give
Karimov by joint photo calls and glad-handing. Nowhere will you find a
public mention of human rights by that stream of high level US visitors to
Uzbekistan, and I don't believe they were that firm in private either.

We have I think to look behind the language. How can it advance the war on
terror to back a totalitarian dictator who terrorises and impoverishes his
own people? If Karimov is part of the "Coalition of the willing", is on
"our" side in the war on terror, then that war cannot be the
straightforward clash between good and evil which the politicians are
selling.

It is, in fact, about something else. It is about the advancement of
American military power in areas central to the control of oil and gas, US
oil and gas interests are served by backing an unpleasant dictator in
Tashkent, willing to give them a dominant position in Central Asia, just as
they are served by toppling one in Baghdad. This is nothing to do with the
advancement of democracy. If it were, why has the US government put so much
effort into shielding the Uzbek government from criticism in international
for a such as the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva?

We also need to be sceptical about some of the language on threat. One area
of co-operation mentioned was narcotic trafficking. There has been a
massive increase in opium and heroin smuggling from Afghanistan in the past
three years. A large amount of that drug follows the natural trade route
through Uzbekistan and up the river valleys to Russia and eventually the
Baltic. (Incidentally, I have been much plagued by Customs and Excise
analysts who argue that, because much more is seized in Tajikistan, much
more must be going that way. If you think about it, that's a reason for a
drug smuggler to avoid Tajikistan).

There is a tremendous taboo surrounding international efforts to counter
drug trafficking in Central Asia. No progress is possible until the real
problem is acknowledged, so I will break the taboo. The real problem is
participation, at very senior levels indeed, of regime members in the
trade. It is not just a question of minor corruption by customs officers.

At Termez on the Uzbek/Afghan border the EU, the UK and the US have all put
money into customs training and state of the art search areas and
equipment, including gizmos that can x-ray whole containers. But while the
border is hard to cross, and UN emergency relief supplies are routinely
held up for days or weeks, fleets of cars with black windows and of trucks
are waved through, shuttling between the Uzbek regime and General Dostum.

Customs never stop the vehicles that have the heroin. We should face the
fact.

So what of Karimov's claim to be holding out against terrorism? There has
been little or no historical tradition of militant Islam in Uzbekistan. The
extremism of teaching by the new mosques and schools introduced in the
early 1990s from Saudi Arabia is, from my talks with people directly
involved, much exaggerated. No doubt there was a threat from the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan as a would-be insurgency in the margins of the Tajik
civil war and thereafter supporting the Taliban. But they had no history of
terrorist style operations. Certainly in Tashkent it is accepted by
virtually everyone that the 1999 bombings were the work of the regime or of
warring factions within it. Following the decimation and dispersal of the
IMU in Uzbekistan, the remnants appear to have re-organised in a more
classical terrorist structure.

However it appears that the March bombings in Tashkent were not
co-ordinated or even expected by the surviving IMU leadership. They seem to
have been the work of predominantly young Uzbeks with a desperate hatred of
the regime. There is however compelling evidence that the groups which
carried out these terrible acts had been heavily penetrated by the Uzbek
security services, to the extent that it is hard to believe they could not
have been pre-empted and their may be reason to suspect an
agent-provocateur operation. The July bombings at the Israeli and US
Embassies perhaps are more classical terrorist attacks with input from an
external leadership. In particular, because there is no news on the subject
on the Uzbek state media, awareness of the Palestine issue in Uzbekistan
even among activists is almost non-existent.

But the key point must be that the despair caused by the deepening poverty
and lack of religious and political freedoms, worsened by the lack of any
democratic means to express that despair, is what creates the violence.

If the US believes that backing Karimov is producing stability in the
region, which is a remarkably short-term view. Uzbeks know they are
miserable and getting poorer, and their government is deeply repressive
and, increasingly, hated. They are being offered no liberal, democratic
alternative. Indeed Karimov's propaganda tells them that the system they
have now is freedom and democracy, and they don't think much of it.

The only opposition to Karimov they often encounter is the underground
Mosque movement or Hizb-ut-Tehrir. And terrible torture and persecution
increasingly radicalise these groups. The system is building up towards
inevitable violent confrontation. That could be five or seven years away,
but I have no doubt that as things stand at present we are heading for a
catastrophic model of regime change. And thanks to US support for Karimov,
the result is likely to be anti-Western. The targeting of the US and
Israeli Embassies in Uzbekistan shows that we are creating a whole new race
of people who hate the West.

Young Uzbeks are attracted to radical Islam because we are giving them no
viable alternative to Karimov. Supporting Karimov is creating, not
combating, Islamic fundamentalism. I strongly commend to you this Human
Rights Watch publication, Creating Enemies of the State, which documents
the brutalising of a society?

