KULANAK, Kyrgyzstan — After the death of a 14-year-old Baptist in Kulanak in central Kyrgyzstan, the local imam and a village mob prevented his burial in the village, even in land allocated two years earlier for Christian burials, local Baptists reported.
After their son's death on May 19 from heart failure, the Isakovs, a Baptist family, and some 20 fellow Baptists were planning to bury the body on the plot of land officially allocated to Baptists in the village as a graveyard in April 2006 by the district authorities.
Meanwhile some 30 men from the village led by the local imam came to the funeral,.
Two days after the boy died, a group of officials including Ishenbek Medetov, administrative head of the Naryn district, came to the Isakov's home to persuade them to either renounce their faith or give the boy's body to the grandfather of the deceased boy, who is Muslim, to bury according to Muslim tradition, in which case the mother and father would not be allowed to attend the funeral.
“The Isakovs did not yield to any of those conditions,” reported a Baptist from Naryn who wanted to remain unnamed because of possible reprisals from the authorities.
Meanwhile a mob from the village gathered around the family home where Christians and relatives of the boy had gathered from Kulanak and from other parts of Kyrgyzstan to support the family and offer their condolences. They mob demanded that they leave.
“Some of the men were drunk,” the Baptist said. “They threatened the family not to bury their son there and forced them to halt the burial. However, the friends of the family did not leave despite the threats from the mob.”
Medetov then invited a police detachment, which arrived in the village at 11 p.m. armed with batons. “The police ignored the family's request to break up the mob outside the house,” the Naryn-based Baptist reported. “They did not even pay attention that one man in the mob was hitting the believers and the father. Instead, the police entered the family house and took away the body of the boy despite the tears and crying in despair of the family members,” the Baptist said.
The next day the family then learned that the police had buried the body 25 miles away in a deserted area called Akkiya. Isakov together with fellow Baptists traveled to Akkiya where there he found the body of his son buried in a shallow grave, unwashed and in his clothes.
“The heart-broken father dug out his son, washed the body, wrapped it in a clean, white sheet and buried him appropriately,” the Baptist said.
On May 30, the family of the deceased boy told Forum 18 news service which monitors abuses to religious liberty that now the village council made more trouble for them by not giving them water to irrigate their crops. Their children have been beaten and threatened by other children in school but the leadership took no measures to protect them. The family feels they are being pressured to leave the village.
Aynura Teymirova, spokeswoman for the regional government, however denied these claims saying, “They can have all the water they want.”
This is “not the first time such an issue arose over the burial of a Kyrgyz who accepted another faith,” Teymirova said. All of this happens because of “a weak legal framework,” she maintained.
“The State Agency for Religious Affairs has in the past registered so many religious organizations and now we are reaping the consequences,” she complained. “As a Kyrgyz national I am against the Kyrgyz accepting other faiths. We need a stronger law putting a constraint on all kinds of religious sects. Only then would we not have such problems.”
This is exactly what Baptists and other religious groups fear. Protestants told Forum 18 that they are now afraid that the government will use this case to pass a very restrictive Religion Law.
“The first signal for this came from the speaker of parliament,” the Baptist reported. “Immediately after the Kulanak events he announced that parliament urgently needs to make amendments to the existing Religion Law in order to tighten control over different religious organizations.”
Members of the Baptist and other churches asked Kyrgyzstan's president, Kurmanbek Bakiev, in an open letter to punish those responsible for violating the family's rights to exercise their faith and protect the believers' rights in the future.
The presidential administration rejected a repressive decree in February that would have restricted freedom of thought, conscience and belief. However, many of Kyrgyzstan's religious communities remain highly concerned by continuing moves to introduce restrictions into the Religion Law.
Christian leaders are planning further moves. “They want to start a legal investigation of the case to punish the perpetrators,” the Baptist said. “This may be an important precedent to resolve similar problems.” Although this is not the first time Christian Kyrgyz had problems trying to bury their dead, the Baptist added, it is probably the first time the issue has been so publicly discussed and is asking for the president's attention.
Protestants living in or conducting missionary activity in what are perceived to be “Muslim” villages — especially in southern Kyrgyzstan — have faced rising pressure in recent years. This has included physical attacks and petitions to the authorities to have their churches closed down.