FORUM 18 NEWS SERVICE, Oslo, Norway http://www.forum18.org/

The right to believe, to worship and witness The right to change one’s belief or religion The right to join together and express one’s belief

13 April 2006 KAZAKHSTAN: SOVIET-ERA BAPTIST PRISONER AGAIN PROSECUTED http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=759 Veteran Soviet-era Baptist prisoner Yakov Skornyakov, who is now 77, again faces prosecution for leading an unregistered religious community. Kadyraly Ospanov, public prosecutor of the town of Taraz in southern Kazakhstan, defended the administrative case he launched against Pastor Skornyakov on 30 March. “Kazakhstan’s laws categorically lay down the requirement for a religious community to register and prevent a religious community from operating without registration,” Ospanov told Forum 18 News Service. “I am simply obliged to ensure that the law is observed.” He promised not to imprison Skornyakov because of his age. In the latest of a rising number of Baptist prosecutions, Pastor Abram Pankrats and Valter Zeman were each fined 400 US dollars on 27 March for leading and hosting the unregistered Baptist church in a village in Jambul region. “He serves the Lord and this requires no registration,” the court decision quoted Pankrats as declaring. * See full article below. *

11 April 2006 KYRGYZSTAN: PRESSURE AGAINST SCHOOLGIRLS WEARING HIJABS http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=757 A village school in southern Kyrgyzstan and a city Education Department are attempting to stop Muslim schoolgirls wearing the hijab, Forum 18 News Service has found. “It is unacceptable to attend lessons at a secular school wearing the hijab,” Rozia Tokhtorieva, headteacher of School No. 26 in the village of Distuk, told Forum 18. “We will find ways to make the schoolgirls remove their headscarves.” Not all officials in Jalal-Abad region agree with the ban. “There is no law on a single school uniform in Kyrgyzstan,” Chyrmash Dooronov of the regional Education Administration told Forum 18, describing the ban as “hasty and ill-conceived.” He also noted instances of parents sometimes infringing their children’s legal rights. Commenting on officials’ imposition of extra-legal demands, Gulnara Nurieva of the Committee for the Defence of Muslim Women noted that “people in Central Asia still have a Soviet outlook,” and “follow orders from above rather than the law”.

10 April 2006 RUSSIA: DIVISION OVER HIZB-UT-TAHRIR http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=755 In Russia, there is much disagreement over how to respond to Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Forum 18 News Service has found. Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned as anti-Semitic in Germany, and its Danish spokesman was given a suspended jail sentence for distributing racist propaganda. Rejecting democracy and core human rights such as religious freedom and purporting to reject violence, it has made violently anti-Semitic statements but not publicly called for specific terrorist acts. In Russia, 29 alleged Hizb-ut-Tahrir members have been given jail terms, following a Supreme Court decision banning the organisation as terrorist. Some, such as Aleksandr Verkhovsky of the Sova Centre, think that monitoring and targeted prosecution of concrete cases of incitement to violence or hatred would be a more effective response. Mukaddas Bibarsov, co-chairman of Russia’s Council of Muftis, told Forum 18 that he had only met three sympathisers, suggesting that, instead of prison terms, the Muslim community should challenge such people, but lamented that “there is no [Muslim] intellectual force to explain that (..) everyone must live by the Constitution here.”

10 April 2006 RUSSIA: BAN ON HIZB-UT-TAHRIR NOT TO BE CHALLENGED? http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=756 Following Russia’s ban on Hizb-ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organisation, a Moscow-based human rights organisation has been given an official warning, for publishing a Muslim leader’s statement questioning the ban’s soundness, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. Hizb-ut-Tahrir claims to reject violence – though the sincerity of this rejection has been strongly questioned – and those charged in Russia with membership claim that they are being persecuted for their religious beliefs. Following appeals from Muslims charged with membership, the Memorial Human Rights Centre published an analysis of Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s brochures by Sheikh Nafigulla Ashirov, head of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Asiatic Russia. Ashirov wrote that the brochures contained nothing that “could be viewed as calls to violence,” but rather contained “a theoretical point of view about a path towards creating an Islamic society.” The Moscow Public Prosecutor’s Office then demanded the removal of Ashirov’s analysis from Memorial’s website. Memorial has complied with the demand, and has since filed a legal challenge against it.

12 April 2006 UZBEKISTAN: EXILED IMAM DENIES LINKS TO ARRESTED TASHKENT MUSLIMS http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=758 At least 22 Muslims are believed to have been arrested in the Uzbek capital Tashkent in a crackdown launched in late March. The authorities accuse them of being extremists and claim they had links with exiled imam Obidhon qori Nazarov and another imam, Ruhiddin Fahrutdinov, extradited back to Uzbekistan by the Kazakh authorities last November. Nazarov denies any links to the detainees. “Maybe some of these people heard my sermons or studied with my students,” he told Forum 18 News Service from exile in western Europe. “But in fact the only ‘crime’ all these people committed is that they are devout Muslims.” Human rights activist Surat Ikramov agrees. “The only guilt of the detainees is that they regularly read the namaz [daily prayers],” he told Forum 18.