What can we do? Stop digging. The policy of engagement is plainly not
producing results and we should treat the Karimov regimes as pariahs. There
is measurably less freedom, and measurably more brutality, under Karimov
than under Lukashenko or Mugabe, and we should be looking to sanctions on
members of the regime and their ill-gotten assets.

Rather than military aid to Karimov, we should put major resources into
assisting the democratic forces in Uzbekistan, notably the parties that
have combined to form the Democratic Forum. We should at least fund a
newspaper for the expression of a wide range of Uzbek views. We could also
put substantive resources into much greater transmission into Uzbekistan by
broadcast media.

Finally, we should break off our relationships with the Uzbek intelligence
services. I have no doubt that we are receiving information that has been
obtained under torture. Where you are receiving such information
systematically, under an established procedure, I also believe that you are
acting illegally. This is complicity under Article IV of the UN Convention
against torture.

It has been argued that it would be irresponsible to ignore useful
intelligence in the War Against Terror. I have two responses firstly I deny
this material is useful. It is provided by the Uzbek regime with the object
of exaggerating their role in the War on Terror, the strength of the IMU
and the linkage of the threat against them to Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden.

I was genuinely surprised when I first learnt that this information was
taken seriously and regarded as valuable by the British intelligence
services. I still find that strange, and fear that it shows a preference
for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat a tendency which
the Butler report shows was much in evidence in our acceptance of a lot of
nonsense on Weapons of Mass Destruction.

But what worries me most what absolutely terrifies me is the thought that
such poor intelligence material, endorsed by someone in the last gasps of
agony, given credence by some gung-ho Whitehall Warrior can be used to keep
some poor soul locked up in Belmarsh Prison. Without trial or charge,
without any idea what he is accused of, day on day, week upon week, year by
weary year.

And what I was seeing was only about Uzbekistan. There is great
international concern at the use of torture worldwide in the War on Terror,
not just in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay but including the transport of
detainees worldwide by the US authorities, delivered to governments which
torture, in plain contravention of Article V of the UN Convention.

Many of my colleagues in other countries must also be seeing intelligence
obtained under torture.

The US State Department briefing says that torture is used as "A routine
investigative technique" by the Uzbek security services. Theo van Boven, UN
Special Rapporteur on Torture, found it to be "Widespread and systemic".
Nobody in the British government has attempted to argue to me that the
information we receive from the Uzbek sources was not obtained under
torture. Rather they argue that we did not encourage or instigate the
torture, so are not complicit.

That might be a valid argument and I repeat might if we stumbled on the
material in the street, or got handed some as a one off. But it is not
sustainable where we regularly receive such material through an established
system. That must make us complicit.

The difficulty is, that to refuse the Uzbek and other torture material
would be to create an exception to the UK/US intelligence sharing
agreement, which we are anxious to keep whole.

During all of this, I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure it is not
a nightmare. Is the British government really insisting on its right to
receive material obtained under torture? Similarly, in the Katherine Gunn
case, were we really going along with US plans to bug Security Council
members inside the United Nations?

I associate support for human rights, and opposition to torture, with
fundamental British values. Surely we have to stand up to the US and say
that under George Bush the CIA is involved in things we cannot go along
with.

Just as we cannot go along with US policy in Central Asia. This is a
throwback to the US policy of support for dictators in Central America in
the 1970s. The situation is redolent with ironies. In supporting Karimov,
George Bush is helping prop up the remnants of Soviet totalitarianism.

I have talked of how Uzbek state farm labourers are bonded to their farms
effectively as serfs. I should add that for months at harvest time workers
in all sectors are conscripted into the cotton fields. Schools and
educational institutions are closed down. Children from eight years old are
dragooned into the fields, working 16 hour days, sometimes sleeping in the
open, working sometimes in freezing conditions. Is it not an irony that a
US administration of the party of Abraham Lincoln is supporting a regime
founded on cotton slavery?

Every crunch of bone at the smash of a limb, every female scream of terror,
every second of dreadful, of unimaginable anguish in the torture chambers
of the US-backed Karimov regime, just as every block in Sharon's wall, just
as every bomb that falls tonight on a home in Fallujah, will fuel the fires
of hatred across the Islamic world. And while no act of random terrorist
violence is ever justified, is in truth evil, we must nonetheless say that
myopic US foreign policy under President Bush reinforces hatred across the
Muslim World.

That was certainly my daily perception in Tashkent, and my aim there was to
distance the UK and articulate a distinctive British policy based on
support for human rights and the rule of international law.

It was worth a try.