Azerbaijan: Baptist pastor faces new prison sentence

Baptist former prisoner of conscience Zaur Balaev, who was freed on 19 March after being held for nearly a year for leading his congregation, was summoned and threatened with a new prison term in early May, he told Forum 18 News Service on 12 June from his home village of Aliabad in the north-western region of Zakatala in Azerbaijan.

"Haven't you learnt from your imprisonment?" Balaev quoted police officers as telling him. "Wasn't one prison term enough for you?" And, in what Balaev says was a clear threat, one officer added: "You may not be afraid, but you've forgotten you've got a wife, daughter and a son."

Balaev said the threats came from Kamandar Hasanov, the deputy regional police chief, and two of his colleagues in Hasanov's office in Zakatala.

"They didn't hit me but they were very crude."

Balaev said the police banned his church from meeting, a ban the congregation has defied. Police have continued to visit his church during worship services. "They realise they can't drive us out," he told Forum 18, referring to the fact that all the church members are local people. "But they observe us closely."

Hasanov denied to Forum 18 that he had threatened Balaev. "There were no threats," he told Forum 18 from Zakatala on 12 June. "Who said there were any threats and raids?"

He declined to say why the Baptist congregations in Aliabad cannot meet for worship without harassment.

"Call me back later," Hasanov said and put down the phone. He was not in the office later in the day.

Strongly backing Balaev and his congregation is Ilya Zenchenko, head of Azerbaijan's Baptist Union. "They used very bad threats against him," he told Forum 18 in the capital Baku in late May. "This must be reported. They definitely want to threaten him, telling him 'this is an Islamic country and Christians shouldn't be here'."

Balaev was arrested in May 2007 on charges of attacking five police officers and damaging a police car that he and his church insist were trumped up. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but was freed under amnesty in March, perhaps as a result of international attention to his case.

The 44-year-old Balaev told Forum 18 his health suffered during his imprisonment. He said he was held for four months in an investigation cell together with some twenty other prisoners who smoked constantly and some of whom suffered from tuberculosis.

Like the overwhelming majority of Aliabad's inhabitants, Balaev is from the Georgian-speaking Ingilo minority, which was converted to Islam several centuries ago. The congregation he leads has existed for more than fifteen years and has repeatedly been barred from gaining state registration. Forum 18 believes it to be Azerbaijan's religious community that holds the record for the longest denial of registration.

Although police have not punished church members for continuing to meet, Balaev told Forum 18 that they have continued to visit services both of his congregation and of another Baptist congregation in the village led by Hamid Shabanov.

"They visited us three times and other congregations twice," Balaev complained. "Pastor Hamid was also summoned by the police and threatened." He said police scrutiny had been particularly intense during a visit some two weeks earlier by fellow church members from Baku. "Police asked them why they had come and what they were doing. They demanded to see their identity documents and wrote down their details."

Balaev reported that Christian literature confiscated from Pastor Shabanov a year ago has still not been returned.

After Balaev's release, church members accompanied by Zenchenko tried once more to have their signatures on the congregation's registration application officially notarised by Zakatala's notary. "But they absolutely refused to do this," Zenchenko told Forum 18. "This is how they have behaved for years."

Jeyhun Mamedov of the State Committee for Work with Religious Organisations in Baku refused adamantly to discuss the threats to Balaev and harassment of his congregation and other religious communities in Zakatala Region with Forum 18 in his office in Baku on 21 May. However, he pledged to investigate the refusal of the notary to notarise the signatures on the registration application. Mamedov's telephone has gone unanswered every time Forum 18 has called since then.

Najiba Mamedova, Zakatala's notary, screamed down the phone at Forum 18 when it tried to find out why the notary's office is refusing to notarise the signatures on the registration application.

"You've been going on about this for years," she told Forum 18 on 12 June. "You're a provocateur. It's none of your business. Armenians have occupied Nagorno-Karabakh for more than 15 years and we've spent blood over it. One Karabakh is enough." When Forum 18 pointed out that the Aliabad Baptist church has no connection with Armenians and that its members are Azerbaijani citizens she angrily put the phone down.

In November 2004 Mamedova angrily threw Forum 18 out of her office during
a visit to try to find out why she was then refusing to notarise the signatures.

Numerous religious communities of a variety of faiths have been denied registration over recent years and children given Christian first names by their parents in Aliabad have been denied birth certificates by officials angry at their choice of name.