... morally, legally and practically wrong!

UK ambassador criticizes M16 for Uzbeks torture

10/11/2004 1:20:00 PM GMT

Murray said that "brutality" was hereditary in Uzbek jails.

The British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has criticized MI6 for using intelligence allegedly obtained through torture and abuse, according to media reports.

In a classified document that reached the Financial Times, Craig Murray said that Uzbek officials tortured detainees to gain information. He also said that the intelligence was used by MI6 after being passed on through the CIA.

The confidential Foreign Office memo reportedly shows Mr. Murray's concerns about Britain's use of intelligence extracted by such means.

The Financial Times stated that Mr. Murray said that "Tortured dupes are forced to sign confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the U.S. and UK to believe - that they and we are fighting the same war against terror . . . This is morally, legally and practically wrong,"

Mr. Murray also says that the Uzbek government exaggerates the role of local rebels and their ties with al-Qaeda.

Human rights groups complained that it became more difficult to draw the attention of the western governments towards reports of extensive torture in Uzbek detention facilities.

In late 2002, Mr. Murray has publicly criticized the behavior in an undiplomatic language saying that "brutality" was hereditary in Uzbek jails and recalling a case where two prisoners were boiled to death.

The Foreign Office then summoned Mr. Murray for a disciplinary hearing on some unrelated allegations concerning his behavior in Tashkent. He was exonerated but some sources said that he believed his superiors were trying to punish him.

Mr. Murray has been known as a vocal critic of Uzbekistan's human rights record. In his first speeck after taking the job, he said: "Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy".

His criticisms could prompt new questions about the use of intelligence extracted from prisoners elsewhere, including those detained in Iraq by the U.S. authorities and those held at Guantanamo Bay.

After hearing about an inter-departmental meeting in London on the use of Uzbek intelligence in July 2004, Mr. Murray- who was very angry that he was excluded from that meeting- wrote that officials decided to go on with using such intelligence. He said that the main argument at the meeting was that the intelligence material did not mention the source.

"The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove he was tortured," he says.

"I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in an organization where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have to deal with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met very few where torture, as defined in the United Nations Convention [against Torture] was not employed."

Mr. Murray also said that intelligence material is of no use because it is made by the by the Uzbek authorities. "We are selling our souls for dross." He said.

He adds that before invading Iraq, it was difficult to argue with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, about intelligence assessment. But since the Butler report about the use of intelligence in Iraq "we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but they have a particular yen for highly colored material that exaggerates the threat".

The Foreign Office responded by saying that the British government complies with the international legal commitments, particularly the UN convention against torture. It also added that intelligence agencies have never abused prisoners to gain intelligence or incited others to do so.

But it added: "We have to bear in mind the need for intelligence for counter terrorism to arrest threats to British lives. Where there was reliable intelligence with a direct bearing on terrorist threats it would be irresponsible to ignore it out of hand."

Mr. Murray refused to comment.

IS THE REAL "ILLNESS" OF BRITAIN'S AMBASSADOR HAS POINTED CRITICISMS OF THE UZBEK REGIME?

Speaking out can be bad for your health in Uzbekistan. Over the past decade, thousands of conservative Muslims and critics of the Uzbek regime have found themselves in prison. Many have been tortured. Some have died--a few, say human rights organizations and diplomats, by being boiled alive. Now, though, freedom of speech may be causing health problems for a more unexpected victim: Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan.

That, at least, is a common explanation in Tashkent for the protracted absence of Craig Murray. For all but one week in the past four months or so, Murray has been in Britain undergoing medical treatment. When Murray was airlifted to Britain on 19 November after a brief one-week return to Tashkent, some friends said he was suffering from severe chest pains. Others say he is suffering from depression.

Some believe the illness might be a fiction or, as friends quoted in the British press suggest, his health gave way under the pressure of a year of constant controversy.

Murray is undoubtedly the most controversial figure to head the British diplomatic mission in Uzbekistan. Rumors suggest he has helped friends with visas, shown up drunk during working hours, fraternized too much with the locals, and allowed his driver to drive the embassy Land Rover down some steps.

But some human rights activists in Tashkent believe the rumors were the work of Uzbek officials concerned with a greater controversy: Murray’s outspoken criticisms of the human rights record of President Islam Karimov.

