GERMANTOWN, Tenn.

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. If he further shortened his stride, he might manage four steps back. He would repeat this for hours, until exhaustion. Only then would he sleep.

“You need to move,” he said. “Movement is crucial. Otherwise you just sit and lay still. And after some time, you will lose. You will lose. Your spirit depends on your health.”

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, and after requests to Islam A. Karimov, Uzbekistan’s president, by the United States.

Since being released, he has spent nearly a year regaining weight and resuming his life, while contemplating his re-emergence in a public role in the conversation about Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic that 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, held over two days this week at his home outside Memphis, he began his reappearance. If ever there was an Uzbek figure positioned to criticize the authoritarian Uzbek state, Mr. Umarov was it. This was a chance. But he was not angry, at least not openly so. He says he does not want to shout broad indictments, even if his ruined voice might be raised.

Instead, 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, and to allow a modicum of dignity to a government that wants respect.

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. Sometimes they were even well mannered.

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, a habit of some investigators and guards (and prisoners in their employ) to gain confessions, intimidate inmates and maintain leverage over the crowd. He is no apologist for his country. But he said he wanted to stay in the realm of fact, and he described the torture he knew of personally as an expression less of the state than of its thugs.

“I don’t want to say all the guards were bad,” he said. “There are some good ones and some bad ones, and without transparency, the bad ones take advantage of their positions.

“If there were video cameras in the prisons, they may be afraid to use force. They would be polite.”

He allowed the thought to float. Video cameras in corridors, in quiet places and where the interviews take place. “Video cameras, everywhere,” he said. “Like in Wal-Mart.”

MR. UMAROV’S story, no matter its happy ending for him and his family, 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. As near as can be determined in a country that has blocked independent inquiry, hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed that day by gunfire from government troops.

In the months afterward, Mr. Umarov and the movement he founded, Sunshine Uzbekistan, called for accountability, reforms and an open dialogue between the Uzbek state and the population.

Anonymous articles in the Uzbek press labeled him a revolutionary. Under the unwritten rules of police-state politics, this was a bad sign. It pointed to what happened next.

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. There, he was ordered to work in a brick factory. His health failed. In late 2008, when his wife, Indira, was allowed to visit him for the first time in three years, he was a frail, wild-eyed and unwashed man, his skin crisscrossed with scars. He barely recognized her.

His wife is an American citizen. She canvassed the Western ambassadors in Tashkent. Richard B. Norland, then the American ambassador, wrote to Mr. Karimov, 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.

BEFORE the intervention, Mr. Umarov said, he had been tortured 10 or 12 times.

His accounts describe the familiar, shabby behavior found in some of the world’s grimmer jails. 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 winter, as a punishment, he was locked with other prisoners in a room without heat or warm clothing. The prisoners huddled together for days to fight off hypothermia.

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 eyes formed a slight squint. A slight smile rose. An undisciplined guard might make a mistake, accidentally providing a recollection of human life. “Sometimes a guard will have a radio,” he said. From down the corridor, in the distance, a noise will drift. “You will hear a song. It is something special. You are very happy.”

Now his life is different. Over dinner on Wednesday, his wife told of his new love. “Ice cream!” she declared. “Ice cream. Now that he is home, he eats so much ice cream. I tell him, ‘Sanjar, you should not eat so much ice cream.’ ” Mr. Umarov smiled guiltily.

After dinner, at his front step, he suggested that his amnesty should be seen less as a personal story than as an indication that perhaps Uzbekistan has a chance to progress to something more hopeful than what it has been. “My case, that I was released, maybe it is a good sign,” he said. He pressed his proposal once more. “Video cameras,” he said. “These would be a good step, too.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/world/europe/25umarov.html?_r=3&sq=umarov&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all