Four of six religious prisoners of conscience in Turkmenistan have been amnestied, but the fate of two others is still unclear.
The country of 5 million people — 87 percent of whom are Muslim — borders Iran and Afghanistan to the south and the Caspian Sea to the west.
On Oct. 9, four of the six prisoners were offered amnesty but one of the four — 49-year-old Baptist pastor Vyacheslav Kalataevsky — remains in police custody as the authorities decide whether to deport him.
“We're worried as there is only a small hope that he will be allowed to stay here,” members of Kalataevsky's family reported from the capital Ashgabad on Oct. 9. “The family and the Church want him to stay — and he wants to stay.” They say the Ukrainian embassy has also appealed to the Turkmen authorities for Kalataevsky — a Ukrainian citizen — to be allowed to remain with his family in Turkmenistan.
No officials were immediately available to explain why two of the religious prisoners were not amnestied, why Kalataevsky cannot return to his family and why some of the amnestied prisoners had to swear an oath of loyalty on the Koran and the Ruhnama (Book of the Soul), the two-volume work attributed to the late president Saparmurat Niyazov who died last year.
Kalataevsky's family members report that he was transferred on Oct. 8 from the labor camp in Seydi to a police holding center in Arzuv on the north-eastern edge of Ashgabad. “Thirty men are held in one cell,” they told the Forum 18 new agency. “Mattresses are given out only at night and in the day the prisoners have to sit or lie on the cold concrete floor. They are held in unhygienic conditions with no possibility to wash.”
Kalataevsky's wife, Valentina, and one of their daughters was able to have a five-minute meeting with him that evening. “It was only with difficulty that they were able to pass on some bread,” family members told Forum 18. “But he was healthy and strong and holds to God.”
Family members report that they asked the authorities if they could bring Kalataevsky to stay with them in Ashgabad while a decision is made about his future. “But they refused. We have been everywhere trying to find out what will happen to him. The Migration Service told us that his case is being handled by the Foreign Ministry and the Interior Ministry. But they won't give us any concrete information.”
Kalataevsky leads a Baptist congregation in the Caspian Sea port of Turkmenbashi, the town where he was born. He was arrested by the Ministry of State Security (MSS) secret police on March 12 and was found guilty of “illegally crossing the border.” On May 14 he was given a three-year labor camp sentence.
The charges related to Kalataevsky's return to Turkmenistan after he was deported in 2001. Dumped with no paperwork or money across the border in Kazakhstan, he was obliged to return to his family a week later as he had nowhere to go.
Deported at the same time in 2001 was fellow-Baptist Yevgeny Potolov, a Russian citizen also from Turkmenbashi. He was arrested earlier this year soon after Kalataevsky, but was deported from Turkmenistan in early July. Potolov's family were subsequently also threatened with deportation.
Kalataevsky and three of the other religious prisoners were pardoned under the amnesty announced by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov to mark the Muslim Night of Omnipotence, which this year fell on Oct. 9. A list of nearly 9,000 prisoners to be freed — all local citizens — was published in local newspapers. A further 158 foreign citizens whose names were not published were said to be due for release.
As in previous years at least some of the prisoners being freed were required to swear the oath of loyalty to the president on a copy of the Ruhnama and the Koran and were shown on television repenting and swearing an oath of allegiance. Such an oath would have been unacceptable to Kalataevsky.