By C. J. CHIVERS

GERMANTOWN, Tennessee - Sanjar Umarov, his voice raspy and faint, described his long string of months in solitary confinement in Uzbekistan. He would stand in a tiny cell, he said, his back to a wall. He would walk three short steps until his face met the opposite wall. He would turn around. He would repeat this for hours, until exhaustion. Only then would he sleep. “You need to move,” he said.


“One day. Two days.
Three days. Four days.
Five days. Silence.
Nothing. One day you
hear a bird. This is
something. You hear a bird"


“Movement is crucial. ” Mr. Umarov, 54, a physicist, businessman and the leader of an Uzbek reform movement that has largely been smashed, was arrested by the Uzbek authorities in 2005 and promptly sentenced to 14 years in prison on charges he said were contrived. He was granted amnesty late last year after an international campaign declared him a prisoner of conscience . Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, is ranked by human-rights organizations as among the most repressive countries in the world.

A wealthy man, Mr. Umarov has long maintained homes in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, and in Tennessee. In his first interviews, he was not angry, not openly so. He said he did not want to shout broad indictments . He chose another role: that of a witness to his own torture, a survivor with a proposal to make brutality against inmates in Uzbekistan less common . His recommendation was simple.

Uzbekistan, he said, should install video cameras in all of its prisons. During his incarceration, Mr. Umarov was held in several different sites. Where there were cameras, he said, his guards never beat him. By Mr. Umarov’s measure, the torture in Uzbek prisons, widely documented by human rights organizations, is rarely conducted at the order of senior officials. It is, he suggested, a crude tool of the low and middle rank. Mr. Umarov’s story is a tale of the perils of activism in the post-Soviet world. In 2005, he spoke against the crackdown after a prison break and public demonstration in Andijon.

That fall he was arrested and taken away in an unmarked car. He was drugged, beaten, accused of underwriting and directing the Andijon uprising, and charged with financial crimes. By 2006, he had been convicted and shipped to the Kizil-Tepa prison colony. Mr. Umarov said he was tortured 10 or 12 times. Guards beat him on the head and on the soles of his feet.

He was injected with or fed drugs that rendered him inactive or sometimes catatonic. In the summer, he was kept some days in a roofless room without water, under a desert sun. One day, he said, he was held against a bunk by guards and one of his thumbs was bent back and dislocated. He was choked until his vocal cords were damaged.

Before his release, he had spent nearly half of his four years in custody in solitary confinement, without exercise, human contact or stimulation of almost any sort. He recalls a draining emptiness. “Silence,” he said, slowly. “Silence. Silence. No radio. No reading. No writing. Nothing. In the window are four rows of bars. You cannot see the sky.

Nothing. One day. Two days. Three days. Four days. Five days.” “Silence,” he said. “Nothing. One day you hear a bird. This is something. You hear a bird.” His wife is an American citizen. Richard B. Norland, then the American ambassador, wrote to Islam A. Karimov, Uzbekistan’s president, requesting amnesty on humanitarian grounds and emphasizing the American connection in the case. In late 2009, after months of treatment in a prison hospital, Mr.

Umarov was abruptly released. He suggested that his amnesty should be seen l as an indication that Uzbekistan has a chance to progress to something more hopeful . “My case, that I was released, maybe it is a good sign,” he said.