International and local media interest in the case of two
Jehovah's Witnesses fined in April for leading a religious meeting in the town
of Tursun-Zade, 60 kilometres (35 miles) west of the capital Dushanbe, has
provoked serious concern among the local authorities, Forum 18 News Service has
learned from sources in the town. The authorities had hoped that the case
against them – first reported by Forum 18 on 28 April - would go unremarked by
the outside world.
The two Jehovah's Witnesses - Grigori Putenkov and Sukhrob Maksudov - have
complained that a local television station portrayed them as criminals in a
report broadcast on 30 April. "Our town is quite small and this programme
has damaged our image," Maksudov told Forum 18 on 21 May. "We do not
think of ourselves as criminals."
However, a producer at Tursun-Zade denied that the report had been biased.
"We heard about the court case against the Jehovah's Witnesses from a
broadcast by the Tajik service of Radio Liberty, which in its turn quoted Forum
18," Firuz Khalikov told Forum 18 from Tursun-Zade on 21 May. "We
found your site on the Internet, translated the article from English and on the
basis of that we showed an objective, neutral television report."
On 20 April several police officers raided the flat where around 40 local
Jehovah's Witnesses were meeting, instructing all those present to write
statements. Putenkov and Maksudov were taken to the town's police station,
where officers started to insult them and struck Putenkov several times. On 24
April the town court fined each of the two men five times the minimum monthly
wage (some 57 Norwegian kroner, 8 Euros or 8 US dollars) under Article 211,
part 2 of the administrative code, which punishes "violation of the law on
giving religious instruction" (see F18News 28 April 2003).
Maksudov reported that on 3 May he and Putenkov lodged an appeal against the
town court sentence to the Supreme Court in Dushanbe. "We hope the
authorities will not take it out on us because our case has unexpectedly
received such wide publicity," he told Forum 18. "We do not seek
confrontation and hope that in the end we will come to an understanding with
the authorities."
No date has yet been set for the Supreme Court hearing, but the Jehovah's
Witnesses expect it to be in about a month's time.