Turkmenistan: Orthodox Faith Under Siege

Amangozel, an ethnic Turkmen, converted to Orthodoxy two years ago, but says she stopped going to church after members of the secret police warned a convert friend of hers not to attend services.

“She was given a lecture that real Turkmen have always been true Muslims,” she said. “ They said that for Turkmen to adopt faiths other than Islam could be seen as a sort of betrayal. And they strongly recommended her to abandon Christianity and return to Allah.”

Followers of the Russian Orthodox Church in Turkmenistan, roughly nine per cent of the 4.5 million population, feel increasingly beleaguered. They’re banned from bringing religious literature into the country; the state makes no provision for Orthodox education – even though the faith is an official religion along with Islam; and secret police regularly monitor church services and keep a close eye on parishioners.

Just as he has sought to exercise increasing control over the Islamic authorities in his country in recent years, President Saparmurat Niazov, who likes to be known as Turkmenbashi, or leader of the Turkmen, now appears determined to tighten his grip on Orthodox religious practice.

The head of the church in Turkmenistan, Andrei Sapnuov, is essentially a Turkmen state official, who appears to have done little, if anything, to stem Niazov’s growing restrictions on both the faith and its followers. Turkmenbashi’s policy culminating two years ago in a law on Orthodox practice, which, amongst other things, introduced the religious literature prohibition and permits only priests who are Turkmen citizens with a diploma from a local institution to operate here.

“Even in the Soviet period, when religion was not ‘welcomed’ we did not feel this pressure and infringement of our rights. The new legislation is harsher than the equivalent laws in the Soviet period,” said Ivan, a parishioner at the Nikolsky church in Ashgabat.

With the state providing no Orthodox education, parishes try to run private Sunday Schools, but resources and funds are so limited that there are less than a 100 pupils in the whole country.

“Investment is needed if we are to have more Sunday Schools. Parishes are so poor at present that almost a third of them cannot afford to have their own priest, “ said Anastasia, from the Alexander Nevsky church in the capital.

Niazov’s latest attempt to squeeze the church came in May this year when he offered to transfer the country’s 12 parishes from the Tashkent and Central Asian diocese to the Russian Patriarchate. Some analysts suggested that under such an arrangement, the parishes would become autonomous and could eventually become fully independent, allowing Turkmenbashi to exert yet more influence and control.

“The Turkmen Russian Orthodox Church has long been a ‘puppet church’. The foremost religious figure is a Turkmen state representative, who follows ‘the wise and far-sighted policies’ of the great Turkmenbashi,” said a member of the Russian community in Turkmenistan.

The Turkmen president’s overtures towards Moscow appeared little more than a cynical ploy given his relations with the Russian diocese to date.

Niazov is said to have turned down visas requests from Russian priests wanting to serve in Turkmenistan; church delegations from Moscow and Tashkent are said to have been forced to reduce the numbers of participants; and the head of the Orthodox church in Russia, Patriarch Alexi II, who has made several official trips to Central Asia and the Caucasus, has yet to receive an invitation to visit the country.

Moreover, it’s been reported that neither Muslim nor Orthodox representatives from Turkmenistan took part in the inaugural session of the CIS Inter-Religious Council, despite invitations from the Moscow Patriarchate; and when relics of two Soviet-era martyrs were taken for veneration to a number of former Soviet countries last year and early this year, a visit to Turkmenistan was not even discussed.

Patriarch Alexi declined Niazov’s offer to have Turkmen parishes incorporated into the Russian diocese, but perhaps mindful of the need to ensure that this would not be seen as a snub and exacerbate conditions for co-religionists in the Central Asian state, he opted for a somewhat bizarre diplomatic tack, giving fulsome praise to what he described as the president’s “attention to the needs of Orthodox parishioners in Turkmenistan”.