Uzbekistan Christians caught in net of persecution

Christians in Uzbekistan are being unjustly fined, imprisoned, and sentenced to hard labor as the government cracks down on all religious groups in reaction to an extremist Islamic movement.

...The government began arresting Christians after radical Muslims bombed targets in Tashkent in March, a Christian who uses the pseudonym John Mark told Religion Today. The terrorists’ targets included the Uzbek president and the headquarters of the national security force, formerly the KGB, he said. "The government is not necessarily anti-Christian, but they still have that communist mindset that all religion is bad." John Mark has visited the country.

...Authorities are applying a harsh new law to close Christian churches and imprison pastors. The country regulates religion more strictly than any other former Soviet state. The 1998 law makes it illegal for nongovernment-approved clergy to preach, bans private religious instruction in Sunday schools and homes, and outlaws churches with fewer than 100 members, Compass Direct News said. Registered churches are forbidden to proselytize or do missionary work. Church leaders who fail to comply with the law face fines many times over the monthly minimum wage and jail terms up to five years.

...Four Pentecostal church leaders in Chirchik, convicted of "violating the procedures for religious meetings," were forced to pay fines equaling 100 times the monthly minimum wage last month, Compass reported. Pentecostal church leader Ibrahim Yusupov was recently imprisoned for conducting missionary activity in Tashkent and, in Bukhara, pastor Na’il Asanov received a five-year sentence for several charges, including "spreading extremist ideas," Compass said. A Christian lay minister is in custody in Nukus, Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic, forpossessing and distributing Christian literature.

...Officials use bureaucratic maneuvers to prevent churches from gaining official registration, Compass said. Yusupov has been trying to get his Tashkent church registered for more than five years and the Pentecostal leaders in Chirchik have been blocked in their attempts to register. The Baptist Union for Central Asia said that only 12 of its 30 churches have been able to gain registration, and leader Pavel Peychev has filed an official complaint with officials in Chirchik and Almalyk over their refusal to register Baptist churches there, Baptist World News said. Church leaders have pledged to continue holding services, but until the churches are registered they are in danger of prosecution. Several Christian leaders in Chirchik, Navoi, Nukus, and Tashkent are in similar situations.

...Police are charging religious leaders with drug-peddling to guarantee longer prison sentences, Compass said. The method has most often been used against Islamic fundamentalists, but Christians are increasingly being targeted, it said. A pastor and two lay leaders in Karakalpakstan are serving lengthy sentences on what local Christians say are false charges of drug-dealing.

...Pastor Rashid Turiyabev has been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for alleged drug trafficking. Co-workers Parhad Yangibayev and Issed Tanishiev received 10 years. An appeals court upheld the ruling July 13 and the men have been taken to a labor camp and their property confiscated, Compass said. The men maintain their innocence. A television station suggested that the charges are more about religion than drugs, and that the men were guilty of deceiving others by "promising to wash away their sins with water" and "glorifying the society of Christ."

...The men appeared "depressed, white, and very thin" during the appeal hearing, Compass said. Their families said the men had been beaten and denied food and water for several days at a time while in prison. "Pray for these men in jail and even more so for their wives," John Mark said. The families are left homeless because the government has confiscated their possessions and they can visit the men only once a month for 10 minutes.

...The government fears an uprising like the Islamic Taleban movement in neighboring Afghanistan. "I sympathize with their situation, because they have a legitimate problem with the terrorists and they have much to lose if they are lose control," John Mark said. "But we need to pray that they will stop seeing religion as the enemy and begin exerting their energies in a way that will solve the problem." The government is much harder on Muslims than on Christians, he said. "Christians may be jailed, but many Muslim leaders have simply disappeared."

...The Central Asian republic is about 60% Muslim. Tashkent, the capital, is the Islamic center of the region. The other Muslim republics in the region look to the Muslim mufti there for guidance. There are about 200,000 Russian Orthodox believers in the country, and evangelicals began working there in the early 1990s, Operation World said. There is a strong Pentecostal presence in Tashkent, and indigenous Christians have carried the gospel to other regions of the country.

(Religion Today, July 26, 1999, www.ReligionToday.com).

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