One of the (few) points of writing this website is to provide a forum for intelligent thoughts for people interested in how government works or not in practice, especially in the foreign policy area.

This is why I refer quite often to the pronouncements of former UK Ambassador Craig Murray. He purports to tell the world how diplomacy works in practice by drawing on his former seniority in public service, but is often simply wrong or howlingly tendentious. So I feel that I owe it to FCO colleagues and anyone else who might be interested to put on the record an alternative point of view.

Anyway, the ever-meaty Spiegel Online has had a good idea, namely to compare the way Craig worked in Uzbekistan with the way the current German Ambasador Wolfgang Neuen operates there.

Neuen was assigned to Tashkent when he is 62, two decades older than Murray was when he assumed office there; Uzbekistan will be Neuen’s last post:

The career diplomat makes one thing clear from the very beginning: He will not spare Karimov from having to address critical questions behind the scenes, and he too will meet with civil rights activists — to an extent he finds reasonable — who are attempting to strengthen civil society. But all of this is to take place on the quiet. Ambassador Neuen has no intention of openly challenging the regime, or possibly contradicting Berlin’s established policy.

That policy consists of cozying up to the Uzbek dictator. The Germans joined, but repeatedly circumvented, the EU sanctions against Tashkent after the Andijan massacre. The entry ban against leading Uzbek politicians was already lifted in 2005 when Uzbek Interior Minister Zakir Almatov was given a special visa for medical treatment in Hanover. And in October 2009, Germany was the leading force behind the decision to lift the EU weapons embargo against Uzbekistan.

Unfortunately the article does not really deliver on its promise, choosing instead to treat its readers to a long account of lurid episodes from Craig’s book. It offers no substantive thoughts on what the two EU countries were/are trying to achieve in Uzbekistan, or whether either of them have actually succeeded in making a real difference for the better through the efforts of their respective Ambassadors.

It concludes:

The provocateur and the appeaser, the man who refuses to apologize for anything and the man with an explanation for everything, the man who constantly rubs people the wrong way and the man who fits in everywhere — they have never met. But it’s safe to say that the "Maharaja of Whiskeypur" and "Fürst Bismarck Quelle" have nothing but supreme contempt for each other.

Neuen, in his office at the embassy in Tashkent, whispers almost inaudibly when he talks about Murray: "When you work as a diplomat, you have to understand and accept your job description. The current British ambassador is still cleaning up the mess his predecessor left him."

Murray, in his house in London, almost shouts his opinion about Neuen: "Oh, the Germans! In Uzbekistan, they were always the ones who, of all Western countries, were the most interested in appeasing the dictator. Is that what they’ve learned from their history?"

Nice idea. Opportunity missed.