Dirty Diplomacy by Craig Murray

Author:Craig Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2006-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

Pinafore, Battlefield and Baseball Bat

I WAS FEELING PRETTY LOW. GETTING SO CLOSE TO THE DEATH OF Mirsaidov’s grandson, and a nagging sense that it was my fault, had hit me hard. My sore leg was causing constant pain. I had lost my faith in my own country and in the job I was doing. The issues of torture and intelligence were causing me a real crisis of conscience. I was facing unmistakable personal hostility from my immediate management. Intellectual company was in short supply, and I didn’t have any sympathetic senior colleague with whom I could talk over these problems. I had to cope with this while living in the landscape of human misery caused by one of the worst regimes on earth.

In novels, people survive a whole series of dramatic and traumatic events and come through them all, guns blazing. They never crack up under the strain. I suppose that’s why they are heroes, and why it is fiction. Anyway, I couldn’t crack up yet, as I was about to enter the busiest period of my professional life. So were the rest of the embassy staff.

In the next four weeks our tiny staff had to prepare for chairing the EBRD AGM, to put on the British Days festival in five cities, organize a visit by a senior British minister and to run the queen’s birthday party with a guest list of over two thousand. I had miscalculated one vital factor. I had been used to working with teams of dynamic and ambitious young graduates, wedded to the job and prepared to give their everything at all hours. Now I was having to bring along lower-flying, less ambitious staff who were not easy to inspire. I ended up doing much more myself than I expected. I also found it was the local staff who best rose to the challenges.

There had been changes in staff. Dave Muir had left and been replaced by Steve Brown, another ex-army man, and his beautiful ethnic Russian wife from Kazakhstan. Jackie had left and been replaced by Angela Clarke. Angela was a single mother with two young sons, and she had taken on a lot by coming to live somewhere as difficult as Tashkent.

I had initiated a major program of new and better staff housing. We had also taken on quite a number of extra Uzbek staff. Steve Brown had two new assistants, Ulugjan and Lilya. I had finally persuaded Chris to take on an assistant, an earnest young man named Talat. I had signaled to London that, if I was going to stay in Tashkent, they would have to put the embassy on a better funding basis and update the communications equipment. One of the issues that had prompted this was a complaint from London that the embassy was not following all proper procedures in accounting, procurement and recruitment. Quite simply, the embassy had never had enough staff to carry out the FCO’s bureaucratic requirements.

I AM A GREAT FAN of cultural diplomacy—reaching the population of a country, and presenting them with a connection with the U.

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