How many people have been boiled alive again? What’s that, you don’t know? Now, in my opinion, one is too many, but to just toss it out there the way you do is to suggest it’s a defining characteristic of Uzbek prisons. According to your government’s human rights reports, there are two cases of this having happened. Horrible, but apparently not common. If we want to accomplish any good, we should at least know what we’re up against.

And, the US government has earmarked a grand total of $0 for the government of Uzbekistan this year. The Department of Defense gave a ~$20 million contribution of patrol boats which realistically are much better suited to drug interdiction than boiling or raping people.

To compare me to Chamberlain only highlights how facile your understanding of politics and history is. Are you suggesting Uzbekistan’s an expansionist state and that I want to allow them Osh and Khojent just to stretch their legs a little?

And it is masturbatory to say something is morally wrong and leave it at that. If Murray’s called for any specific form of sanctions, I’d love to hear it. Perhaps I’ve missed it.

I do think that it is morally wrong to torture people and I hope that those guilty of torture pay for it one day. I also think it’s morally juvenile to look at the world in black and white – failing to consider the consequences of absolutist stances. What I advocate is not the strawman you’ve planted, but that we at the very least continue and hopefully increase our funding of exchange and training programs and civil society NGOs working in Uzbekistan to prepare the ground for a new government. I also advocate offering aid – large chunks of it – directly to the government and keeping it on the table for a long time. However, aid would only be released if certain benchmarks were met.

Nathan’s argument seems to be that the West should keep giving money and guns to the Uzbek government, whose security services boil people alive and rape children in front of their parents, in the hope that we can thereby persuade them, in the long term, to boil fewer people and rape fewer children.

Back in the 1930s the British government seriously believed that rearming Hitler and allowing him to occupy large areas of Eastern Europe would somehow deter him from trying to take over the rest of the continent.

Nathan believes that it is “masturbatory” for Craig Murray to say that boiling people alive is morally wrong, and to call for sanctions against the Uzbek government. What really seems to have got his goat is that Murray had the audacity to criticise US government policy.

You seem to be suggesting that HRW’s view is overly negative due to ideological factors.

Is it not possible that the State Department’s official view is distorted by the fact that the US has a number of strategic interests in Uzbekistan?

Because, come on, how do you react when people moralize and preach to you about things? Even if they are right, and even if you know they are, I think most of us get pissed off by preaching. And damn does that preacher feel good afterwards. As much as we may not want to have to deal with it, the GOU is made up of people who have the same kinds of reactions as people anywhere. If we treat them like adults, they’ll cope with criticism.

As for the declining numbers of arrests, that doesn’t really say anything to me. Maybe there are fewer and fewer people left to arrest? People have learned how not to get arrested? Running out of space in the prisons? Who knows?

If the CSCE site wasn’t down, I’d find the part of the testimony that talks about how the GOU wanted to round up a lot of people on very shaky grounds after the 04 bombings like they did in 99. There are always people to arrest in Uzbekistan and there’s always more room. Surely you were stopped by the police fairly often, right? While it never happened to me, many of my friends got the third degree about drug smuggling from Tashkent cops (in the provinces, it was usually amused curiosity). Imagine you’re an HCN. They don’t accuse you, they shake you down. There’s no way to avoid getting arrested, the police have all the power. I know you led a different lifestyle than me in Uzbekistan, but surely you know these things, right? 300 arrests was a muted reaction and many were subsequently let go.

I know there are more meaningful types of progress, but progress is progress as frustrating as it may be when it comes in drips.

I’d love to see a large aid package offered that results in the release of funds as certain benchmarks are reached.

Decertification/”cutting off government-to-government aid” is a separate issue that we weren’t discussing here. We were discussing public criticism and the tone of that criticism.

As for the declining numbers of arrests, that doesn’t really say anything to me. Maybe there are fewer and fewer people left to arrest? People have learned how not to get arrested? Running out of space in the prisons? Who knows?

More meaningful to me would be sustained declines in the total number of political prisoners being held, along with a reduction in the number of offenses for which one can be arrested, e.g. a guy could have been arrested for attending an unauthorized religious service in 2003 in Andijan, but now folks in Andijan are attending such gatherings openly and not getting arrested. That would be progress.

For a good discussion of the issue from some experts, see the testimony linked here and check out this year’s State Department human rights report. You have to take note of some past information, but there was a reduction in religious & political prisoners and there were fewer arrests after the 04 bombings than the 99 bombings (300 vs. 3,000). Things still are bad, but that’s progress and it’s progress achieved because of the State Department and our NGOs. It bothers me that it’s going at a glacier’s pace, but there is movement. I’m not arguing that it shouldn’t be faster. There have also been some economic improvements that I would argue are much more important to most Uzbeks.

OTOH, there are steps back in some areas, leading to what Martha Brill Olcott calls “uneven progress.” I talk about that a lot. It is a problem, but cutting off government-to-government aid probably isn’t the way to address it. The GOU doesn’t respond well to punishment, especially when Russia can substitute rewards that we might be offering with strings attached.

And, my alternative to Murray’s policy (which, honestly, I don’t see very well explained anywhere, so place some burden on him, will you?) is the status quo, though I would tweak a few things. I’d like to see Uzbekistan held to account more for the promises it has made.

