>>KIDNAPPED GIRL FROM GROZNY CHURCH FOUND
Refugees from Chechnya Take in Abused Child
by Barbara G. Baker
ISTANBUL, January 7 (Compass) -- A 13-year-old girl kidnapped from the Grozny Baptist Church by Islamist Chechen fighters more than three months ago was brought out of Chechnya's war zone last week.
Young Anja Hrykin arrived on the doorstep of a Christian family in the neighboring North Ossetian capital of Vladikavkaz a few days after Christmas, escorted by Russian soldiers who had found her in an abandoned Chechen village.
The frail teenager, described as so underfed and ill that "she looks like a nine-year-old," had managed to give the soldiers the name and address of Christians from Vladikavkaz who had visited her church regularly in the past.
"She was in very bad shape," a source who had talked with the Christians in Vladikavkaz told Compass yesterday. "She had been raped many, many times, beaten, and almost starved to death."
The child told the Christian family who took her in that she had been forced by her captors to recite the Muslim creed and convert to Islam.<<
prcenter.newmail.ru
>>CHECHNYA
The situation for Christians in Chechnya is deteriorating badly as extremist Islam takes hold. Christians can no longer distribute literature safely, one store house full of Christian literature has been burnt by Muslims. Many Christians have been kidnapped, one beheaded. One
Christian worker lamented “I estimate that by the end of this year there will no longer be any Christians in Chechnya”.<<
barnabasfund.org
>>"Evangelical Cleansing"
Christians Flee Grozny as Violence Targets Christian Leaders and Elderly Baptist Congregation
By Dan Wooding
HRWF (23.06.1999) – Website : hrwf.net – Email : info@hrwf.net - A brutal policy of "Evangelical Cleansing" by radical Islamic gangs in trouble-torn Chechnya is forcing the last handful of evangelical Christians in Grozny to flee into southern Russia for resettlement.
Open Doors with Brother Andrew, the ministry founded more than four decades ago by the Dutch-born author of "God's Smuggler," has announced that Chechnya's ongoing rash of kidnappings and brutal murders during the previous nine months has prompted the action.
"This is first time in memory that almost the entire Christian population of a nation may be evacuated," said Terry Madison, US President and CEO of Open Doors, based in Santa Ana, California. "Already, the first 10 members of the Grozny Baptist Church have arrived in Krasnodar, a region of the Russian Federation along the Black Sea coast, with little more than the clothes on their backs. Others are expected to follow in the near future.
"With the exception of two men, the isolated Grozny congregation now consists of less than 100 women and children, most of them elderly women and orphans."
Madison explained that members of Grozny Baptist Church have been living in fear after the savage murder of their church leader, 65-year-old Alexander Kulakov, who was last seen alive on March 12 boarding a bus.
"Ten days later, a lady from the church saw, to her horror, his severed head displayed at a local market," said Madison. "This is the second time a church leader has been targeted. Last October the pastor, Alexey Sitnikov, 42, was abducted from the church building. The Grozny Christians are now convinced he is dead. He had been taken hostage, threatened and beaten twice before by presumed radical Islamic gangs. A search into Sitnikov's whereabouts has proved fruitless, and no ransom demands were ever made. Inquirers about his fate were finally told in mid-April, by an inside contact among the local security authorities, that the pastor had been killed during the first week after his abduction."
Madison added, "Since Kulakov's death, another Russian Christian who frequently travels into Grozny has started receiving anonymous threats over the telephone and at his home, indicating he was targeted to become the next abduction victim. It has become too dangerous for him to keep going there.
"Still another Christian leader, Baptist youth pastor Volodya Kargiev from the nearby North Ossetia capital of Vladikavkaz, has been held hostage since March 9 by Chechen captors demanding $100,000 ransom. The abductors, who sent his family a video in which the obviously manhandled youth pled for his life, reduced their ransom demands last week to $25,000."
Barbara G. Baker, a reporter for the Compass Direct News Service says, "Although subjected to spiraling violence and severe food shortages since Chechnya's debilitating war with Russia concluded in 1996, the handful of Christians had until now resisted leaving their church and homes in Grozny."
One frequent visitor to the region told Compass Direct, "Now they are eager to leave. They were ready to leave yesterday, rather than tomorrow, they said."
Baker added, "Two weeks after Sitnikov's disappearance, the Russian Baptist Union in Moscow advised the congregation to close their church and emigrate from the region. Their numbers dropped within a few months from 170 to some 100, but most of the elderly resisted a move."
One source commented, "Many of them have lived all their lives in Grozny, even though they are Russians. One of the Christians there told me their family had lived in the city for 400 years. So it's a very traumatic decision to leave."<<
hrwf.net
>>It is believed that some Chechens have become Christians by the eighth century. During the 16th century, other people who were Islamic settled among them. By the late 17th century, Christianity had disappeared. Today, Chechens are among the most devout Muslims in the Former Soviet Union, only becoming stronger because of Russia’s attempt to completely eliminate Islam from their territory. The rise in Chechen nationalism has further strengthened their religious ties to Islam, resulting in severe persecution of those who are not Muslim, including beheading and rape. Most Christians are evacuating from Chechnya (summer of 1999) in the face of unrelenting, diabolical persecution.<<
aims.org |
