Parley Questions Credentials of Uzbek Delegates Over Bribery Probe

MOSCOW â€”  In a move believed to be unprecedented, the credentials of members of an official delegation to the national gathering of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party have been questioned, a leading party official said Wednesday.

The party leader from the Soviet Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Rafik N. Nishanov, admitted that members of his republic’s delegation of 178 are being scrutinized by the party conference’s credentials committee following allegations in a leading national magazine that some members were under investigation for taking major bribes.

The article, in the magazine Ogonyok, was written by the Moscow magistrate who has led a broad-based investigation into official wrongdoing in the republic.

The magistrate’s charge--that Uzbek officials under investigation for bribery were elected as delegates although prosecutors had notified the relevant party organizations--led to demands for clarification Wednesday.

“The issue was raised at the conference, and the credentials committee is looking into the charges,� Nishanov told a news conference here. Denying knowledge of criminal suspects on his delegation, he said the committee will have a report today.

The charges follow several other controversies surrounding delegate selection to the party conference, but the Uzbeks are believed to be the only group under scrutiny.

They also are the latest whiff of scandal in a region notorious for the extent of its official-level corruption. The illegal activities of one former Uzbek party boss, Sharaf Rashidov, became so legendary that “Rashidov syndrome� has become a Soviet synonym for official corruption.

Buried in 1983 in a place of honor near the center of the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, Rashidov’s remains were removed to a remote family plot following Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s rise to power.

The republic remains an area slow to warm to Gorbachev’s reforms. In his opening speech to the party conference Tuesday, Gorbachev singled out Uzbekistan’s agricultural sector as an “element of stagnation . . . traced to the attitude, the confidence of the managers and their inability to run things the new way.�

In the course of the hourlong news conference with eight Uzbek delegates, Nishanov said three former party officials, sentenced to death for their part in a major cotton-buying scandal, had won a reprieve from the country’s highest legislative body, the Supreme Soviet. Their punishment was reduced to 20 years in prison.

Nonexistent Cotton

The three had helped run a scam that left Moscow paying for nearly 1 million tons of nonexistent cotton from the Central Asian republic, the country’s largest cotton producer.

Ten other party functionaries were still under investigation in connection with the scandal, Nishanov said. Two Uzbek officials were executed two years ago and a third committed suicide in connection with the affair, which has led to a major purge of the republic’s regional party.

Although the extent of corruption was believed to have been dealt with in the early 1980s, when senior officials in Moscow discovered that the inflated cotton harvest figures failed to tally with satellite photos of the area under plantation, the region has consistently been a problem under Gorbachev.

Much as in some other large Asian republics, local Communist party leaders have resented his reform as the direct challenge to their traditional dominance.

Last January, Gorbachev sacked Nishanov’s predecessor as Uzbek party leader on the same day that the party daily newspaper Pravda denounced the Uzbek Politburo en masse for undermining the Soviet leader’s reform.

Nishanov, a 63-year-old former ambassador to Sri Lanka and Jordan, leapfrogged the entire Politburo into the top party position.

But in a region where intrigue is a way of life and corruption traditionally has been recognized as a growth industry, habits appear hard to break. According to one report, election of the Uzbekistan delegation to the party conference was among the most tightly controlled of all.

While delegations from many republics are sprinkled with rank-and-file party members, the representatives from the Uzbek party are said to be almost exclusively from the hierarchy.

In addition to its chronic difficulties with corruption, the republic struggles with a myriad of other problems, including a rapidly unfolding environmental crisis caused by drawing so much water from the Aral Sea to irrigate its cotton crop that the sea is rapidly shrinking.

“This is the greatest mistake of the period of stagnation,� Nishanov said. “We developed cotton without looking up the water need.