Nearly two months after five church members were imprisoned
for ten days and three fined, the local authorities are still preventing a
local Baptist church from meeting for worship in the village of Khalkabad in
the Pap district of Namangan region, in Uzbekistan's section of the Fergana
valley. "Police officers come to virtually every meeting we hold,"
church member Aleksandr Tyan – one of those imprisoned in August - told Forum
18 News Service in Khalkabad on 7 October. "The police are also stopping
our fellow-believers in Fergana from coming to Khalkabad."
Forum 18 has been unable to find out from officials why they are still
preventing the church from meeting. The divisional police officer for
Khalkabad, Bahtier, even refused to give Forum 18 his full name. "I have a
junior job. Why do you want to talk to me? Go to Pap, and talk to my
superior," he told Forum 18 on 7 October in Khalkabad. However, Bahtier
admitted that the police were indeed still attending the Baptists' meetings.
"We are doing this at the request of the Baptists' parents, who are
unhappy that their children have changed their faith," he claimed.
"Personally, I cannot understand these Baptists either. Why do they think
it is a sin to watch television and read newspapers?"
The most recent problems for the church began on 15 August, when police
arrested eight church members – five men and three women - during a service in
a home in Khalkabad. The following day the Pap district criminal court
sentenced the five men –E. Kim, S. Stanislavsky, N. Zuldikarov, and O.
Solijonov, in addition to Tyan - to 10 days' imprisonment, with each being
ordered to pay 816 sums for each day of detention in temporary cells in
Namangan (63 Norwegian kroner, 8 Euros or 8 US dollars for the total of 10
days). The women Baptists, I. Boiko, N. Stanislavskaya and the owner of the
apartment A. Osnovina, were each handed down a fine of 6,440 sums (51 Norwegian
kroner, 6 Euros or 7 US dollars) (see F18News 25 August 2003).
Tyan told Forum 18 that although initially he and his four fellow Baptists had
been ordered to pay for their detention in temporary cells, the authorities had
now retracted this demand, although they were still forbidding them to meet.
The Khalkabad congregation belongs to the Council of Churches (or unregistered
Baptists), which split from the All-Union Council of Baptists in 1961, when
further state-sponsored controls were introduced by the then Baptist
leadership. It has refused state registration ever since in all the post-Soviet
republics where it operates, believing that such registration leads to
unwarranted state interference. According to one of its pastors in Moscow, it
has 3,705 congregations throughout the former Soviet Union.
Khalkabad is a village attached to a rubber factory. The average monthly wage
for a factory worker is around 25,000 sums (180 Norwegian kroner, 22 Euros or
25 US dollars), and even this is only paid with a six month delay. When the
Soviet Union collapsed, most of the factory workers were ethnic Russians and
today the majority of them have emigrated to Russia. Almost all the people who
remain in the village are pensioners and alcoholics.