Kazakhstan: Government “trying to force all foreign religious believers out of the country”?
By Mushfig Bayram and Felix Corley
10/1/2010 Kazakhstan (Forum 18 News Service) – New visa regulations that came into force in March have caused growing problems for some religious communities to invite foreign citizens for religious work, Forum 18 News Service has found. The new “missionary visa” is valid for a maximum 180 days and is not renewable. “No one wants to spend so much money to move, only to be able to stay in the country for a maximum of six months,” Rabbi Elkhonon Cohen of Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Centre of Kazakhstan told Forum 18. “It will be difficult for us to open new synagogues, since it will be very difficult to invite rabbis to lead them.” He insists that he and his colleagues are not “missionaries” and are in Kazakhstan “first of all to serve the Jews”. After one Catholic priest failed to get a visa for two months, the nuncio spent a week going to the Foreign Ministry before a business visa was granted. Two Ahmadi Muslim imams have been forced to leave after visas were denied. Kazakhstan is “trying to force all foreign religious believers out of the country,” one Ahmadi commented to Forum 18. The government’s Religious Affairs Committee told Forum 18: “There are no problems with giving missionary visas, you do not need to invent these cases.”
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