bibles and literature were confiscated as part of a government led crack-down targeting Protestants, reports said Thursday July 10.
News about their trial, scheduled for July 20, came five months after a raid on their small Adventist congregation in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan in north-western Uzbekistan, reported the Forum 18 News Service (F18News).
Officers from the National Security Service, the former KGB, burst into an apartment and confiscated several hundred leaflets setting out Adventist doctrines as well as eight Bibles in a raid resembling the Communist era, church sources said.
The officials wrote down the names of the dozen Adventists present who were later fined 23 US dollars, four times the minimum monthly wage – under controversial religious legislation, F18 News observed.
GOVERNMENT BACKS CRACK-DOWN
Government officials have defended the action, saying that Christian literature in the Kazakh language should not be distributed in Uzbekistan.
"I did indeed write that the Kazakh-language brochures confiscated from the Adventists, which were published in Turkey, should not be distributed in Uzbekistan," F18 News quoted the religious expert of Karakalpakstan’s cabinet, Nurula Jamalov, as saying.
But "Kazakhs make up around 30 per cent of the population of Karakalpakstan, making them as numerous as the Uzbeks and Karakalpaks," noted F18News, which closely monitors religious persecution.
"EXPERT ANALYSIS"
Jamalov said he had returned to the police all the literature that had been sent "for expert analysis". He denied that Bibles were confiscated, but F18News said it had established that they have not been returned to the Adventist Christians.
"In Uzbekistan there is an unwritten directive: "If you are Uzbek, you must be Muslim, if you are Russian, you must be Orthodox," F18News commented. Other churches and religious groups are therefore persecuted across the former Soviet state of about 24 million people, human rights watchers say.