13 April 2006 KAZAKHSTAN: SOVIET-ERA BAPTIST PRISONER AGAIN PROSECUTED

http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=759 By Igor Rotar, Central Asia Correspondent, Forum 18 News Service <http://www.forum18.org>

On 27 March, massive fines were handed down on Pastor Abram Pankrats for leading an unregistered Baptist congregation and Valter Zeman who owns the home where it meets in the village of Konaeva in Jambul region of southern Kazakhstan. Three days later, the public prosecutor for the nearby town of Taraz, Kadyraly Ospanov, launched a similar administrative case against Baptist pastor Yakov Skornyakov, as well as an investigation into the activities of two of the town’s unregistered Baptist churches. Skornyakov, who is now 77 years old, was imprisoned three times under the Soviet regime for his religious beliefs. “What do you want me to do? Kazakhstan’s laws categorically lay down the requirement for a religious community to register and prevent a religious community from operating without registration,” Ospanov told Forum 18 News Service from Taraz on 12 April. “As the town’s public prosecutor, I am simply obliged to ensure that the law is observed.”

At the same time, Ospanov assured Forum 18 that Skornyanov “will not have significant problems”. “We are not beasts. I am sure that the court will take his age into account. Imprisonment, even for a few days, cannot be a consideration for Skornyakov.” It is not yet known when Skornyakov’s case will be heard by the administrative commission.

Article 375 of the Code of Administrative Offences allows religious believers to be punished for leading or participating in unregistered religious activity, a provision which religious freedom activists and a member of the human rights ombudsperson’s office in the capital Astana have told Forum 18 must be removed for Kazakhstan to meet its international human rights commitments (see F18News 1 March 2006 <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=735>).

Skornyakov’s congregation – like all other congregations of the Baptist Council of Churches – refuses to register on principle with the authorities in any of the post-Soviet countries. They believe such registration leads to unacceptable government interference in their internal affairs. It remains unclear what form Ospanov’s “investigation into how the law of the Republic of Kazakhstan on freedom of religion and of religious associations is applied in the activity of the Council of Evangelical Christian Baptist Churches” will take. Ospanov has named his senior assistant, V. Tsoi, to lead the investigation.

On 27 March, the Shu district court imposed the fines of 51,500 tenge (2,592 Norwegian kroner, 330 Euros or 400 US dollars) each on Pastor Pankrats and Zeman under Article 374-1, part 2, of the administrative code, local Baptists told Forum 18. (The government estimates the average monthly wage at just over 30,000 tenge.) According to the court ruling, of which Forum 18 has received the text, Pankrats “without recognising his guilt” openly declared at his hearing that he leads the church. “He serves the Lord and this requires no registration,” the court decision quotes Pankrats as declaring.

On 28 March Baptists from Taraz wrote to Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev to complain of pressure on their congregations in the town and the rising number of such prosecutions across Kazakhstan. They said the pressure takes the form of visits by representatives of the prosecutor’s office to church services. Officials take photographs or video footage of church members without their consent, write down the names of those at services and draw up reports. They then put together cases alleging administrative offences which they bring to court. Church members are then fined or, on occasion, given short terms of imprisonment.

On 27 February Taraz Specialised Administrative Court sentenced fellow Baptist pastor Pyotr Panfidin to three days’ detention for refusing to pay his fine of 101,955 tenge (4749 Norwegian kroner, 611 Euros or 759 US dollars) imposed last September for refusing to register his congregation. His home has been threatened with confiscation to pay the fine despite the fact that he has nine children and is disabled (see F18News 1 March 2006 <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=735>).

The Baptists also complained of similar recent fines imposed on Sergei Sologub in Merke in Jambul region, Asan Abylkhanov of Karatau in central Kazakhstan, Valeri Pak of Kyzylorda in south-western Kazakhstan, Vasili Kliver of Aktobe in central Kazakhstan and S. Krasnov of Oral (Uralsk) in northern Kazakhstan. All were fined for refusing to register the churches they lead.

In July 2005, President Nazarbayev signed a law amending a range of national security laws (see F18News 15 July 2005 <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=608>). Included was an amendment to the religion law to ban the activity of unregistered religious organisations (Kazakhstan thereby joined two of the other Central Asian republics, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, whose religion laws forbid the activity of unregistered religious organisations in defiance of international human rights commitments).

Even before the adoption of this law, under Article 375 of the administrative code a religious community’s refusal to register was seen as grounds for prosecution. State officials effectively interpreted registration as compulsory. Essentially, the national security amendments simply legalised a long-established practice. (END)

For a personal commentary on how attacking religious freedom damages national security in Kazakhstan, see F18News <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=564>

For more background, see Forum 18’s Kazakhstan religious freedom survey at <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=701> and articles on the 2005 “national security” legal amendments at <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=608> and <http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=625>

A printer-friendly map of Kazakhstan is available at <http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/atlas/index.html?Parent=asia&Rootmap=kazakh> (END)

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