A Tyrant’s Charter

The New Statesman
23 May 2005

In an era when TV determines an event’s importance,
the massacre in the Uzbek town of Andijan (see page
14) has received less coverage than it deserves.
Camera access denied, few stories supplied. The
reported death toll of more than 700 constitutes one
of the worst cases of bloodshed involving government
troops and civilian protesters since Tiananmen Square
in 1989. With such staunch friends in the White House,
Islam Karimov, one of the most unpleasant
cast-offs of the Soviet era, knew he could act with
impunity.

The Uzbek president has done George W Bush many a
service since 9/11 – protection of gas supplies, an
airbase for sorties into Afghanistan and beyond, and a
willing venue for a spot of offshore torture. We may
be bystanders, but we are not innocents. The roots of
this barbarism can be traced back to the US Congress,
to January 2002 and Bush’s invocation of the axis of
evil. By selecting three targets for his `war on
terror’ – Iraq, Iran and North Korea at the time,
although, like any hit parade, countries go up and
down – the president did not herald an era of regime
change for despots the world over.
`Democratisation’, aka `liberal interventionism’, when
applied consistently and through international
organisations, could be embraced by the left. But the
agenda is based on a single criterion: US interest.
The world is where it was during the realpolitik of
the cold war, except now there is one superpower doing
as it pleases. The UK response? A statement
of concern a tad less weaselly than that of the US –
for a regime whose human rights abuses are documented
even by the Foreign Office. If the moral courage of
Jack Straw and Tony Blair had matched their political
guile, from Iraq to Uzbekistan, Britain’s standing in
the world would have been enhanced, not diminished, in
recent years. Now, as long as you are on the right
side of the `war on terror’, there is no better time
to be a torturer and tyrant.