During the year, the government continued to arrest, detain, and imprison members of religious groups, criminalize speech “inciting religious discord,” question congregation members about their choice of faith, punish individuals for “illegal missionary activity,” and label “nontraditional” religious groups as “destructive sects” in the media.
On June 25, individuals described by the government as Salafist militants and “followers of radical, nontraditional religious movements” killed eight people and injured 37 individuals in Aktobe in the northwestern region. Four of the attackers were killed in shootouts with the police. On November 28, a court sentenced seven of these people to life in prison, two to 20 and 22 years in prison respectively, and 19 others to two- to four-year terms for “organizing a terror attack on a military unit and a gun shop in June.” One defendant was sentenced to four years of probation.
On July 18, a gunman killed eight law enforcement officials and two civilians and wounded several others near a police station and building of the KNB in Almaty.
Government reporting characterized the June 25 and July 18 incidents as carried out by individuals motivated by radical religious extremism and drew links between the perpetrators and Salafism. The July 18 Almaty shooter stated in court he attacked his victims because “they do not live according to the laws of Allah.”
In both the Aktobe and Almaty incidents local experts said additional factors such as criminal history, poverty, and lack of opportunity may have led to the attackers’ radicalization.
According to the KNB, 14 members of the banned Tablighi Jamaat missionary movement were convicted for violating the criminal code for their participation in a banned religious movement this year, compared to 18 convictions in 2015. Forum 18, however, said 19 members were sentenced this year to prison for terms ranging from nine months to three years, and three members were sentenced to probation.
In December five Sunni Muslims in the Almaty region were imprisoned for up to three years for alleged membership in Tablighi Jamaat. They were arrested by the KNB in July.
On August 1, Baurzhan Beisembay was arrested in Ust Kamenogorsk and charged with participation in Tablighi Jamaat activities. Banned religious literature and videos, as well as reports on his activities, were seized during a search and used as evidence in court. Beisembay reportedly headed the regional cell of Tablighi Jamaat in East Kazakhstan after its previous leader moved to Astana where he was arrested and convicted in 2015. On October 13, the court in Ust Kamenogorsk sentenced Beisembay and seven other followers of Tablighi Jamaat to prison terms ranging from one to two and a half years. Two other defendants were sentenced to one year probation terms.
AROK continued to report law enforcement forces interpreted expressions of religious beliefs during conversations as a form of exalting one religion over others, thus “professing its supremacy.” Authorities then used this as the basis for charges of “incitement of interethnic discord.” In October the appellate panel of the Supreme Court declined Seventh-day Adventist Yklas Kabduakasov’s appeal of a two-year prison term for incitement of religious discord. He was originally sentenced in November 2015 to seven years’ probation, but an appellate court changed the sentence in December 2015 to two years in prison. The prosecutors presented recordings totaling 48 hours, which contained meetings discussing religion between Kabduakasov and four men he thought were students.
In June Rustam Musayev was sentenced to two years in a labor camp under the law against inciting religious discord after talking to others about his Islamic faith during private meetings. According to reports by the NGO Forum 18, the meetings may have been set up by the KNB. An “expert analysis” commissioned by the KNB did not find any instances of inciting “religious discord” in the recorded conversations, but did find instances in one of Musayev’s books, which was subsequently banned. Musayev was also ordered to pay for the “expert analysis,” and in August his bank accounts were frozen when he was put on a Finance Ministry list of individuals “connected with the financing of terrorism or extremism.”
On October 13, religious scholar Kuanysh Bashpayev was arrested by the KNB when he arrived in the country on leave from graduate study in Saudi Arabia. He was arrested and charged with incitement of religious discord for having discussed Islam during a meeting with several young men in a restaurant during a previous visit to the country. One of his interlocutors had recorded his interpretation of the Quran and sharia, and the tape served as grounds for his arrest. According to his lawyer, KNB investigators exerted pressure on him to confess his guilt. At the end of the year, the case had not been brought to trial and Bashpayev was still in prison.
