For the past four months, the administration in Andijan, a
city in the Uzbek section of the Fergana valley near the border with Kyrgyzstan,
has failed to give Pentecostal pastor Bakhtier Tuichiev the letter of
recommendation required for the regional justice department to consider
registering the church. "Officially, no-one has refused me," Tuichiev
told Forum 18 News Service from Andijan on 28 May. "It is simply that
every day I am told to come back tomorrow. I am sure the authorities are quite
deliberately dragging their feet."
However, an official of the Andijan city hakimiat (administration) denied that
there was any deliberate obstruction. "We are certainly not trying to drag
out the registration of the church that Tuichiev leads," Izatullo
Khojayev, a specialist for work with public organisations, told Forum 18 from
Andijan on 29 May. "We have been holding a sports competition, and have
not had the time to devote to this issue. I have already told Tuichiev that we
will deal with his application very soon."
Tuichiev told Forum 18 he had been summoned by the regional police in January
and April this year and warned that if the church continued to operate without
registration, he would be brought to court under the code of administrative
offences. He maintains that police officers keep watch on the church entrance
at each service.
Pastor Tuichiev, whose congregation belongs to the Full Gospel Church, has been
trying to gain registration for the past few years (see F18News 14 March 2003).
In February 2002 he received the authorisation required for the church to
operate from the mahalla committee (the mahalla is a district of a city), and
submitted registration documents to the city hakimiat. However, the hakimiat
did not want to register the church. In March 2002 a meeting of mahalla
residents established that it was "inexpedient for a Christian church to
operate".
Last September, a group of people who claimed to be BBC and CNN journalists
visited Tuichiev, but the pastor believes they were in fact officers of the
National Security Service (the former KGB).