Russia & Former USSR

Police officers from Uzbekistan’s criminal investigation department burst into the home of a Protestant pastor in northwest Uzbekistan last week, disrupting 12 people as they were having lunch together. The pastor and another believer were charged with “breaking the laws on teaching religion.”

There was concern Saturday, April 8, over the future of Christian radio in Russia after the Ministry of Culture and Mass Communications refused to renew the radio license of a key evangelical radio station, an official said.

An influential evangelical mission group in the former Soviet Union expressed concern Wednesday, March 29, over a “crackdown” on Christian believers in Belarus following the re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko.

Sergey Shavtsov, a lawyer and prominent human rights activist, was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 days imprisonment in Belarus for organizing an “illegal religious activity,” a UK-based religious rights group said Monday, March 27.

Belarus is ruled by Soviet-style totalitarian dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenko. Popularly elected in 1994, he has since then maintained his grip on power through propaganda, repression, fraud and violence. In late 2002 Belarus adopted the most repressive Religion Law in all Europe. Unregistered religious groups are illegal, and registration is severely restrictive.

The persecution of Protestants continues throughout Uzbekistan, says Igor Rotar writing for Forum 18 News Service (www.forum18.org).

Pastor Georgi Vyazovsky of Christ’s Covenant Reformed Baptist Church in Belarus was freed from a Minsk prison for Administrative Violations Code offenders shortly after midday local time today (13 March) on completion of a ten-day sentence for conducting religious worship in his own home.

The Washington, DC-based human rights group, International Christian Concern (ICC) www.persecution.org, has recently been informed that the government of Azerbaijan has destroyed an irreplaceable medieval Armenian Christian cemetery in the Djulfa region of Nakhichevan.

A so-called “documentary” televised regionally in Uzbekistan last summer has left entire communities convinced that a Protestant congregation is an “extremist” group worse than fundamentalist Islam.

Former Muslim residents in a remote village of the ex-Soviet union republic of Uzbekistan are being beaten, publicly humiliated and forced from their homes and jobs for converting to Christianity, a news agency investigation religious persecution said Friday, October 21.