On 21 June, a member of the Asia Protestant church Nelya Denisova
received a summons to the National Security Service offices (NSS, the former
KGB) in the Uzbek capital Tashkent, Denisova told Forum 18 News Service on 10
July in Tashkent. Denisova claims that NSS officer Vadim Negreyev spent four
hours interrogating her about the activities of the Association of Independent
Churches, of which the Asia church is a member. "Just don't publish an
article about our conversation on the Internet," Negreyev told Denisova at
the end of the interrogation. "No-one here tortured or raped you! We just
had a friendly chat."
The Asia church was founded in Tashkent in 1994, as a result of work by
American missionaries. The church has gradually become active in Tashkent
region, Karakalpakstan in north-western Uzbekistan, the Fergana Valley in the
east of the country, and in the Surkhandarya region of southern Uzbekistan.
Today, the church has 27 affiliates, which together make up the Association of
Independent Churches, with around 1,500 members.
"This is far from the first time that members of our church have been
summoned by NSS officers," the Association's co-ordinator, Vladimir
Zhikhar, told Forum 18 on 10 July. He believes the main reason for the NSS
interest in the church's activity is the fact that it operates without registration.
"We are not fundamentally opposed to registration, but so far at least we
have not managed to register our church anywhere," Zhikhar told Forum 18.
The Asia church tried to register in Tashkent in 2001, but was unable to gain
the agreement of the mahalla committee (a mahalla is a district of a city),
which is required for registration. The church tried twice in 2001 and 2002 to
register in the town of Almalyk, 50 kilometres (30 miles) south of Tashkent,
but was refused on the grounds that its pastor had not received specialist
religious education, as required by Article 8 of Uzbekistan's religion law.
"I don't presume to say that the authorities are deliberately refusing us
registration, but this problem will have to be resolved in the end," Zhikhar
told Forum 18. He said that in the near future all 27 pastors of the
Association of Independent Churches plan to visit the Uzbek government's
Committee for Religious Affairs in Tashkent to ask the leaders of the committee
for help in registering their churches.
However, the chairman of the committee for religious affairs, Shoazim
Minovarov, said he had never heard of the Association. "Having 27
unregistered churches functioning illegally is too many," he told Forum 18
in Tashkent on 14 July. He contrasted this number with the 50 or so Protestant
churches that have registration in Uzbekistan. "Let them come to us and
we'll discuss their situation," he declared.