In the latest of a series of raids on Protestant Christians
in Uzbekistan's western autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a group of
police officers and officers of the secret police, the National Security
Service, entered an apartment on 28 February in the town of Khojali, a suburb
of the Karakalpak capital of Nukus. A Baptist who asked not to be named told
Forum 18 News Service that ten Baptist women of the local ethnicities, Kazakh
and Karakalpak, had gathered in the apartment for a Christian meeting. They
were held for a total of 27 hours before being freed.
The women were taken to the Khojali police station where they were insulted for
being Christians. Illogically, the police also called the Baptist women
"Wahhabis", a label widely applied in Central Asia to Islamic
fundamentalists. The women were held at the police station for ten hours
(although under Uzbek law the police may not hold anyone for more than three
hours without pressing charges). Also the women were illegally held in a cell
with male prisoners. After ten hours the women were sent to a special reception
centre - an investigation prison where vagrants and the homeless are held while
their identities are established - and were held there all night.
A senior local police officer denied that there had been anything improper in
the way the Baptists had been treated. "The women were detained for
identification, since none of them had any documents," the deputy police
chief in Khojali, Janabai Ametov, told Forum 18 from Nukus on 24 March.
"They were held for not more than ten minutes at the police station and
then they were sent to the investigation prison. Nobody insulted them and there
were no violations of the law by the police."
Karakalpakstan is a region of Uzbekistan where the rights of religious
minorities are violated particularly frequently. Only one Christian church the Emmanuel Full Gospel Church has been able to gain registration in the
autonomous republic. Christians of local ethnicities Karakalpaks and Kazakhs
(historically both Islamic peoples) are the primary target of government
harassment.
In one incident earlier this month in the town of Muinak in northern
Karakalpakstan, the police burst into a private house for a second time where
two ethnic Kazakh Protestants were talking. In a separate raid last December,
the two men were taken to the police station where they were tortured (the
police put gas masks on them and closed off the air supply) in an attempt to
force them to sign a statement that they had been preaching to each other.
Several days later the two men were sentenced to five days' imprisonment (see
F18News 17 March 2003).
A recent interview about religious minorities in the Russian-language newspaper
Vesti Karakalpakstana (News of Karakalpakstan) with a leading specialist from
the hakimiat (administration) of Nukus city, Raftdin Turdymyranov, is
indicative of official attitudes (see F18News 12 March 2003). The title of the
interview is telling: "Unlawful activity continues. If we sell our faith,
then what sort of people are we?" It is noteworthy that Turdymyranov calls
the Protestant churches, along with the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Baha'i
community, "sects" (in Russian this word has very negative
connotations). The tone of Turdymyranov's discussion with the journalist,
Khojamuratova, demonstrates that both consider religious minorities an evil
that threatens the population of Karakalpakstan.
Accusing Protestants of "Wahhabism" is also typical for
Karakalpakstan. In 1999 drugs were planted on three Protestants of local
ethnicity, who were then sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. They were freed
under international pressure after six months, though only after signing a
petition for a pardon. During their trial Karakalpak television broadcast a
report about them in which they were called "Wahhabis".