Persecuted Christian Dashes From Prison to Border
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He spent three days in police detention, and three more in health quarantine. Once he arrived at the immigration prison, he managed to borrow a smuggled cell phone and call Aygul.
She asked if he had received the clothes and food parcels she had registered and sent to him through jail officials. He hadn’t.
“I went home and cried, I was so upset,” she said.
It wasn’t long before Makset’s own cell phone was slipped in to him, enabling him to make brief but frequent calls to Aygul and the children. It was a vital link, since the prison refused to allow her any visiting rights.
But as the weeks went by, turning into months, Makset admitted it was hard to keep focused on God’s promise when everyone around him was sure he would be sent to Uzbekistan.
“My fears kept building up. I knew it was Satan, trying to make this fear in my heart. So I told him, ‘I have this letter from my God here in my hand, the Bible. Your words never came true in the Bible. You are the father of lies!’ ”
During the first week in the common prison, Makset read from an old version of the Kazakh Bible that had been secreted in one of the cell’s several hiding places. Later, a pocket edition of the modern Kazakh Bible was smuggled in to him, which he kept hidden in his own corner.
At first, he said, he asked God, “Please show miracles to the men around me here.” But as he began to pore over his Bible, spending sometimes four or five hours or more every afternoon behind the blankets draped around his bed, he said God showed him there was another reason he was in prison.
“Instead, God showed me that it was me He wanted to show His face to. He was telling me that He could trust me, like Job, to go through this persecution. It was not just for the people around me, the authorities, the 10 or 11 other prisoners in my cell. God wanted me to see His power.”
During his three months behind bars, he read 22 books of the Old Testament and 10 of the New Testament, keeping a detailed journal of all the things God was teaching him as he read and prayed. A dozen books were sent in to him openly through prison officials, who apparently did not realize they were religious in nature.
One book told how a Chinese house church flourished and grew for 21 years, while all that time their pastor was sitting in jail.
“Persecution causes the spread of the church. It’s the key to growth,” he concluded. “So I told Jesus then, ‘If this is the way to grow Your church, I am willing to sit here in this prison.’”
Anywhere But Uzbekistan
The UN told Aygul it had no funds to hire a lawyer. Close Christian friends raised funds to secure an ethnic Russian lawyer experienced in representing refugees in Kazakhstan. He was less than hopeful.
“‘I am not at all sure I will be successful. So it may be useless to hire me,’ ” Aygul recalled him saying at their first meeting.
She told him she didn’t believe him. “ ‘We believe in God, and He will help us,’ ” she responded.
Hopeful or not, the lawyer was the only person allowed to visit Makset in prison; even the local UNHCR representatives were stonewalled by jail authorities.
“He was my only visitor, and he came just a few times. And he was usually discouraging,” Makset said. “But at least,” he smiled, “I enjoyed the long walk I got to take from my cell to meet with him.”
Meanwhile, Makset and Aygul continued their furtive phone calls. By the end of September, they had agreed they would accept asylum abroad, if the UNHCR could help arrange it. Even then, they had no guarantee that the Kazakh government would ignore Uzbekistan’s demands and actually allow Makset to go to another country.
But the UNHCR was not sure the couple were serious. Makset had been arrested by Kazakh police and badly beaten in 2008; through the UNHCR, Sweden and the United States offered the family asylum.
“It would be good for your children,” they urged him at the time. “They are offering you citizenship there if you leave.”
“But I had just started a church,” Makset remembered thinking to himself. “I was tempted, and I had a one-month deadline to accept it. But after I prayed and fasted, I chose to stay, and fruit came: We baptized 50 new believers in the next few years. ”
So when the UNHCR asked him this second time, he again prayed, asking God, “Then who will lead the church here, if I leave?” He heard God’s answer clearly: It’s not your church, it’s Mine. This time, he said, he knew he was leaving behind an established congregation with a team of church leaders.
Their decision made, the paperwork began. The UNHCR managed in October to send Makset papers through the lawyer to sign, agreeing they would accept asylum, wherever it was offered, with one exception.
“Anywhere but Uzbekistan,” they said.
The process dragged.
“It seemed like my time in prison would never end,” Makset said. “I doubted God’s promise almost every day, all those weeks.” But he always heard God speaking to him, he said, “answering my doubts with promise after promise.”
After a Long Silence
Finally, when Aygul was informed on Nov. 7 that Sweden had offered them asylum, she broke down and cried for joy in the UNHCR office. It was the answer to the first of their prayers: Which country will accept us?
But it still left answered their second prayer: Will Kazakhstan actually let us leave?
“I was instructed not to tell anyone, for Makset’s safety, because if people found out, it could make it difficult to get him out of prison,” Aygul said. She couldn’t even tell Makset, except indirectly. “Our lawyer found out later, when he took in the papers Makset had to sign, to agree for our amnesty visas. But we didn’t tell him any details, how we were doing it.”
It was all carefully choreographed. The High Commissioner for Refugees didn’t approach Sweden until Makset and Aygul had agreed to accept asylum. He didn’t approach the Kazakh government until Sweden had made its offer. And now, the commissioner was demanding that Aygul tell no one.
“I was so grateful to God,” she said. “But I didn’t dare tell our kids, so I had to keep it a secret from them and our friends until just two days before we were scheduled to leave. And even then, they knew we were leaving, but not where we were going.”
“But even after I knew that Sweden had accepted me,” Makset admitted, “I was not really sure that I would ever leave the prison safely. Would the Kazakh government really release me?”
The Final Stretch
There was still no answer to that question three weeks later. By the last week of November, Aygul cried out to God in frustration. “Lord, I have no more strength!” she prayed, again in tears. “I am ready to give up.”
Then a call came from the UNHCR on Friday, Nov. 30. She walked into the head office at noon, unsure just what she might hear. Good news? Or more delays? “The Kazakh government has just agreed to release Makset from prison, and to allow us to escort him and your family safely out of the country,” the official announced, looking pleased.
Makset isn’t entirely sure why Kazakhstan decided to set him free. But a likely factor, he suspects, was the widespread international outrage after June 2011 when the Kazakh government deported 28 Uzbeks back to Tashkent, where they were likely to be jailed and tortured. Rebuked for their clear violation of international law and agreements they had signed, the Kazakh authorities promised to not repeat it.
Warning that Uzbek officials might try to kidnap Makset as he left prison and whisk him across the border, the UNHCR advised Aygul to wait a few more days, until the night of Dec. 4, a Tuesday, when they would walk him out of prison and through the Almaty airport with his family in a few quick hours.
The U.N. officials admitted they “couldn’t really be sure it is going to work” until Makset was actually out of prison, through the airport immigration checkpoint and on the airplane flying out of Kazakhstan airspace.
But time was short at noon that Friday, if Aygul was going to get an exit visa issued in time to leave on Tuesday. With the weekend and then a Monday holiday just ahead, she needed to get the required permits for herself and the children before government offices closed Friday afternoon. “It was no small miracle to get our exit visa that fast, to be able to leave on Tuesday,” she said.
Aygul kept her secret until Monday, Dec., 3. Then, guarding her words carefully, she told Makset over his mobile phone that he would be released the next day from prison, and that UNHCR security officials would be waiting to meet him.
