TURKMENISTAN – Less than a month after Baptist pastor Rahim Tashov was released from prison in Turkmenistan, authorities arrested two pastors and raided four of the five Baptist churches in the west-central Asian country Dec. 16 and 17.
Pavel Peychev, president of the Union of Evangelical-Christian Baptists of Uzbekistan and Middle Asia, in a letter to the Baptist World Alliance, has stated, “We are disturbed about the future of the churches and Baptist leaders in the country.”
Baptists in Sweden, meanwhile, have appealed to the president of Turkmenistan, a former republic of the Soviet Union, and the United Nations Center for Human Rights, asking specifically for the release of a Baptist layman, Shageldy Atakov, currently imprisoned on charges of embezzlement of a car.
The Swedish Baptists also protested the razing of a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Turkmenistan.
Speaking from reliable sources, Sven Lindstrom, general secretary of the Baptist Union of Sweden, said the charge against Atakov was influenced by local religious leaders who were angry with him about his conversion to Christianity and his outspokenness in discussing his new faith. By imprisoning Atakov on charges not related to his faith, Lindstrom said from his sources, authorities in Turkmenistan are using tactics of the former Soviet Union in which the state claimed imprisoned pastors were incarcerated for legitimate criminal activity.
“However, by 1988, the Soviet authorities acknowledged all of these pastors to be victims of political repression and subsequently released and apologized to them for the persecution they endured for their faith,” Lindstrom said.
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