Several members of the Council of Baptist Churches, which continued to refuse on principle to register under the Religion Law, received fines and were jailed in administrative facilities for refusal to pay. In September Zhasulan Alzhanov and Vyacheslav Cherkasov spent two and three days, respectively, in jail for not paying fines levied in 2013 and 2014. Council of Baptist Churches members stated they did not pay fines levied for their religious practices, on principle and as a policy. A Baptist Council representative reported their members faced fines for carrying books and proselytizing. The representative reported that authorities frequently raided and destroyed their Council’s prayer houses.
In July the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was denied registration again after resubmitting an application in 2015. CRA experts concluded their teaching was not Islamic and demanded that they should change the name of the group by removing the word “Muslim.” The Church of Scientology continued to function and be registered as a public association, rather than as a religious organization.
According to reports, the government continued to recognize as legitimate and legal only those mosques registered with the SAMK, the government-affiliated Sunni Hanafi organization led by the grand mufti, with offices in Almaty and Astana. By joining SAMK, Muslim communities relinquished the right to appoint their own imams, were permitted to take actions on their property (such as sales, transfers, improvements) only with the approval of the SAMK, and were required to pay 30 percent of the mosque’s income to the SAMK. Press reports indicated there were a dozen new mosques built across the country with approval from the SAMK.
The SAMK continued to control the activities of all the 2,529 formally registered Muslim groups affiliated with the Sunni Hanafi school and had authority over the construction of new mosques, the appointment of imams, and the administration of examinations and background checks for aspiring imams. SAMK was responsible for authorizing travel agencies to provide Hajj travel services to citizens. According to SAMK, the Saudi Arabian authorities allocated a quota of 3,000 spots for Kazakhstani Muslims to make the Hajj to Mecca, down from 5,000 last year.
According to Forum 18 and local media, officials raided two summer camps run by the Baptist Union in West Kazakhstan in July, reportedly on suspicion that children were engaged in religious activity without the consent of their parents. The raids followed the arrival of foreigners at the camp who said they came to help repair a church building, but were also involved in reading the Bible to the camp children. Officials took statements and the foreign camp visitors left the country. No legal action was taken against the church members.
Reportedly, on June 28, three Muslim residents of Semey in Eastern Kazakhstan were fined for speaking to people about their faith on their way back from evening prayers in the mosque. They were fined 212,100 tenge ($636) for “carrying out missionary activity without state registration.”
According to Forum 18, on April 17, three members of Council of Baptist Churches congregations were fined by the police without a court hearing for leadership of, or participation in, an unregistered, suspended, or banned religious group. According to human rights sources, this was the first known instance police used their summary power to fine without first going to court. One of the three, 89-year-old former Soviet-era Baptist prisoner of conscience Yegor Prokopenko was fined 212,100 tenge ($636) on May 22 for leading a meeting for worship in Zyryanovsk. The other two were Sofya Bunyak of Ekibastuz, Pavlodar Region, and Aleksandr Belan of Sergeyevka, Akmola Region.
Also according to Forum 18, on April 17, two members of the New Life Protestant Church in the Caspian port of Atyrau, Bagitzhan Zholdybayev and Aleksandr Revkov, were fined after discussing their religion while drinking tea at a cafe with five other church members after their Sunday meeting for worship. They were fined 74,235 tenge ($223) each for “violating procedures established in the law for conducting rites, ceremonies, and meetings.”
According to NGO Forum 18, the CRA forced organizers of a religious musical in Astana and Almaty to cancel all performances in May and stated “if a show is religious, it requires permission in accordance with the law.” Reportedly CRA said the show, which was produced by Russian citizens, was religious material that, according to law, could only be imported by a domestically registered religious group after receiving government permission.
Courts continued to fine individuals found guilty of illegal missionary activity. According to AROK, local law enforcement authorities continued to interpret and label any religious discussions that took place outside of a registered religious building as “illegal missionary activity,” including invitations to religious services and discussions, especially for “nontraditional” religious groups such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and evangelical Christians.
