Uzbek Dissidents Get Prison Terms : Central Asia: Sentences of six follow vote extending president’s rule. They indicate more repression ahead.

Six dissidents in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan have been sentenced to prison in a renewed political crackdown by President Islam A. Karimov after a referendum that prolonged his dictatorial rule.

The Supreme Court convicted them on charges of sending Uzbek youths to Turkey for military training to overthrow Karimov. The prison terms, meted out with the verdict last week and reported Wednesday, range from five to 12 years.

Uzbek and international human rights monitors condemned the five-month trial as part of a longstanding pattern of Soviet-style repression in the Central Asian republic. They said the government made up for a weak case by beating the defendants into making confessions and by depriving them of legal counsel until after the trial had started.

The outcome indicates that Karimov’s regime, after a brief letup before the March 26 referendum and despite his overwhelming victory, intends to keep a muzzle on political rivals, dissidents and the press.

“They are moving again to paint every critic as a criminal,” said Rachel Denber, Moscow representative of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki.

Uzbek officials have emphasized repeatedly that their 22 million compatriots enjoy peace among diverse ethnic groups and care little for politics.

The government says 99% of the voters approved Karimov’s cancellation of the 1997 presidential election, allowing him to stay in office until the year 2000.

A former member of the Soviet Politburo, Karimov retained power in Uzbekistan after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

While his impoverished new nation’s cotton- and mineral-based economy has stabilized with help from the International Monetary Fund, its output is stagnant, and food rationing is still in force.

Karimov is wary of economic and political freedoms.

All opposition movements and news media are banned. Leaders of two persistent groups, Berlik and Erk, are imprisoned or exiled. It was during an attempt by Erk activists to distribute their party’s newspaper last spring that five of the seven defendants landed in jail.

The other two--Murod Dzhorayev, a former member of Parliament and former mayor of the city of Muborak, and Erkin Ashurov, a former tea plantation manager--were picked up June 17 in the style to which Uzbek dissidents say they have become accustomed: They were followed to neighboring Kazakhstan by Uzbek security agents, then reportedly kidnaped, beaten and driven to their homeland. Dzhorayev reportedly made the trip naked, strapped to the hood of a car, and suffered severe sunburn.

State witnesses at the trial included several young Uzbek men who had been sent by Erk for what the party called business and political training courses in Turkey. Some of them testified that they had been trained there for terrorism and had practiced in combat in Chechnya, the breakaway Russian republic, on their way home.

Dzhorayev was sentenced to 12 years in prison; his brother, his driver and Ashurov to 10 years each, and two other Erk party activists to six and five years. A seventh defendant, the party’s secretary, got a three-year suspended sentence.

Abdumannob Polatov, exiled chairman of the Society for Human Rights of Uzbekistan, admitted that an Erk leader not on trial had helped the government’s case by declaring in Turkey that violence might be needed to solve Uzbekistan’s problems.

But, in a statement on the verdict, Polatov added that the “legal and political grounds for such charges are far from adequate.”

Other rights monitors agreed, noting that none of the men had been put on trial for taking up arms.

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Hopes for political liberalization fluttered in January, when government and opposition leaders sat together at a seminar in Washington. The trial was suspended as the referendum approached, and Ibragin Bureyev, arrested last fall after announcing plans for a new opposition party, was freed.

But after the referendum, the trial resumed and abruptly concluded. Bureyev again turned up in Uzbek police custody Monday, accused of possessing firearms and illegal drugs.

His family claimed that the police who raided his home found only notebooks and papers, including the latest damning report on Uzbekistan by Human Rights Watch/Helsinki.