Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror Paperback - 2007

CHAPTER 1

Awakening

Chris looked pretty amazed. 'OK, let's go,' didn't seem to be the standard reaction from a British ambassador to the news that a dissident trial was about to start. The Land-Rover drew up to the embassy door and out I went, still feeling pretty uncomfortable at people calling me 'Sir', opening doors and stopping their normal chatter as I passed. We turned up outside the court, where a small wicket entrance led thorugh an unprepossessing muddy wall into a dirty courtyard containg several squat white buildings. Like much Soviet construction, it looked unfinished and barely functional. To enter the courtyard, we had to give passport details to two policemen sitting at a table outside the gate. They took an age to write everything down with a chewed-up pencil in an old ledger. I was to find that the concealment of terrible viciousness behind a homely exterior was a recurring theme in Uzbekistan. About a hundred people were hanging about the courtyard waiting for different trials to begin. I was introduced to a variety of scruffy-looking individuals who represented a range of human rights organisations. Puzzlingly, the seven or eight I met seemed to belong to the same number of groups, and most of them would not talk to one another. One short but distinguished-looking man with a shock of white hair and big black specs was so full of self-importance that he wouldn't talk to anyone at all. Chris, busting around doing the introductions, pointed to him and said, 'Mikhail Ardzinov - he says that it is for you to call on him.' I was puzzled, as the question of who called on who involved taking about eight paces across the courtyard. Chris explained that Ardzinov was feeling very important, as his group was the only one that was registered and thus legal. The others were all illegal. Peculiarly, Ardzinov's registered group was called the 'Independent Human Rights Organisation of Uzbekistan'. None of this meant much to me at the time, and I certainly hadn't been an ambassador long enough to feel my pride compromised by taking eight paces, so I went over and shook the man's hand. I received a long, cool stare for my effort.

"I thought that diplomats like Craig Murray were an extinct breed. A man of the highest principle"
–John Pilger

"An important and well-told story from a frontline on the war of terror"
–The Spectator

"The Uzbek people know only one word for Craig Murray: hero"
–Mohammad Salih, Uzbek opposition leader

"Heroic. This darkly comic tale...rings horribly true. It helps explain the moral bankruptcy [of] the Blair government"
–Sir Max Hastings, Sunday Times, 16 July 2006

"The book is fantastic. It is very, very funny...It also deals with the fact that the reason he is no longer ambassador is that the British Government was using information obtained from torture and he thought that was wrong"
–Michael Winterbottom, Director

"This candid account...looks set to ruffle a few feathers"
–Bookseller

"The actions of this brave and principled man have certainly exposed the 'war on terror' for the sick charade that it is"
–Morning Star

"Excellent"
–Sunday Express

Craig Murray was born in 1958. He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1984 and served in Nigeria, Poland and Ghana, before being appointed Ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2002. He retired from the Civil Service in 2005. He now lives in London, where he works as a writer and broadcaster.