SIX MONTHS ago security forces in a sprawling Central Asian city gunned down at least 700 unarmed protesters in the continent’s worst state-sponsored massacre since the horror of Tiananmen Square. Some victims died at once. Others were shot in the forehead by soldiers walking among the corpses looking for the wounded.

European foreign ministers eventually called for a full investigation of the bloodbath in Andijan, in eastern Uzbekistan. The Uzbek Government promised one, and yesterday it delivered its own sort of justice. Fifteen alleged ringleaders of an alleged Islamist revolutionary plot were given jail terms of up to 20 years. Their trial was a sham. Each had confessed before it began, almost certainly under torture. None of those who carried out the killings on Babur Square was charged with any crime, let alone convicted.

Uzbekistan is a big, beautiful, populous, potentially rich, mainly Muslim country in the heart of Asia about which we would all know a great deal more had it not been run into the ground and progressively sealed off from the outside world these past 14 years by President Islam Karimov, a former Soviet apparatchik, now a grotesque embodiment of the truism that power corrupts.

There may have been some Islamist extremists in the crowd on which troops later opened fire. But the overwhelming majority of the victims were innocent civilians seizing what seemed to be a rare chance to vent their desperation over deepening poverty and repression, protected by strength in numbers.

We know this from brave reporting by Uzbek journalists who penetrated the security cordon thrown up round Andijan after the killings, and from survivors who fled to neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. And we know that Karimov has routinely exaggerated the threat to his country from fundamentalists because the leadership of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was wiped out by US forces in Afghanistan in 2001.

Since then the US has leased a giant Uzbek airbase from which Karimov now demands that it withdraw. When it does, Washington will lose any justification for muting its public criticism of his barbarity. Europe never had one. Karimov has made his country a pariah, falling back into a suffocating Russo-Chinese embrace to the dismay of his people. The West must unite to denounce him.