Another Scathing Voice on Uzbekistan

Craig Murray, the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, has a scathing critique of America's Uzbekistan policy in today's Guardian. He makes several fantastic points, about how democratic protesters don't have the opportunity that their equivilents in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgystan had - elections, and how the American airforce base at Khanabad is hardly essential to the effort in Afghanistan. But here's where Murray's critique hits its stride (and makes me question the praise I just had for Jack Straw):

So the Uzbek people can keep on dying. They are not worth a lot of cash, so who cares? I travelled to Andijan a year ago to meet the opposition leaders, and kept in touch. I can give you a direct assurance that they are - or in many cases were - in no sense Islamist militants. They died an unwanted embarrassment to US foreign policy. We will doubtless hear some pious hypocrisies from Jack Straw. But when I was seeking funding to support the proto-democrats, the Foreign Office turned me down flat.

The US will fund "human rights" training in Uzbekistan but not help for the democratic opposition, in contrast to its policy elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. When Jon Purnell, the US ambassador, last year attended the opening of a human rights centre in the Ferghana valley, he interrupted a local speaker criticising repression. Political points, Purnell opined, were not allowed.

Indeed.