This is a skeptic’s first intro to the world of blogging – a pleasant surprise to find interesting points well made!

In response to your point 2) there are existing alternatives to Karimov. Shortly after the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, Nodira Khidoyatova and Sanjar Umarov, leaders of the Sunshine Coalition, returned to Uzbekistan from exile. Both were subsequently arrested. Nodira has been released but is severely restricted in her political activity by the security services, and Umarov is still serving a lengthy sentence in solitary confinement in a prison cell near Bukhara. Both Khidoyatova and Umarov were successful in business before the government accused them of economic crimes (often used as a euphemism for political opposition in Uzbek law courts) and if you read their proposals for the economic reform of Uzbekistan they do present a viable alternative. However, for whatever reason, the international community has allowed Karimov to silence these people, for now. They do need Westeners to raise awareness of their existence and to put pressure on our governments to push for free and fair elections.

So, what is Craig’s role in this? I wrote to him a while ago, saying almost exactly what you said, that problems in Uzbekistan get conflated with issues about Iraq, terrorism and UK complicity in torture. However, since then I have revised my view: it is worth noting that the only way Craig can get his voice heard in mainstream media is to use Uzbekistan to make a wider point: organisations such as the BBC are public service broadcasters, and while they have been very sympathetic to Craig’s plight, they cannot justify large volumes of info on a country that still very few British people have heard of. If you search his website and check postings elsewhere, you will see that he has done a lot to raise awareness of opposition movements and their repression. But he’ll never receive any money for this and the poor man has to make a living after being made redundant from the FO. If Craig begins to call for reform more vociforously his detractors will jump on him, saying he had a political agenda for raising torture allegations in the first place, that he was the agent of some opposition movement or another.

CLM: What do you think of the whole craig murray debacle?
RONA: Ok. I think it’s despicable that civilize societies practice torture and incommunicado detention. Everyone should have a right for freedom and a free trial. No one should be above the…

I don’t suppose anyone will ask him anything more about it. The wonder is, why he was promoted to Ambassador to a country where he could cause more embarrassment for the Foreign Office? Was he “kicked upstairs” and sent far away in the hopes that scandal would just go away?

If so, the choice of Uzbekistan for Murray may have been, to use the cliche, worse than a crime by the Foreign Office–it was a blunder.