Turkmenistan is in Central Asia, bordering the Caspian Sea, between Iran and Kazakhstan.
Kalataevsky's wife told Forum 18 News Service that she expects the trial, on charges of illegally crossing the border in 2001, to take place at the City Court in the Caspian Sea port of Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk).
"The court will not tell me officially when the trial is due to start, but we have indications it could be on 2 or 4 May," Valentina Kalataevskaya told Forum 18 News Service.
Calls to Turkmenbashi City Court by Forum 18 went unanswered.
Valentina Kalataevskaya told Forum 18 that the last time that she saw her husband was on March 12, the day he was arrested by the State Security Ministry (MSS) secret police, when she saw him being transferred into a car at one of Turkmenbashi's police stations. She said that, after being held in the regional capital Balkanabad (formerly Nebit-Dag), he was transferred in mid-April to Prison Number 5 in Turkmenbashi where he remains. "They still won't allow me to see him," she told Forum 18.
Kalataevsky - who was born in what was formerly Krasnovodsk but holds a Ukrainian passport - faces charges of illegal border crossing under Article 214 of the Criminal Code, which carries a sentence of up to two years' imprisonment for first time offenders acting on their own. However, his wife insists he is being punished for his religious activity.
"Although officials don't mention it, I believe there is a religious motivation to the case," she told Forum 18. "They won't take into account that he was expelled across the border into Kazakhstan in 2001, as a punishment for preaching the Gospel."
The first MSS secret police investigator, Selbi Charyeva, who completed her investigation on 28 March 18 , refused to discuss Kalataevsky's case with Forum 18, the news service stated. No new prosecutor was named, Kalataevskaya added, and the case was handed to the regional prosecutor's office and then Turkmenbashi City Court.
Kalataevskaya told Forum 18 that she has received a response from the General Prosecutor's Office. They told her that her husband was being held under orders from the prosecutor; that he was being prosecuted for crossing the border illegally and that he had admitted his guilt. She insisted that if the authorities had the legal right to deport him in 2001, they should have sent him to Ukraine and issued him with a deportation certificate. Instead, Turkmen authorities took him over the border to neighboring Kazakhstan, where she claimed they left him with no money or identification.
"It was wrong of them to take him to Kazakhstan," she told Forum 18.
Kalataevsky - a leading member of the local congregation of the Council of Churches Baptists - was deported in 2001 as the authorities completed their campaign of expelling all foreign citizens prominent in Muslim, Protestant, Jehovah's Witness and Hare Krishna communities. At that time, all non-Muslim and non-Russian Orthodox religious activity was illegal in Turkmenistan. Even today, Forum 18 reported, the activities of the Council of Churches Baptists remain illegal, as they refuse on principle to be registered by the state.
Meanwhile, Forum 18 reported, there has been no progress in the case of the Protestant Merdan Shirmedov, who has been denied permission to leave Turkmenistan to join Wendy Lucas, his pregnant wife in the United States. "I have written to Meret Orazov, the Turkmen ambassador in Washington, but had no response and I have also taken up the case with American politicians," Lucas told Forum 18. "Merdan has also approached the mission in the capital Ashgabad of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)."
Shirmedov was denied permission to leave Turkmenistan on Jan. 6 2007. Lucas told Forum 18 she believes this was in retaliation for the prominent role his family has in an ethnic Turkmen Protestant fellowship in their home town of Dashoguz in northern Turkmenistan.
Lucas said that on April 10, Shirmedov tried to cross the nearby border to Uzbekistan, but was prevented from leaving after Turkmen border guards found his name on a computerized exit blacklist. However, they refused to tell him why he was prevented from leaving. Border guards and the MSS secret police work both together and separately in barring people from leaving the country, the news agency said a Migration Service official told Forum 18 .
An aide to Ambassador Orazov at the Turkmen Embassy in Washington, Nury (who refused to give his last name), said that in the absence of the ambassador - who returns to the Embassy on May 2 - he has no official comment about Shirmedov's case. "I have no information on this case," he told Forum 18 on April 20. "I am sure if they have written to the Ambassador, he has transferred the letter to the Foreign Ministry in Ashgabad."
Asked why Turkmenistan still operates an exit blacklist for its own citizens, Forum 18 said he replied, "That question exceeds my authority."
He likewise had no information about the apparent continued imprisonment of the former Muslim Chief Mufti Nasrullah ibn Ibadullah, who was sentenced at a closed trial in Ashgabad in March 2004. His family is increasingly concerned that it has had no recent news about him. According to Forum 18, Nury claimed not to have even heard about his case.
As Nury suggested, Forum 18 has submitted written questions to Ambassador Orazov about why Shirmedov is being prevented from leaving his own country, why the exit blacklist remains and whether the former chief mufti is still alive and, if so, where he is being held.
Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov has been on a pilgrimage this month to Mecca, which Forum 18 reported Turkmen State TV described on April 14 as "compulsory for every Muslim." The haj pilgrimage is compulsory for Muslims who are able to perform it (although there are exemptions).
Forum 18 reported that every year the country severely restricts the numbers of haj pilgrims to the number who will fit on one airliner of the state-run Turkmenistan Airlines. This is far below the quota allocated to Turkmenistan by the Saudi authorities. The numbers of genuine pilgrims actually permitted by the country is almost certainly smaller than this, as Forum 18 reported the news service has been informed that members of the MSS secret police are included among the pilgrims.
In a related report, Forum 18 reported the Ashgabat-based Neytralnyy Turkmenistan newspaper on April 14 claimed that "every Turkmen citizen is free to practice his religion." Religious believers and human rights activists inside and outside the country have noted that officials have a vested interest in continuing to attack religious freedom.
For more background, see Forum 18's Turkmenistan religious freedom survey at www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=672
