Craig Murray's Blog, page 200

One Turbulent Ambassador

It is really wonderful to be back home again after almost six weeks travelling. It is also a tremendous pleasure to be able to announce this:

ONE TURBULENT AMBASSADOR

A play by

Robin Soans

A World Premiere

Directed by

Jessica Swale

One Turbulent Ambassador follows the career of Craig Murray on

his appointment as Her Majesty’s Ambassador and Plenipotentiary

to the Republic of Uzbekistan in 2001.

Murray’s proximity to post 9/11 Iraq forces him into a political

minefield that neither he nor the Foreign Office could have

envisaged. When he walks into a bar in Tashkent late one

Monday night and sees a beautiful belly dancer arching her

limbs, his personal life threatens to become as turbulent as

the political landscape around him.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see the world premiere of Robin

Soans’s newest play, researched and developed in collaboration

with LAMDA students.

Please note that this production contains strong language and

scenes of an adult nature.

Lyric Hammersmith Ticket Office:

PLEASE NOTE BOOKING OPENS 1 MAY

0871 22 117 22* (Mon – Sat, 9.30am – 7.30pm, 5.30pm on

non-performance days) or book online at www.lyric.co.uk**

* Calls cost 10p per minute, plus network extras. **Agents, industry guests and LAMDA

Angels should continue to book through The LAMDA Linbury Studio Box Office.

Venue Lyric Hammersmith

Dates 7.30pm Mon 02 July

& Times 7.30pm Wed 04 July

2.00pm Thu 05 July

7.30pm Fri 06 July

2.00pm Sat 07 July

7.30pm Mon 09 July

2.00pm Tue 10 July

An Evening With…Me. In support of Bradley Manning

Monday 16 April 2012

Why Do We Need Whistleblowers in a Democracy?

An Evening with Craig Murray

Ex Ambassador, Author, Broadcaster, Whistleblower and Human Rights Activist

Small Chemistry Lecture Theatre, Main Building, Cardiff University

With Bradley Manning’s impending court martial hearing and the recent WikiLeaks controversy, Craig Murray will be discussing why whistleblowing is necessary in a democracy. He will draw on his experience as former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, until 2004 when he was removed from his post for exposing grave human rights abuses as well as about his experiences in Africa.

This event is held in partnership with Bradley Manning Support Events (Wales). For more details of events taking place for the Manning campaign in April, see wiseupforbradleymanning.wordpress.com

Please contact Naomi Blight at naomiblight@wcia.org.uk or call 029 20228549 if you are able to attend.

Litopia Interview

Via Radio Litopia

Afghan Disaster part 462

I have been explaining this in great detail for months, indeed years. Whitehall is finally admitting it. What a huge cock-up! So much for the elite policymakers in the Foreign Office.

Disaster – Genius Needed

I am sorry for the blog hiatus, but I follow a method of historical research a bit akin to method acting! I am absolutely immersed in the world of Burnes. I am in Bhuj at tne moment, and yesterday was at Mandivi looking at the shipyards and harbours where Burnes procured his boats to sail up the Indus – they are still made today. Much larger than I had realised. In Mumbai I identified a "lost", uncatalogued portrait of Alexander Burnes which I think is the finest of him anywhere. The owners did not know who it was. It is by Brockendon like the one in the royal geographical society but is quite different, with him in military uniform. It is by Brockendon, not a copy.

Today disaster. I have lost ten days worth of notes. I noticed this morning that I had two versions of the identical document of my notes open – an .ODT on open office. One was a much older version. Paradoxically they had the identical file name but both showed as saved – the save icon was blanked on each.

Having checked that the content was all there on the version on which I was working, and that it was saved, I decided the best thing was to close off the extraneous version. Disaster!! An error message came up saying open office would now close. On restart, document recovery brought up only the old version, minus ten days work. I had a moment of hope when I right clicked on the document icon and saw "restore earlier versions of the document" but clicking on that just brought up a ,essage that there are no earlier versions available.

I am heartbroken- these aren't just notes that can be recovered from memory, but also painstaking transcripts of old manuscripts, some of which I probably can't access again even if I had the time and money.

I can think of a dozen things I might have done to avoid this situation. Comments on how to avoid such happenings are not welcome in the current trying circumstance. The real question is, can anyone think of anything at all that might help? I am running Open Office on Windows 7.

I really cannot express how much in despair I feel. This trip has cost all my available cash and I have to come back soon as money is out.

[If any mods have hung around while the blog is quiet, I am getting an extremely small typeface, only on this site. Do we have a problem, or is it another computer glitch personal to me?]

Delhi Delirium

I am well aware that Osborne has been redistributing money to the rich in his budget. I am also stunned by the idea that the state should see its role not as reducing regional inequality of wealth, but as reinforcing it through regional public sector pay rates.

But my days at the moment are like this. I get up at 7.30 am and after a very frugal breakfast I take a local taxi to the disastrously neglected and underfunded National Archive of India. I spend eleven hours there hastily transcribing from an enormous wealth of documents on Alexander Burnes – really beyond my wildest hopes – and then at 8.00pm the security guards kick me out, the curators having left some time ago. I get back to my budget hotel, take a light supper of imodium and activated charcoal, chat with Nadira, and then fall asleep exhausted.

Karimovs Cash In

UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond's visit to Tashkent on 28 February was not covered in any UK mainstream media that I can find, which is peculiar, given the media's obsession with covering anything to do with "Our heroes" in Afghanistan. It was not really the kind of visit the state would want to publciise, with Hammond in the rather unheroic position of having his knees firmly placed on the acres of marble floor of Tashkent's presidentiail palace, with his tongue well and truly stuck up Karimov's arse.