Uzbekistan’s deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Norov, has rejected the allegations. “As far as I know, Mr. Murray is sick and having medical treatment in London. If someone is trying to speculate about these rumors, then it is outside my competence. The British government has to deal with it,” Norov said.

But such statements have not ended the speculation. Certainly, the Uzbek government has plenty of reason to want to see Murray leave Tashkent. In October 2002, just three months after he came to Uzbekistan, Murray was summoned to the Uzbek Foreign Ministry to explain himself after he gave a damning speech to an audience that included the U.S. ambassador and Uzbek officials.

Speaking at the opening of the Tashkent office of the U.S.-based human rights organization Freedom House, Murray said that Uzbekistan “is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy.” Murray said the country has “made very disappointing progress in moving away from the dictatorship of the Soviet period,” and that 7,000 to10,000 people in detention are political or religious prisoners, many of them “falsely convicted of crimes with which there appears to be no credible evidence they had any connection.”

He continued: “Brutality is inherent in a system where convictions habitually rely on signed confessions rather than on forensic or material evidence,” adding that “another chilling reminder of the former Soviet Union is the use of commitment to lunatic asylums to stifle dissidents.”

Murray followed up the speech with numerous reports to London about human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, going on public record with statements that there is "no freedom of speech, mass media, movement, and so forth" in Uzbekistan and that widespread torture “affects thousands of people, many of whom are completely innocent and are being persecuted for their religious beliefs."

Calls for greater commitment to democratic reforms are commonplace (and U.S. government reports have talked of torture being “routine”), and sharply worded attacks on Uzbekistan’s human rights record are nothing new. International human rights organizations have long attacked Karimov’s regime as repressive and abusive. Even the United Nations has been critical. In July 2002, its Human Rights Committee strongly criticized Uzbekistan’s decision to execute six people whose cases the UN committee had been investigating. That was followed by a claim in December 2002 by the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo van Boven, that torture "is not just incidental but ... systemic" in Uzbekistan.

But Murray’s comments were the strongest statements by a diplomat, human rights activists in Tashkent say. And they were made more potent by their timing: the speech came immediately after a blander speech by the then-U.S. ambassador, John Herbst, and a day before UN Secretary General Kofi Annan met Karimov.

Moreover, Murray’s views may subsequently have become even more awkward. Abuses in Uzbekistan were as bad as those perpetrated in Iraq, he is reported to have told London, but Washington was financing Uzbekistan rather than invading it. The suggestion of hypocrisy struck a particularly raw nerve because the United States now has a base in Uzbekistan. In 2002, aid to Uzbekistan tripled, to $500 million, and Karimov made his first official visit to the White House.

So when Murray went back to Britain in September, there were many who thought he was being recalled under pressure from the U.S. administration, the Uzbek authorities, and from within the Foreign Office. (British, U.S., and Uzbek officials have denied the accusations.) According to friends quoted by the British Guardian, he was told to resign or be removed. He was also told, reportedly, that he faced possible disciplinary charges. While he was away from Tashkent, a British foreign ministry investigator was sent to Tashkent.

Murray was officially said to be ill. British officials deny that Murray’s stance differed from London’s, pointing to the inclusion of his Freedom House speech in the Foreign Office’s annual human rights report. The British foreign ministry insisted (as it still does) that he remained the country’s ambassador. Further, when Murray’s return to Tashkent was announced in November, Foreign Office junior minister Baroness Elizabeth Symons talked about “appalling” deaths in police custody, religious prisoners, and the lack of independent political parties and media.

Britain’s policy, she said, is to continue “critical engagement” with Uzbekistan.

Some counter that the West has tried “critical engagement” for the past decade without achieving significant improvements in Uzbekistan. The policy’s limitations were graphically highlighted in 2003, when the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) chose Tashkent as the venue for its annual meeting, in May 2003. Though a platform was given to critics of the Uzbek government (and they used it from the very outset), reports of torture persist. Though the EBRD’s president said before the meeting that Karimov would go on television to condemn torture, he never did. The UN is still waiting for a draft plan to combat torture that the government had originally promised for mid-November.

However, attitudes among Uzbek human rights activists to Murray’s approach are mixed. Some came out onto the streets to support Murray, holding a demonstration in 2003 outside the British embassy and carrying placards such as “Take your hands off Murray” and “Craig Murray, we are with you.” One human rights body, Ozod Ovoz (Free Voice), gave an award to Murray, calling him “an example for other ambassadors.”

