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Craig Murray is a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, a country which he was very critical of whilst posted there, and eventually forced to resign from his position as ambassador by the FO.
He lives and works in the UK, in public service maintaining his critical views and publicizing them through the usual modern popular channels. He has not been targeted for torture or state sanctioned harassment,and nor have state emissaries been sent out to persuade one and all to do like-wise with full enthusiastic conviction as the British State might like to......with the addition of Brother Grimm Fairy tales to add spice to the saga. He belongs to the right ethnic clan and circle, and therefore his critical words are that much more easier to bare for the UK State.
Post-Soviet Union Central Asia is restive, and faces many challenges as with many Developing countries.
The problems are compounded by the ambitions of the USA in the region, and the naivety of leaders in the region trying to work with the USA. The USA funds, trains and arms the problem, usually through Pakistan, and now since 2001 via Afghanistan....and then presents itself as the good buddy savior to the Central Asian leaders.
There can never be any good in the region if the USA is allowed to have a permanent military presence there. The Uzbek's should know well of this fact.
There is no wisdom in replacing a former powerful master with a new powerful one.
Uzbekistan is being unwise in acting as the replacement for the Pakistanis for the supply routes of the occupation forces in Afghanistan. Strategically this is not in the interests of Central Asia and Uzbekistan.
Central Asia requires peace, stability, independence and greater regional cooperation.
It was Porfiro Diaz the Mexican President for 35 years who said, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and (yet) so close to the United States!"
Yes Mexico has developed considerably, but let us look at the narcotics problem created by American government agencies using the country as a prime conduit to import narcotics into the USA.
Ditto the USA reason for being in Afghanistan.
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In Bed With Lola and Gulnara
By Craig Murray at Information Clearing House.
The Afghanistan conference in Bonn is a farce.
There are no representatives of the Afghan resistance to the occupation, so it is not negotiating peace. Karzai’s corrupt and effete presidency, obtained by massive electoral fraud, expires in 2014.
It is no coincidence that immediately after that the NATO troops will leave (40,000 are leaving from now).
Be guaranteed that none of the Karzai family will remain in Afghanistan, but will rather retire to Switzerland with the many billions of dollars they have looted from UK and US taxpayers’ funds, and made from the heroin trade.
(Straight honestly in telling it like it really is........though more likely given his relationship with the USA that he will head there. It would have even more honest if he had admitted that the UK/USA states are the biggest beneficiaries of the Afghan heroin, and that the money laundered from the profits form a significant liquidity asset of the high street banks in the "The City" and Wall street. .......and that the British people don't benefit one bit from this evil business, but on the contrary suffer....100,000 of thousands of British people.....in the streets of Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool where the price of Afghan heroin has declined year in year out spookily running in parallel to the occupation of Afghanistan, and that the British military for 10 years has been posted in Helmand Province, the highest opium growing province in Afghanistan....2+2=5 )
Pakistan of course is not present at the conference. After approximately 6,000 Pakistanis were blown up by the USA on Pakistani soil, the next 28 were killed all at once and were all young soldiers, something that not even Pakistan’s complacent, corrupt government could gloss over.
(4000---4500 is a more accurate less cryptic figure of Pakistani troop losses, and to suggest the USA carried out ALL of the covert ops inside Pakistan using the TTP is stretching credibility.......No UK? No Israeli roles?
As I understand it a section of the British establishment would like to detach Pakistan from the USA, for old times colonial sakes. Craig in a rather direct no nonsense way reflects this fact.
We must not underestimate the sheer stupidity of the Pakistani state, run by the USA/UK trained generals.....it is a Failed State after all....and its failing for a rather obvious reason. Its core leaders the generals don't work for Pakistan's interests but their rather narrow perceived interests)
So for now all of NATO’s ground supplies are being shipped through Uzbekistan – the percentage of NATO supplies going that way was already increased to almost 50% and still rising fast as a matter of policy,
Lucky that Hillary has a new best friend in President Karimov
All of which explains why there has been not one single word of criticism of Uzbekistan’s human rights record by the coalition government in the UK. There was not one single mention of human rights, of child slave labor, of political prisoners, of free elections, unbanning the opposition, of freedom of assembly, speech or religious belief, when the British government hosted official Uzbek parliamentary and trade delegations last month. There was not one word either in public or in private on any of these subjects.
The current British government loves Karimov. It has never issued even the mildest criticism. Boiling people alive and torturing political opponents to death is fine by them. We even deport him back extra dissidents to practice on. This British government successfully pushed through the EU new preferential tariff access for Uzbek cotton picked by eight year old child slaves. The love affair with the British establishment goes wider than just this government. New Labour’s chief financier, their own Lord Ashcroft, is a man named Andrew Rosenfeld. He has sold a house in Switzerland to Karimov’s daughter Lola for three times its market value. ( With a name like that this must be a drug store Mills and Boon novel, right?) Such huge payments in excess of market value are, very often, a spot of money laundering with the extra money being in return for something else.
Money flows both way – as previously reported here, Karimov’s elder daughter Gulnara is getting a massive cut from the transport of all those NATO supplies through Uzbekistan.
But the latest bit of love-in with the Karimov family will astound you. William Hague is going to agree that Gulnara Karimova - the most hated person in Uzbekistan - can come and live in London as Uzbek Ambassador. The request for her to be accepted (“agrement” in diplomatic parlance, in French) – has been in for some time. The only obstacle remaining is to resolve how many of Gulnara’s seven bodyguards will be allowed to carry semi-automatic weapons on the streets of London.
Among our major political parties, the notion of morality appears virtually as dead as it is to the Karimov family.
(Well Craig political parties and politicians are transient fickle buy and sell figures.....most top politician's in the UK are run by M-I5. After they've sodomized a boy or two in a ritualistic manner, picked from the streets or a children's home, and have satisfied other such requirements....total fealty to Israel....they are let into the corridors of power, but still managed by the Mandarins, who in many respects hold real power. Thus the REAL CRIMINALITY is within the British State....FO, Home Office etc.
But I understand as a former "insider" the easy manner and acceptance of diabolical Third World banana republic leaders boiling their opponents.......and describing other such daft things with shall we say repetitive ease at the dinner party, but at the same time overlook the role of the somewhat evil criminal UK State...and what it does and has done to its own citizens. What it does and has done around the world as a wanna be empire living in the shadow of the USA)