As for HRW, they got Shelkovenko wrong. He did commit suicide in the opinion of the US-Canadian forensic team that Freedom House helped bring it. That by no means is to say that the GOU’s hands are clean – R. Sharipov notes that suicide is common in prison because of government treatment of prisoners – or that HRW is always wrong. They do jump to conclusions, and paired with their preachy rhetoric, that’s a problem.

When did you live there, by the way? I’ve noticed that post-9/11 people tend to see things getting worse across the board. I see that there were a fair number of improvements, many of them economic, from 2000-2002.

CONFIDENTIAL
FM TASHKENT
TO IMMEDIATE FCO
TELNO 63
OF 220939 JULY 04

INFO IMMEDIATE DFID, ISLAMIC POSTS, MOD, OSCE POSTS UKDEL EBRD LONDON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKMIS MEW YORK

SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE

SUMMARY

1. We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.

2. I gather a recent London interdepartmental meeting considered the question and decided to continue to receive the material. This is morally, legally and practically wrong. It exposes as hypocritical our post Abu Ghraib pronouncements and fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results.

3. We should cease all co-operation with the Uzbek Security Services they are beyond the pale. We indeed need to establish an SIS presence here, but not as in a friendly state.

DETAIL

4. In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of the practice.

5. I was summoned to the UK for a meeting on 8 March 2003. Michael Wood gave his legal opinion that it was not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture. He said the only legal limitation on its use was that it could not be used in legal proceedings, under Article 15 of the UN Convention on Torture.

6. On behalf of the intelligence services, Matthew Kydd said that they found some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror. Linda Duffield said that she had been asked to assure me that my qualms of conscience were respected and understood.

7. Sir Michael Jay’s circular of 26 May stated that there was a reporting obligation on us to report torture by allies (and I have been instructed to refer to Uzbekistan as such in the context of the war on terror). You, Sir, have made a number of striking, and I believe heartfelt, condemnations of torture in the last few weeks. I had in the light of this decided to return to this question and to highlight an apparent contradiction in our policy. I had intimated as much to the Head of Eastern Department.

8. I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that without informing me of the meeting, or since informing me of the result of the meeting, a meeting was convened in the FCO at the level of Heads of Department and above, precisely to consider the question of the receipt of Uzbek intelligence material obtained under torture. As the office knew, I was in London at the time and perfectly able to attend the meeting. I still have only gleaned that it happened.

9. I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true – the material is marked with a euphemism such as “From detainee debriefing.” The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured.

10. I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact

11. The torture record of the Uzbek security services could hardly be more widely known. Plainly there are, at the very least, reasonable grounds for believing the material is obtained under torture. There is helpful guidance at Article 3 of the UN Convention;

“The competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the state concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.”

While this article forbids extradition or deportation to Uzbekistan, it is the right test for the present
question also.

12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer:

“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.

14. I was taken aback when Matthew Kydd said this stuff was valuable. Sixteen months ago it was difficult to argue with SIS in the area of intelligence assessment. But post Butler we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but that they have a particular yen for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat. That is precisely what the Uzbeks give them. Furthermore MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment.

15. At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family’s links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.

16. I have been considering Michael Wood’s legal view, which he kindly gave in writing. I cannot understand why Michael concentrated only on Article 15 of the Convention. This certainly bans the use of material obtained under torture as evidence in proceedings, but it does not state that this is the sole exclusion of the use of such material.

17. The relevant article seems to me Article 4, which talks of complicity in torture. Knowingly to receive its results appears to be at least arguable as complicity. It does not appear that being in a different country to the actual torture would preclude complicity. I talked this over in a hypothetical sense with my old friend Prof Francois Hampson, I believe an acknowledged World authority on the Convention, who said that the complicity argument and the spirit of the Convention would be likely to be winning points. I should be grateful to hear Michael’s views on this.

18. It seems to me that there are degrees of complicity and guilt, but being at one or two removes does not make us blameless. There are other factors. Plainly it was a breach of Article 3 of the Convention for the coalition to deport detainees back here from Baghram, but it has been done. That seems plainly complicit.

19. This is a difficult and dangerous part of the World. Dire and increasing poverty and harsh repression are undoubtedly turning young people here towards radical Islam. The Uzbek government are thus creating this threat, and perceived US support for Karimov strengthens anti-Western feeling. SIS ought to establish a presence here, but not as partners of the Uzbek Security Services, whose sheer brutality puts them beyond the pale.

MURRAY

http://erkinyurt.org/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1169

I’ve repeatedly asked you for specific examples of progress in Uzbekistan. You haven’t provided any, and I didn’t see any in two years living in Uzbekistan. I’ve also repeatedly asked you to provide a proposal for how to deal with the GOU that would be more effective than Murray’s actions, and you’ve provided nothing specific here, either, beyond general “engagement” and rewarding the GOU for the improvements that you seem unable to cite.

I’m keenly interested in facts. Please provide some. I don’t see any in your last few posts. Just one of many examples:

“Ambassador Herbst is a superbly competent diplomat, Murray obviously was not. Herbst helped improve human rights in Uzbekistan and in Ukraine, that is the connection. The “Orange Revolution” would not have happened without him, I’m sure.”

I don’t see any facts there, just opinions. This is high school debate club stuff, guys. I asked you to support your positions and you didn’t.

You seem to have two modes here: making vague assertions without suppporting them, and throwing up your hands in frustration when your readers ask you to support them.

Disagreements, aside, I appreciate this forum and your collection of information and links, btw. Just wanted to add that.