A local human rights activist, Tolqin Qoraev, praises Murray as “not just an ambassador, but also a true human rights activist” and argues that Murray was helpful in demanding that the Uzbek government should keep to the international standards it has signed on to.

Even some British businessmen, with money at stake in the country, back Murray’s approach. Fifteen of them sent a letter to the Foreign Office in which they described Murray as a defender of British interests.

However, Abdumannob Polat, the director of the Union of Councils’ Central Asian Human Rights Information Network, takes a different view. He believes that Murray’s views of the political and human rights situation in Uzbekistan are only half true. They are, he says, exaggerated and somewhat one-sided.

He believes the diplomat should have been more diplomatic. “Since Britain is cooperating closely with Uzbekistan, Murray’s views should have been more composed and objective,” he said, pointing to the example of former U.S. ambassador Herbst, who, he said, “did more to improve the human rights situation in the country.”

According to Polat, “Murray’s views have always resembled the views of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other, mainly nongovernmental organizations. Such activities are necessary,” he continued, “but I think Western governments have to adopt a diplomatic policy of cooperation … and I am sure that Uzbek officials paid more attention to Herbst’s statement and criticisms.”

Polat, who met Herbst four or five times, believes the former U.S. ambassador “did many things to soften rights abuses in the country. This is all thanks to U.S. government policy and the influence that it has in the world.”

But while there may be debate about how to protect human rights, activists agree that those rights are badly abused in Uzbekistan. The situation was described in a November 2003 Amnesty International report (titled “Justice Only in Heaven") that said “torture is systematic.” The report went on to state that “corruption is unchecked at every stage from investigation to the final clemency process.” Decrying the handing down of the death penalty without reference to “objective and publicly accessible sentencing criteria,” Amnesty International asserted that Uzbekistan's flawed criminal justice system provides fertile ground for miscarriages of justice.

