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Than a Game Craig Murray Blows the Whistle on British India

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Than a Game Craig Murray Blows the Whistle on British India MORE THAN A GAME CRAIG MURRAY BLOWS THE WHISTLE ON BRITISH INDIA BY SIMON HEWITT I CAME ACROSS Murder In Samarkand some years ago in Budapest, in a second-hand bookshop (now defunct). Having been to Samarkand for a Rod Stewart Concert (as one does), while taking part in a Gulnara Karimova Press-Trip (as one did), the title caught my eye. I was surprised to learn that the author, Craig Murray, had been U.K. Ambassador to Uzbekistan. MURDEROUSLY HOT BUT NO ROD : SAMARKAND IN 1870 BY VASILY VERESCHAGIN He lasted just over two years and was sacked in 2004 for defying Foreign Office instructions to keep quiet about Human Rights abuse in the country. Since leaving the Diplomatic Service, Murray has been Rector of Dundee University (his alma mater ) and launched an iconoclastic blog ( www.craigmurray.org.uk ) that I enjoy consulting for its punchily alternative views on current affairs. On 11 December 2016, for instance, Murray dismissed the notion of Russia organizing the leaking of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails as a ‘blatant CIA lie… this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post and The Guardian , and on the BBC main news. They are not hacks, they are insider leaks. They did not come from the Russians…. Plainly it stinks.’ I learnt on this blog that His Ex-Excellency would be speaking in London during Russian Week. Not at the Russian Embassy (or Hyde Park Corner), but at the Turkish Cultural Centre on Maple Street off Tottenham Court Road – as part of the Eurasian Book Forum & Literature Festival . Murray’s talk – about his recent biography of Sikunder Burnes , a fellow-Scot granted the sub-title Master Of The Great Game (Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia) – had been arranged ‘at very short notice, so I expect my audience to be pretty intimate.’ Tickets were available via his blog for a princely £11.21 – well worth paying, I thought, to hear, see and possibly meet a man of such moral courage and literary verve. DAREDEVIL JOURNEY If ‘The Great Game’ conjures up anything today, it is probably Rudyard Kipling’s Kim – which first popularized the expression when published in 1901 (the novel is set two decades earlier). The Great Game effectively began in 1828, when the Treaty of Turkmenchay placed Persia under the sway of Russia – whose presence in Central Asia was viewed by the British as a potential threat to their stranglehold on India, established in the 18 th century. Afghanistan became a 700-mile buffer-zone between the two Empires. Alexander Burnes (1805-41) was a key player in the Game’s early years, though nothing predestined him for such a midfield rôle. Burnes hailed from Montrose, 30 miles up the coast from Dundee, and sailed to Bombay in 1821 to join the army of the East Indian Company. Within two years, after teaching himself Persian and Hindustani, he was appointed a translator at the Bombay Court of Appeal. In 1825 he was Persian interpreter for the British field force invading north-west India. His linguistic brilliance, personal charm and sense of initiative saw him marked him down for a career in roving intelligence, and he trained as a ‘surveyor.’ By 1829 he was Assistant Resident in Bhuj, a dusty town in north-west India, and promptly dispatched on a four-month ‘survey’ (spying tour) along what are now the India-Pakistan borderlands. In January 1831 he set off to chart the River Indus – continuing to Lahore and Delhi before crossing Afghanistan to the River Oxus, visiting Bukhara, then veering south-west to the Caspian Sea, Tehran and the Persian Gulf. This epic, daredevil journey, much of it accomplished in Muslim disguise, saw Burnes fêted upon his return to England in late 1833 – and granted audiences with King William IV and the 14 year- old Princess Victoria. He set off back to India in April 1835 after publishing a three-volume, 1200- page travelogue, and 18 months later made a second expedition up the Indus (drafting his will en route ) before heading to Peshawar and through the Khyber Pass. He stayed six months in Kabul (then engagingly spelt Cabool ) before repairing to Simla – the cool British summer capital in the Himalayan foothills – to meet Lord Auckland, Governor General of India, who was set on invading Afghanistan. Burnes vehemently disagreed and offered to resign, but caved in to appeals to his patriotism, and helped lead the troops that entered Kabul in August 1839. ‘I know exactly how Burnes felt’ claims Murray. ‘To turn your back on the country you serve is not easy, above all in a time of war. I faced the same dilemma when ordered as Ambassador to give my support to a vicious dictatorship in Uzbekistan.’ Murray writes that, like Burnes, he was ‘completely unsuited by belief and temperament’ to kow-tow to political diktat – and admits, in his Preface, that he ‘identifies with Burnes to a considerable degree.’ This empathy derives partly from their origins – two East Coast Scots who achieved ‘a hard-won position from a non-privileged background.’ When Murray was named Ambassador to Uzbekistan, ‘following in the footsteps of Burnes was directly on my mind.’ Curiously Murray does not mention Burnes in his autobiographical Murder In Samarkand – though he does cite his hapless compatriots Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly, both beheaded in Bukhara for spying in 1842. Burnes had been cut down by a rebellious mob in Kabul just seven months earlier, aged 36. NEW EMBASSY I ventured out of Warren Street tube station on the chilly morning of 26 November 2016 and found my way to the Turkish Cultural Centre, a forbidding brick building on Maple Street. I had been too late to secure a ticket on-line, so hoped to pick one up on the black market outside the door. Alas! not a tout in sight. Luckily I was able to secure a ticket inside, from the girl at reception, for a bargain £10. I scurried up to the intimate gathering on the third floor. Murray arrived 10 minutes late, clutching a suitcase and clad in a loose white woolly sweater, oozing self-unimportance. One theme of his talk was how events and attitudes recur throughout history – and how little we learn from the past. He likened the Palmerston government’s doctoring of Burnes’ reports from Kabul to the ‘sexed-up’ accounts of Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction under Tony Blair – ‘dishonesty as shocking in 1838 as in 2003.’ Sikunder Burnes includes chapters entitled The Dodgy Dossier and Regime Change . Murray addressed the Eurasian Book Forum without notes. He spoke humorously, densely and fast. The term ‘Eurasia’ being Putinist code for Late Lamented USSR, I was unsurprised that Festival proceedings were conducted in Russian rather than Turkish. Murray paused after each sentence to allow for translation by Mumtoz Kamolzoda, a smouldering Tajik in the James Bond Girl mould. ‘Actually she’s a PhD Student’ reported Murray conspiratorially, after collaring Miss Kamolzoda over lunch. This was served around the corner at Fitzroy House – former home, now shrine to Scientology guru Ron Hubbard (1911-86) – and followed by an awards ceremony wherein David Parry, the messianic Chairman of the Eurasian Creative Guild, ‘bestowed his blessing’ on lucky laureates. Murray was asked to bestow the main prize. ‘You’ve had enough of listening to me so I won’t give a speech’ he declared breezily. ‘The winner is…’ Afterwards we retired to a ground-floor drawing-room (doubling as a temporary cloakroom) for an interview. Murray told me he had come up that morning from Ramsgate, stopping off in Canterbury to pick up a USB-key full of wikileaked material which, after the Eurasian Forum, he was delivering to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy before slipping north on a fast train to Edinburgh. It sounded like a programme scripted by John Buchan. Murray is thrilled to be a member of what he calls ‘The Whistleblower Community’ – inducted therein by Daniel Ellsberg, who released the ‘Pentagon Papers’ in 1971 (revealing nefarious aspects of U.S. conduct during the Vietnam War), and who arranged for Murray to undertake an American speaking-tour after leaving the Diplomatic Service. We also talked about another great game – Dundee United’s 2-0 defeat of Roma in the 1984 European Cup semi-final, which Murray savoured from the Tannadice terraces – and discussed one of Scotland’s all-time greats, Derby County legend Dave Mackay who, according to Murray, ‘had a bit of a pot-belly.’ ‘Barrel-chested’ I retorted. I was keen to ask Murray about Gulnara Karimova, whom I had last seen in Geneva in December 2008, at a Gala Dinner held by the ‘Cercle Diplomatique’ to mark the 60 th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She had been invited, with obsequious cynicism, as Guest of Honour. Murray had recently blogged about rumours of Gulnara’s death. ‘No Western Embassy will ever ask the Uzbek government where Gulnara is’ he snorted. ‘A lot of people would be most happy if she is dead…. The U.K. is the only country where she had a house and major assets but is not wanted by police because, no matter how immoral and twisted your activity, it is probably not illegal in the City of London.’ On first meeting her in Tashkent, Murray had found Gulnara ‘charming and girlish, giggling delightedly’ – a poignant contrast to her likely fate, ‘chained to an iron bedstead in an ex-Soviet mental institution being pumped full of lobotomising chemicals.’ We also, of course, talked about Murray’s new book – his third, after The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known (an account of his time in Africa).
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