THE belly-dancing mistress of Britain’s controversial former ambassador to
Uzbekistan is to perform her life story on the London stage in an attempt to
change her image.
The British Ambassador’s Belly Dancer, which opens in January at the Arcola
theatre in Hackney, tells the story of Nadira Alieva, the Uzbek dancer who
captured the heart of Craig Murray, causing him to leave his wife and two
children.
But instead of the comfortable life in the West he promised, she became the
target of a smear campaign started after Murray criticised the British
government for using intelligence obtained by torture in Uzbekistan.
“The government was using me as a cheap way of discrediting Craig,” she said.
“I was described as a bimbo, a prostitute, ‘stupidly beautiful’ by
journalists. In fact I have a degree. I was supporting my family.”
Not only was the relationship between the 22-year-old dancer and portly
48-year-old diplomat splashed across the tabloids but Murray lost his job
and the couple ended up in a cramped rented flat in Shepherd’s Bush. So poor
were they that Alieva started lap-dancing at Spearmint Rhino in London’s
Tottenham Court Road, a haunt for City traders entertaining clients.
Now 26, she was a bundle of excitement as she opened the door to the flat
where she and Murray have lived for three years. The tiny living room was a
jumble of books on world affairs and Britney Spears CDs, and the sofas were
old. “It’s not like an ambassador’s residence,” she shrugged. “Sometimes I
say to Craig, ‘You should have just kept quiet.’ He would have been
ambassador in Denmark.”
In the small sitting room are framed certificates for drama courses he paid
for her to take. These gave Alieva the confidence to tell her side of the
story through a one-woman show with voiceovers from Murray. It’s a story
that opens a window onto one of the most repressive regimes in central Asia,
recounting her life as a child drug runner and the two rapes that she
endured, and culminating with her dancing in a nightclub in Tashkent when
Murray walked in.
With her lithe body and exotic looks emphasised by long-laced leather boots,
trilby and wide toothy smile, it is easy to see what attracted him. “Her
body invited sex while her eyes screamed ‘save me’,” he later wrote.
Alieva is equally candid about what she saw in him. “All us girls in the club
hoped to marry foreigners and escape,” she said.
Her story starts in a small town called Djizzak near Samarkand. Her parents
were actors and often out of work. “We weren’t just hungry but starving,”
she recalled. The little money the children earned from collecting plastic
bottles for recycling or hawking chocolate in the streets was not enough and
her father sank into depression. From vodka he moved onto heroin.
“One day he would be happy, saying the world is beautiful; the next he would
turn into a monster and beat us,” she said. At the age of 11 she was his
heroin mule. “We would travel to a village near the border with Afghanistan
where Afghans would bring opium in exchange for food. Because I was a little
girl the police wouldn’t check me.”
At 15, Alieva nearly killed herself one night but her seven-year-old brother
talked her out of it. “That night I made a deal with God,” said Alieva.
“Make me someone, take me out of this place, then I will believe in your
existence.” Shortly afterwards she astonished everyone by getting into
Tashkent University on a scholarship to study English, the only person from
her town to do so. On graduating she began working as an English teacher but
her £8-a-month salary barely covered the rent.
Instead she got a job as secretary to a man who ran two petrol stations but
who, at the end of the second week, raped her.
She quit. But the money she scraped tutoring English and cleaning was not
enough. One day her brother fainted. When she took him to the doctor, they
were told he was suffering malnutrition. The next day she was walking past a
nightclub and saw an advert saying “dancers needed”. “It was basically a
brothel,” she said. But she was earning £150 a month.
Then, one April night in 2003, Murray walked in. “It was my turn to dance and
I could see this man, very English-looking, with a half-smile, looking at
me,” she said. “He wasn't sporty-looking or handsome and I wasn’t
interested. I just wanted my tip. But the manager said you mustn’t refuse
him, he’s the richest man in the place.”
After chatting for a while, Murray suggested that she quit the club and become
his mistress. “I told him, ‘You’re not the first to offer’, and I left.” The
next time Murray returned to the club, it was Alieva’s day off so he gave
another girl £50 for her phone number. Flattered, she agreed to a date.
Although she knew Murray was married, they were soon an item. “I’d gone out
with diplomats before but Craig was different,” she said. “He’d take me to
official dinners and parties and introduce me to people. People were shocked
as they knew I was a dancer but he didn’t care.”
But after they had been seeing each other for four months, he went to London
with his wife and did not return. “I’d started to feel something for him
because of his generosity and gentleness, then, voom, he disappeared,” said
Alieva. “Five months without a word. I thought, right, that’s it with men.”
In fact Murray was defending himself against allegations of corruption,
alcoholism and exchanging visas for sex, part of a dirty-tricks campaign
prompted by a speech he had made the previous year in which he had condemned
the systematic use of torture in Uzbek prisons, highlighting a case of two
men being boiled to death. So stressed was he that he ended up in a
psychiatric ward.
