At least, that’s all I got out of this puff piece on the horribly-named American edition of Murder in Samarkand (it’s now: Dirty Diplomacy: The Rough-and-Tumble Adventures of a Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against Terror. Murray was rough-and-tumble?).
Say what you will, though (and I will about his rather floridly-written book once I finish it), the man has balls. Ambling into a North Korean dance club, offering an Uzbek stripper a $20 bill and his business card and the chance to become his mistress, then complaining about marginalized Karimov’s citizens takes big brass ones. That he did so while just walking away from his wife and children is even more ballsy.
That being said, Murray is absolutely right that the sordid details of his personal life bear little on his complaints about Karimov’s vicious regime. He was right to speak out, and should be lauded for that, especially knowing he was tossing away his career in the process. But the FCO was right to recall him for it, too—sadly, the man was not a credible voice, even though what he was saying needed to be said.
Still, it’s tough not to wonder at the whole affair. It is certainly deserving of its own book, and Murray absolutely deserves our support in his fight against Internet censorship. So I guess there’s that.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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I really wish that Craig Murray was a credible voice. He’s syaing things that need to be said, and they lose out to the bellydancing. Kind of the way Turkmenbashi’s sheer wackiness kept the media from focusing on human rights.