For Allah and the caliphate Shiv Malik Monday 13th September 2004



Hizb ut-Tahrir, with its millions of Muslim followers, is accused in the US of being a conveyor belt for terrorists. But how dangerous is it really? Shiv Malik reports It's a hot summer Sunday and I am stuck in a strip-lit hotel room five minutes from Heathrow Terminal One. All I want is for someone to pass me the freezer-cold bottle of water from the end of the table. I stare at the shaven-headed solicitor on my right, hoping, just hoping, that he will notice me, but he is speaking. "Where," asks Basharat Ali, "is the initiative for the individual to enter into his own economic undertakings in a communist system? In the Islamic and capitalist systems the initiative is upon the individual." Sajjad Khan, an accountant, pushes his glasses back up his nose: "Now that's not totally fair. There is no incentive on the individual, but there is incentive in doing something for the collective good." These and two other middle-aged, middle-class people are members of the worldwide Islamic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir (Hizb for short), and I am sitting in on one of their normally private study circles. Marxist economic thought is just the sort of thing they do on a Sunday, and any university professor would die for this kind of enthused, informed debate. But not everybody thinks Hizb is so inoffensive. Far from it. "Hizb produces thousands of manipulated brains, which then graduate from Hizb and become members of groups like al-Qaeda," says Zeyno Baran, director of international security and energy programmes at the Nixon Centre, a think-tank based in Washington, DC. "Even if Hizb does not itself engage in terrorist acts, because of the ideology it provides, it acts like a conveyor belt for terrorists." It was the then leader of Hizb's branch in Britain, Omar Bakri, who called for Muslims to assassinate John Major on the eve of the first Gulf war. "We will celebrate his death," Bakri told the Daily Star. He was arrested and detained for 48 hours. Since that PR coup, this once obscure organisation has become a major source of radical Islamic thought. And since 9/11, it has been caught in the cross-hairs of Washington's big-gun think-tanks; Hizb has given them back what the end of the cold war took away: a war of ideas. Not liberal, soft-whip, Monbiot-mush ideas, but the kind of high-calibre ideas for which people are fighting and dying. "The west," says Baran, "can no longer ignore the deadly impact of Hizb ideology, which reaches millions of Muslims through cyberspace, the distribution of leaflets, and secret teaching centres. It is time to name the war correctly: this is a war of ideologies, and terrorist acts are the tip of the iceberg." Ariel Cohen, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the richest of the right-wing US think-tanks, compares Hizb to the Trotskyite wing of the international communist movement. He sees Hizb as offering an alternative form of globalisation. "This ideology," he has written, "poses a direct challenge to the western model of a secular, market-driven, tolerant, multicultural globalisation." Hizb ut-Tahrir translates as "party of liberation". It was set up by a Palestinian court clerk, Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, in 1953. In a Middle East awash with pan-Arabism and the politics of nationalism and race, it adopted Islamic teaching and scripture as its ideology, Leninist organisation as its method of action, and the re-establishment of the caliphate as its aim. The caliphate, or khilafah, dates back to the seventh century, when all Muslim lands were under the governance of a single elected caliph, and were subject to a single system of Islamic law. Hizb wants to recreate something similar now for the whole of North Africa and the Middle East and for much of central and south Asia. Al-Nabhani's party proposed a constitution of 187 articles for an Islamic state, detailing everything from Islamic economic and education systems to relationships between men and women (women being an "honour to be safeguarded", but having rights to own property, to vote and to do business). The Jordanian authorities then responsible for the pre-occupation Palestinian territories arrested al-Nabhani as soon as he tried to register his fledgling organisation. He was eventually forced underground and the party has remained there ever since. In the past 50 years, Hizb has spread its message to more than 40 countries, from Malaysia to Scandinavia. It refuses to give membership figures, but estimates hover around the million mark. Its support is thought to run much higher - roughly ten million in central Asia alone, according to the Arab news magazine al-Majalla. Although it has never been directly implicated in an act of violence, Hizb is banned in nearly every country in which it operates. Between 7,000 and 8,000 members are thought to be in prisons in Uzbekistan: it was over their treatment that the British ambassador to that country, Craig Murray, protested last year - they were being boiled alive, electrocuted and raped, he said - and got himself disciplined by the Foreign Office. Egypt, Syria and Libya are among the many other countries where Hizb members are imprisoned, sometimes for membership alone. Three British members were sentenced to five years in jail in Egypt this year for being in possession of Hizb literature. The party's activities were outlawed in Germany in 2002, when it was found guilty of distributing anti-Semitic material. Last year Russia arrested 55 members of the group. The idea of the Hizb "graduate" is not without foundation. According to intelligence sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's man in Iraq, is a former member of the Jordanian branch of Hizb. According to the same sources, the al-Qaeda commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also spent time with the party. When MI5 searched the home of Omar Sharif, the Derby father-of-three who committed suicide after failing to blow himself up in a bar in Tel Aviv in April 2003, it found plenty of Hizb literature. Unlike al-Qaeda, which operates on a loose, "franchise" basis, Hizb is rigidly controlled by its central leadership, based in Palestine. Below that, national organisations or wilayas, usually headed by a group of 12, control networks of local committees and cells. New members must spend at least two years studying party literature, under the guidance of mentors, before they take the party oath. A parallel, separate structure exists for women, who are encouraged to become fully active members. Last year, the British party, headed by a 28-year-old Indian IT engineer, Jalaluddin Patel, attracted 10,000 Muslims to a conference, entitled "British or Muslim?", at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. It