Dina Sarsebekova, a Jehovah’s Witness in Western Kazakhstan, was charged for inviting two young people to attend the local community’s annual memorial service and for showing them a Jehovah’s Witness video on her computer. On April 25, the Uralsk Specialized Administrative Court in Western Kazakhstan found her guilty of carrying out missionary activities without state registration and imposed an administrative fine of 212, 100 tenge ($636).
On October 14, three members of the Rodnik Evangelic Baptist Church in Ust Kamenogorsk, Eastern Kazakhstan visited a local hospice where they talked to tenants and taught them prayers. Local CRA officials said their meeting was a violation of the procedure for holding religious ceremonies and meetings. The specialized administrative court imposed administrative fines on all three women in the amount of 106,050 tenge ($318) per person.
There were reports of girls being prevented from attending school and young women denied employment because they wore headscarves. On October 24, the SAMK issued a statement in response to disagreements between religious parents and school administrators after local authorities stated headscarves should be banned in schools. The statement called on parents not to force underage girls to wear headscarves or hinder them from getting a secular high school education and stated all Muslims should “abide by and respect the Constitution and the law.” The statement did not ban headscarves but encouraged parents to come to a compromise with school administrations.
The New Life Bible Church reported that on March 25, authorities searched five of their members’ residences and five buildings and confiscated 50 of their computers, as well as money and documents. The authorities said they were investigating fraud. The Church reported the authorities did not adequately make a full inventory of the items confiscated. The authorities subsequently said they found illegal weapons, which the Church denied.
Government officials continued to express concerns about the potential spread of religious extremism. President Nazarbayev described the June 5 Aktobe violent attack as “organized by followers of radical pseudoreligious movements,” who he said were radicalized from abroad. The government later said, however, the attackers may have been inspired by online terrorist propaganda, but were self-radicalized within the country. The president assured the people the state “will always apply the harshest measures to suppress extremists and terrorists.”
As set forth in the 2013-2016 State Program for Countering Religious Extremism and Terrorism, and kept as the main objective of the subsequent 2017-2020 State Program, the fight against religious extremism remained a top priority for the government. Government entities, like the KNB, continued to monitor civil society and religious groups.
On November 17, Minister of Religious Affairs and Civil Society Nurlan Yermekbayev condemned what he termed destructive religious teachings, such as Salafism, and said “secularism is the basis of stability of Kazakhstani society” in his remarks to an annual conference of religious scholars. He stated existing legislation enabled the government to counter extremist groups, but said his ministry may offer amendments to “improve” laws regulating religion, and was drafting a concept paper on how the government will engage civil society to combat extremism and terrorism. He said imams and experts have had success de-radicalizing extremists and said this partnership between civil society and the government was the best approach to combat extremist ideologies, including Salafism. He reiterated the government stood ready to ban Salafism if other means of combating extremism failed.
Individuals reported a tightening of the religious space. An AROK representative said the government was seeking to control religious expression and was especially concerned with controlling proselytizing and what the government saw as Islamic radicalism. A representative of a different NGO said trust between government and civil society was eroding, which was having a “repressive, chilling effect, on all religious groups.” Several “nontraditional” religious groups said they experienced continuing harassment from the government, for example by audits. Yet other activists noted the CRA had taken steps to become more open to feedback from the religious community, and one group reported increased day to day cooperation with CRA.
Before the amendments to “counter extremism and terrorism” became law, the government submitted them in draft for review to the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and civil society groups. These entities said there were serious religious freedom problems in the draft text, but the government did not accept their opinions.
The SAMK continued to provide a Russian-speaking preaching group in response to numerous requests by Russian-speaking Muslims in the northern regions. The Russian-speaking religious leaders included theologians and imams who had religious knowledge and a secular education. SAMK experts participate in examination of the growing number of Russian language religious literature and Internet publications to prevent dissemination of extremist books and publications.