NATO, including the UK, needs to transit Uzbekistan to get its 14,000 vehicles out of Afghanistan, having well and truly queered the pitch of an exit through Pakistan by a decade of bombing the locals. The Karimov family had already made hundreds of millions in profit through a monopoly of providing haulage and logistical services to supplies going in to Afghanistan. With NATO's demoralised forces sitting on an incredibly large stockpile of materiel in effect stuck in the country as the utterly fruitless occupation ends, the Karimovs are in a position to ramp up extortion.

That will not only involve huge cash payments going to the Karimov family from the British taxpayer, disguised as transit fees, railway charges, fuel provision etc. It will also include a raft of political demands. Karimov had already in 2011 secured the ending of EU sanctions, and the international respectability he craves for his regime through an official visit to Brussels and call on EU President Barroso.

Now as a condition of facilitating our retreat, Karimov is insisting on a full visit to Tashkent by David Cameron in 2013 or 2014, a state visit by Karimov to the UK in 2015 and acceptance of Gulnara Karimova as Uzbek Ambassador in London. He is also keen to acquire a variety of state of the art UK weapons and surveillance systems for use against his own people. The strong steer from No 10 is that these Karimov demands will have to be accepted.

There is an excellent video here of Scott Horton being interviewed by Galima Burkabaeva on the subject of the kelptocratic Karimov state. Galima was an eyewitness to the Andijan massacre of 2005, in which Karimov's military murdered some 800 pro-democracy demonstrators. Galima herself only just got away, a bullet passing clean through her reporter's notebook.

Nice friends Mr Hammond has.

(Am currently in Delhi).

A New Goethe Needed

The Peacock Throne of the Mughal Emperors was set at the heart of beautiful gardens, fountains and elegant courtyards. Poetry was as important to them as warfare. On the throne was set the inscription: "If there be heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here."

I am in Dubai. If there be hell on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here. Dubai. The land that taste forgot. Apparently designed to gather together as many as possible of the nastiest people from all continents, and give them anything their heart desires. I am sure, if you could just find the right person to chuck a spare million, you could make a snuff movie starring one of the unfortunate little Sri Lankans or Central Asians who are everywhere, doing all the work, but apparently invisible. Then you could go to a Spa.

It is as though someone had given Jordan a trillion dollars and a million slaves and invited her to construct the city of her dreams. For those who believe that consumption is the purpose of life, this is the new Mecca. I think I can sum it up best by saying that I am continually expecting to see Tony and Cherie come round the corner, followed by Mandy, Nat Rothschild, Deripaska and Gulnara. I met nicer people and my soul was less disturbed up country in the middle of the Sierra Leone civil war. My God, I want to get out of here, burn all my clothes and shower for a week.

Beyond Irony

The videos of both my speech and my interview at the Berlin Freedom of Expression Forum have been taken down. This is not an accident. All the other speeches and all the other interviews are still there. Both series have been renumbered to hide the fact that someting has been removed.

Given that my talk was about censorship and exclusion of whistleblowers, and the lack of genuine freedom in western societies to explain an alternative policy narrative, it is hard for words adequately to describe the apparent behaviour here. The full title of the event was "Censorship and Freedom in Traditional and New Media: The Revolution of Media as a Tool of Freedom of Expression ".

I have written to the organisers to ask what is happening. It is conceivable there is an innocent explanation, though the removal from different places of both the speech and the interview seems hard to explain. Once I hear back from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy I will let you know. I do not intend to let this lie.

Craig

Afghanistan: Mainstream Media Awakes

This morning Sam Kiley, Sky News' security correspondent, stated bluntly that the large bulk of Afghan heroin and opium production is controlled by members of the Karzai government.

That is a simple truth, and I have been publishing it repeatedly on this blog for the last six years, but it runs absolutely contrary to what has been an extraordinary and monolithic mainstream media narrative. The insistence for ten years by an almost unanimous mainstream media that it is the Taliban who contol the drugs trade has been perhaps the most remarkable example of a massive organised lie in modern media history. The question of how a false narrative like that becomes an accepted mainstream "truth" is a key element in control of the state by a rapacious elite using the brainwashing tcapabilities of modern mass communication.

The truly remarkable thing is the truth has somehow broken through. Then today in Parliament David Winnick, opposition defence spokesman, actually stated directly tthat people know longer believe that the presence of our troops in Afghanistan somehow protects us from terrorism, but rather might tend to inspire hatred of the UK.

Again, a blindingly obvious truth that I have been proclaiming for a decade. But absolutely not admissible as an argument on moanstream media in that period, and a truth whose denial was the dedicated work of Winnick's party when it was in government.

The counter-productive and ruinously expensive nature of the Afghan War is something a high proportion of people fully understood even when they were never reinforced in their understanding by seeing that view reflected in "mainstream media". Tens of thousands of children have died while arms suppliers and mercenary commanders got very rich. The last nine to be slaughtered in their beds have helped jolt people in the media and politics to talk some semblance of sense at last.

Urinating on dead Afghans, burning Korans and a nighttime killing spree are not the problem; they are symptoms of the problem. A vicious occupation by religious antagonists who repeatedly and continually launch massive violence on civilians, with the intent of imposing by force elements of an alien culture while establishing a massively corrupt and despised puppet government, is not a viable long term project. There is no way to undo the past. The best thing to do now is leave.