was Britain's biggest Muslim event to date, and the organisers plan to make this year's conference, due to take place in London at the end of November, even bigger. Fridays are when Hizb members work hardest. At the end of prayers each week, they distribute 100,000 leaflets to the faithful as they emerge from mosques. Up and down the country, from Edinburgh to Essex, the organisation's smoothly run, PowerPoint-presented meetings draw in those who are fed up with the bland, sterilised sermons of most imams post-9/11. In Bradford, Hizb hires a room at a business centre a stone's throw from the central mosque. The 48 chairs are quickly taken mainly by middle-aged men, some suited, others in more casual attire. Some have children with them who run around making quiet mischief during the meeting. The laptop, projector and software, provided by one of Hizb's many IT-savvy members, have been set up for a talk entitled "The drugs epidemic in the west". The video begins and a close-up of a small, frail-looking white boy - a 12-year-old heroin addict - appears. His harrowing tale is intersected with shots of Muslim children playing merrily in the streets. At the end of the video the speaker, tubby, bearded and well-spoken, admonishes not only capitalist society but also the Muslim community for failing to care for non-Muslims. After all they, too, are the victims of western values. Hassan Mujtaba, a national committee member and an IT lecturer at a college in East Ham, London, explained to me afterwards Hizb's big solution for Britain: model Islamic communities. "What it is really about," he said, "is maintaining our identity as Muslims, living by the Islamic sharia rules in this country and showing the British public that we share their problems: the problems of the upbringing of children and caring for parents when they're old, or drugs or crime or education." He continues: "We feel that what we are providing is something better than what is already here and perhaps we'll become a model." So what exactly will Hizb do to turn the drug-ridden Muslim slums of Bradford and Leeds into beacons of social improvement? "As a political party," says Mujtaba, "we wouldn't engage in action that would divert us from our main aim, which is the establishment of the caliphate. We wouldn't go around building a school or a mosque or setting up a drugs project. We would collate the information, really closely observe what is going on in British society, and then provide a template that would assist those people to go and establish an Islamic community." In other words, Hizb doesn't do elbow grease. It is no Hezbollah, with a large network of schools and hospitals. Nor does it condone suicide bombing. Its route to power is the peaceful coup, in which a general or politician seizes control of a state in the name of the caliphate. No arms would be used, because the Prophet Muhammad never raised arms to establish his state. This does not impress the Heritage Foundation's Ariel Cohen. "Hizb is what Lenin would term as 'the open-ended organisation'. It is indoctrinating tens of thousands of Muslims, enabling the creation of an environment for armed struggle. The caliphate is inimical to democracy and human rights and women's rights. Its goals are, in essence, totalitarian. Let me tell you something else," he says, before rushing off to take part in a debate on Fox TV. "A few years back, I talked to very senior government figures in the UK about al-Qaeda and Abu Hamza [the jailed extremist cleric] and they said, 'Oh, don't worry, they have rights and we can't just throw them in prison', but after three years they have come to the same conclusion: that these people are dangerous." The spokesman of Hizb's British branch, Imran Waheed, agrees that the party is the biggest player in this newly declared ideological war. He has just passed his psychiatry exams and is in buoyant mood. We talk about Francis Fukuyama. "There's a quote of his where he says we've reached the end of history because there's a lack of a viable alternative ideology to capitalism and western civilisation. We view our work as a direct challenge to that statement: we have to prove him wrong. We believe Islam has a history of world leadership, and [that] Islam is a comprehensive ideology which is an alternative to western civilisation . . . We don't believe that it is a threat to the people in the west . . . You know, there are many people who are disenchanted with their lives under the western system, but at the moment there is no practical alternative. Islam is an alternative . . . We are increasingly looking to interact with western thinkers, academics and the masses to illustrate to them what type of a state it is that we want to establish, so that when it is established, western regimes won't find it so easy to undertake military action towards it." So when will this state arrive on the world stage? "Ah, this is the question which everyone asks me and it is not one I can really answer. We believe that victory is not in our hands; it is in the hands of the Creator. Our obligation is to create a suitable environment for that change to come about . . . While al-Nabhani probably imagined a small state . . . in Jordan or Syria, I can now imagine a giant being established throughout a large part of the Muslim world due to the strength of feeling that exists." Here lies Hizb's greatest achievement: to have shifted the debate in the Muslim world from rule by nationalist authority to rule by Islam. But even with its draft constitutions to hand, it seems laughable that Hizb, armed only with the righteousness of its ideas, could overpower some of the most ruthless regimes in the world. Yet when Osama Bin Laden talks about the caliphate, it can justifiably credit itself with being his inspiration. After two and a half hours on that summer Sunday near Heathrow Airport, we are finally finished. The group has managed to discuss to death four simple paragraphs of al-Nabhani's book The Economic System in Islam. At this rate, it will take them a year to get through the whole thing. So why have the leaders of Hizb, a usually secretive organisation, allowed me to spend a month with them? Why have they bothered to ferry me around, meticulously organise my every visit, give up hours of their time to answer my every inquiry? Imran Waheed tells me it is because they want to get their message across. Since 9/11, they have been afraid they will be branded as a terrorist organisation. All they want to do is to carry on their debates with intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and George Carey. After all, if they're not violent, can their ideas be so dangerous? To quote: "Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?" Good question, Stalin.

This article first appeared in the New Statesman.