I guess I had the dispatches question the wrong way round.
To trigger a dispatch you need to get either of your two scoring figures onto a multiple of 5. Once someone has taken one of your meeples prisoner you have a away of triggering a dispatch at the cost of 3 points (I claim!). A dispatch is only guaranteed to score 2 points so HiG missed an opportunity to really mess up there and they avoided creating a small milking exploit. However this is well worth it so long as you have a good chance of getting more than 3 points or an extra tile. And the order of the dispatch cards is in principle memorizable.
From what I can interpret by reading the CAR, the conclusion would be that 'moving forward" in the rule section would also be applied when moving backwards.
This would render all your example outcome to be true. I.e. the answer is yes.
My answer is based on other games whereas 'forwards' has been expanded to 'moves anywhere', both official and unofficial, which seems logical.
I think, but I am not going to double-check until later, that the logic breaks down in some places. My reading of the robber rules is that they are intended to make sure that robbers are never stranded which is why I think robbers can be forced to move back However they are not obliged to accept negative scores and just saying "forward" can be expanded to "in both directions" might imply that.