of an unregistered Pentecostal church have been arrested in Azerbaijan and given fifteen-day prison terms, Keston News Service reported Monday January 21.
KNS qouted Protestant sources in the Azerbaijani capital Baku as saying that the two – Yusuf Farkhadov and Kasym Kasymov – were detained in Sumgait, a town close to Baku, when police and National Security Ministry officers raided a prayer meeting last Friday January 18 in a private flat.
"All they were doing was praying," one church member told KNS, which monitors religious persecution. The Azerbaijani authorities seem intent on closing down many Protestant churches, with the majority likely to lose their registration, KNS said.
LIVING STONES
The Living Stones church has unsuccessfully tried to register with the authorities to gain legal status. "We gave in the application and it lay around for a year and a half," a church leader was quoted as saying. "Then last autumn it was returned. They said there were errors in the application."
Human rights workers are concerned about the religious tensions in this mainly Islamic, multi party republic of about 8 million people. Analysts say that since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Azerbaijan’s economic and social progress has been slow, partly because of civil unrest in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region dominated by Christian Armenians.
WAR AND MIGRATION
The war reportedly lead to large migrations of Armenians and Azerbaijanis, although a cease-fire was agreed in 1994 with about 20 percent of Azerbaijan’s territory under Armenian control. Christians are also facing persecution in other former Soviet republics, at a time when the world seems focused on the war against terrorism.