While Murray was away, Alieva was raped again, by an off-duty policeman.
Finally, in January 2004, Murray returned. He told Alieva that he had left
his wife and wanted to marry her. “My heart was cold,” she said. “But he was
alone in the residence and he was unwell so I felt sorry and moved in.”
They had lived together for four months when they came to England on holiday
and Murray was suspended and then diagnosed with a heart complaint and given
six months to live. Unbeknown to Murray, she decided to dance again to
support him and ended up at Spearmint Rhino.
“It was awful,” she said. “They expect you to strip naked for £20. I got more
than that in Uzbekistan for wearing a bikini.
And I had to pay the club £80 a night to dance.”
Murray became suspicious at her late-night disappearances and looked at
websites she had used. “He stormed into the club to see me flirting with a
man and said, ‘Dance for me, I’ll pay you’,” she said. “He’d borrowed money
from a friend. He paid the £80 so I could go home. It was the first time I
saw his tears.”
Alieva told him he had been so busy with his problems he had neglected her. So
when he was cleared by the Foreign Office and given a £250,000 payoff, he
paid for her to study drama at Rose Bruford college, in Kent, from which she
graduated in July, then for summer courses in Shakespeare and Restoration
theatre.
It was discovered Murray’s heart complaint had been misdiagnosed and he was
not about to die. After a failed run for parliament in 2005, today Murray
scrapes a living giving speeches. He is now in Ghana trying to set up a deal
selling electricity.
His account was published in his book Murder in Samarkand. But his
self-confessed whisky-loving womanising ways undermine what was supposed to
be an exposé of the brutal dictatorship of Islam Karimov and Anglo-American
collusion. The book is being turned into a movie with Murray played by Steve
Coogan. There is talk of Alieva being played by Angelina Jolie. But for the
time being she has her own story to tell.
The story is indeed very outspoken, but it has it's purpose. It is not a story about political situation in Uzbekistan (though very much influenced by it), it is a life story of a woman--a woman who faced a lot of pain and injustice, but yet preserved her ability to love, to be compassionate, and to feel the joy of life. Nadira from Tashkent, I undestand that Nadira's life in Uzbekistan is not an exception--rather reality for many other girls and children, but this is a harsh and cruel reality, and until you call this a "banal life", you accept it as a norm instead of fighting against it. Nadira didn't give up to the hopeless destiny and used the resourses she had (beauty, charm and intelligence) to get out of this pit. So, shall we blame her for that?! Both Nadira and Craig are crazy:)rebels in a way--they fight against such negative aspects of our life as corruption, cruelty and indifference. But these aspects became so common that majority started accepting them as a norm. Sad..
Katerina, London, UK
"Is now the time that you realize
you better get out quick cause time is ticking on
to long to fake your smile
but then you sell your soul for a leading role so wear it for a while"
It's a shame, Nadira, it's a shame...
V.T., Iassy,
I think her story is overly dramatized. Entering college to study English is not that hard and certainly she wasn't the only one from Jizzakh entering college. The majority of students in Uzbekistan recieving scholarships are from rural areas. Many girls from rural areas compromise their innocense to pay rent, get grades, get jobs, etc.She might have been less lucky than other girls in Uzbekistan, but her story is just an attempt to romaticize what hundreds of unfortunate Uzbek women go through. It is banal life. This story is so lame, it does nothing to show the real picture of Karimov's dictatorship.
Nadira, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
If I had a story like Nadira's I would find it painful and embarrasing to make it public. However I could put up with the pain and embarrasment if it had a purpose. My problem is I don't understand what good this publicity will do to the people who are not as lucky as Nadira.
Hulya, London,
The squalid aftermath of Murray's career-ending stupidity once again validates an inviolable physiological truth about the male of the species: when the little head gets hard, the big head gets soft. This happens to middle-aged men in all walks of life, not just ambassadors -- and mostly with disastrous career consequences. But Murray seems to think that by shining his moral compass in the media he can somehow get a pass on his conduct in Tashkent.
Wallah, Washington, DC,USA
If you look at this article from British perspectives, it looks both okay and convincing. However, Uzbek audience will not like this story for the following reasons: 1) Why Craig went to a night club when he was in Tashkent? 2) Why Nadira had to work as a 'striptease' in the club in the UK? I can't believe that Uzbek wife is cheaper than an English lap-dancer (equals 'prostitute').
I had a great respect to Craig Murray before ...
bek, Chicago,
I wonder why women are not listed on the commodity and stock markets. It would reflect the reality of their being. As corporations, they could control their own bottom line, at least.
habrow2, ALBANY, usa/ny