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Foreign Affairs and Defence

The Minister will have been briefed about my mention of the region in yesterday’s debate. I pointed out that we have no embassy in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, where refugees are flooding in. Who, on behalf of the United Kingdom Government, is in Kyrgyzstan today? Are we going to open an embassy there, or are this Government and Sir Michael Jay, the head of the Foreign Office, going to persist in the absurdity of not having an embassy in that most critical part of the world, which is affected by events in Uzbekistan? When there was a velvet revolution six weeks ago, we had no British presence there.