Uzbekistan new indd

parties, including the Birlik chairman, fled the coun-
try. As a part of a political crackdown, conspiracy 
charges were issued against five Erk leaders who had 
been living in exile since 1993. In June 1994, Uzbek 
security services seized dissidents Murod Zurayev 
and Erkin Ashurov from exile in Almaty and took 
them to Uzbekistan to stand trial along with other 
dissidents. The Supreme Court found the seven dissi-
dents guilty of “participating in a conspiracy to forc-
ibly overthrow the constitutional government.” The 
government used this trial as a part of an ongoing 
effort to discredit opposition groups by linking them 
with extremism.
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It is hardly a coincidence that the exit visa was 
launched in a time of political repression, when many 
opposition figures fled to Russia, Turkey, and the 
United States, and continued to be active abroad. In 
1995, the Uzbek authorities closed seven major news-
papers on the grounds that they were “disloyal to the 
current regime.”
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 Some publications were banned 
outright, such as Mustaqil Haftalik and Erk, the news-
papers of the Birlik and Erk opposition groups respec-
tively. Individuals have been imprisoned for merely 
possessing one of these newspapers.
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 However, both 
movements continued to operate from abroad. In ad-
dition to the new law on the media, a law on political