The order to destroy a Seventh-day Adventist church in Turkmenistan November 1999 came from the president of the country, according to a defecting foreign minister.

In an exclusive interview with Keston News Service November 6, Boris Shikhmuradov, former Turmen foreign minister and recent ambassador to China, said President Saparmurat Niyazov was responsible for the bulldozing of an Adventist church in the capital, Ashgabat.

Shikhmuradov said President Niyazov personally makes all decisions about religious affairs. Christianity has been crushed and other religious minorities are also persecuted, Shikhmuradov told Keston just days after being dismissed from his post.

Thousands of Christians from all over the world participated in a letter writing campaign protesting the Turkmenistan regime’s actions against different religious groups, including Muslims, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Baha’is. Many church buildings have been destroyed and religious leaders have been imprisoned. The destruction of the Adventist church in Ashgabat, recorded on video tape, aroused protests internationally. See ANN report www.adventist.org/news/data/2001/03/0986913046.

Shikhmuradov, now in Russia, says Turkmenistan’s National Security Committee, the KNB, is an internal police service used to control the country. Every believer is monitored, he says.

“Turkmenistan needs religious liberty immediately,” Shikhmuradov told Keston. “The state must not interfere in the life of religious groups.”

Reacting to the Keston News Service report, John Graz, director of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, said, “I am not really surprised about the role of high state authorities in the religious affairs of Turkmenistan. One hopes that the Turkmen people and their authorities will understand that intolerance and persecution is not the best way to assume a transition toward a democratic society.”