The regime of Islam Karimov, who ruled the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan from 1991 to 2016, once had a couple of dissidents boiled alive. When the grandmother of one of them complained publicly, she was sentenced to six years in prison.
People under his rule could be jailed, tortured or killed for the slightest reason. Police raped women at will. His country’s chief export crop, cotton, was picked by forced labor. Karimov’s family, especially his daughter Gulnara, and his cronies controlled the economy.
But he was not a primitive tyrant ruling a backward country remote from the centers of civilization. Rather he and his fellow Central Asian dictators were intimately connected with global finance and politics, and owed their power to those connections..
International banks helped Karimov and his family take their wealth out of the country and hide it. Russian, American and Chinese governments completed for his favor, and turned a blind eye when his secret services reached out to capture and kill political opponents living abroad.
Corrupt Third World dictators that Western governments support are not mere puppets. Empowering them means compromising and corrupting institutions that are supposedly based on the rule of law.
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I recently read two books about Central Asia – MURDER IN SAMARKAND: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror by Craig Murray (2006) and DICTATORS WITHOUT BORDERS: Power and Money in Central Asia by Alexander Cooley and John Heathersaw (2017). I’ll first comment on Murray’s book, then on the other book.
Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian nations were part of the Soviet Union until it broke up. Their governments were continuations of the former Communist governments.
Craig Murray was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004. His descriptions of life in Uzbekistan reminds me of accounts of the USSR in the 1930s
He was a colorful character—a drinker, a womanizer and a proud Scot who appeared in formal occasions in Highland dress complete with kilt. But his physical and moral courage were indisputable.
He once found himself with a stalled car on a country road, alone except for his female interpreter, a female staff member and the widow of a murder victim.
A couple of roughnecks approached, and the widow whispered Murray that they were the murderers of her husband. Murray pushed one of them in the chest, told them he was the British ambassador and to get out of his way. He did.
He in theory was supposed to advocate for human rights laws that the British government had endorsed, but in reality, his superiors wanted him to go along with U.S. policy, which was to support Karimov as a valued supporter of the U.S. “war on terror” and interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Uzbekistan was part of the Northern Supply Route, by which U.S. forces in Afghanistan are supported by way of Russia and Central Asia, and it allowed a U.S. air based on its territory.
This mean that Murray was expected to overlook at lot, as he told a Guardian reporter at the time:
People come to me very often after being tortured. Normally this includes homosexual and heterosexual rape of close relatives in front of the victim; rape with objects such as broken bottles; asphyxiation; pulling out of fingernails; smashing of limbs with blunt objects; and use of boiling liquids including complete immersion of the body. This is not uncommon. Thousands of people a year suffer from this torture at the hands of the authorities.
Source: The Guardian
He once interviewed an old professor about imprisoned Uzbek dissidents. A short time later, the body of the professor’s 18-year-old grandson, bearing the marks of torture, was dumped on the professor’s doorstep. That is the “murder in Samarkand” in the title.
The U.S. ambassador strongly opposed Murray’s meddling. At the time was Uzbekistan was a destination for American “extraordinary rendition” of suspected terrorists. The CIA set great store by information obtained by torture and so did the British government.