A Sort-of Love Story, Uzbekistan Style*

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  02.05.08 | 5:00 PM ET

imageUzbekistan has never been high on my must-see list, despite its Silk Road mystique and stunningly beautiful architecture. Maybe I’ve read too many dreary news reports about soldiers mowing down unarmed protesters and police boiling alive terrorism suspects. But a strange profile this weekend in The Washington Post made this hard-to-love land alluring in a flinty, James Bond-meets-Graham Greene sort of way.

The story goes like this: a married British diplomat in his 40s falls in love with an Uzbek belly dancer in her 20s. Craig Murray gets fired from his post for speaking out about human rights violations by Uzbek authorities, leaves his wife and children and moves with Nadira Alieva to London.

Now the couple lives on dwindling money in London, where they re-tell their respective Uzbek stories in memoir (him) and belly-dancing stage play (her).

Though the usual Eastern bloc-meets-Western-wealth stereotypes abound here, this is no simple love story. Nadira ends her play not with pronouncements of love for Craig but with a declaration that she is a “free woman.”

British director Michael Winterbottom (“A Mighty Heart”) bought the movie rights to Murray’s book. (How about Angelina Jolie and Fred Thompson as the leads?)

Any chance this will help Uzbekistan’s anemic tourism industry?

* Edited Feb. 6: for clarity, per comment below.

Related on World Hum:
* Keeping up With the ‘Stans

Photo by AudreyH via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Tags: Europe, England, London

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


4 Comments for A Sort-of Love Story, Uzbekistan Style*

poetryman69 02.05.08 | 9:46 PM ET

love in the Uzbexs…

gulzik 02.06.08 | 1:32 PM ET

would be great if only this case could help our anemic tourism sector, but…

Tony 02.06.08 | 3:53 PM ET

Wintebottom actually bought the rights to Murray’s book ‘Murder in Samarkand’ released in America under the title ‘Dirty Diplomacy’, not Ms. Alieva’s one-woman play.

Joanna Kakissis 02.06.08 | 7:25 PM ET

Thanks Tony. We changed the text to reflect the clarification.

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