Persecuted Christian Dashes From Prison to Border

A 24-Hour Whirl
“On the morning of Dec. 4, nobody came. Nothing happened,” Makset said. He had given away his extra clothes and other items to his cellmates, and packed the rest to take with him. 

“I waited until lunch time, and then I started to doubt. It was 1 p.m., and still nothing. I was waiting for the guards to come and take me to the head department, to sign papers and then get my certificate of release.”

He knew that under prison procedures, a prisoner had to be processed before 4 p.m. to be released that same day. “But the afternoon wore on,” he said, “and I was still waiting.”

He still had his phone, and he dialled Aygul. “Where are they? When will they come?” Before she could answer, he heard the cell door opening. “Immediately I threw my phone away to hide it, so the guards would not see it,” he said.

Smiling broadly, the police clerk walked in and demanded, “Give me a celebration gift!” Waving a paper, he asked Makset, “Do you know what your news is?” After reading from it, he announced solemnly, “You can go home.” Already packed, Makset just picked up his things and followed the clerk out of the cell.

“At the administration office where I had to sign some papers, the prosecutor was clearly upset. He had lost his battle to keep me in prison,” he said. “Then I was taken to the head of the prison department to sign still more papers in front of her. But before I left her office, she told the guards to go ahead of me to the outside gate, to check who was waiting there.

“Who is waiting for me?” he asked quickly, his heart pounding. “The government of Uzbekistan!” she replied. 

Was it a joke? “I believed her, and I was really afraid,” Makset said. “Was that why they were leading me to a side entrance of the prison, instead of out the main gate? Maybe they had arranged to ‘release’ me, but into the hands of someone waiting outside to kidnap me.

“When I got to the final exit,” he said, “I had to show my papers one last time. In the distance on one side of the gate, I saw a woman waving and shouting at me, but I couldn’t recognize her at first.” Emerging from the dark interior, he squinted at the bright lights reflecting off the snow.

Finally he recognized her: the woman who had processed all his UN documents over the past years. The three UNHCR security officials with her rushed him into one of their two cars and drove straight to their office.

“I waited there several hours until Aygul and the children arrived. It was like a dream to see them all again,” he said, shaking his head. “Lots of people were around, so I didn’t cry there,” content to wrap his arms around them and hug them.

“Our two-year-old son Arman was sound asleep when they arrived,” he said. “When he woke up later at the airport and saw me, he was confused and not sure that I was really his daddy.”

“Look, Murat,” Aygul said to their oldest son, “our God has delivered your father from prison!” Murat nodded and replied matter-of-factly, “Of course, because we prayed for him every night.”

The Last Tense Minutes
At midnight, the UN officials drove them directly to the airport, where more than 50 believers with their children were waiting inside to see them off. “I had wanted a week to say goodbye to them all, but in the end, I only had 15 minutes,” Makset said.

But even then, the UNHCR escorts were nervous about the noise and attention he was getting. “Everyone came to hug me and say goodbye, so they were worried that the KGB might react.”

The couple quickly called their families in Nukus, the capital of Uzbekistan’s autonomous Karakalpakstan region, to give them the news that Makset was free. “This was the first they knew that our entire family was leaving for resettlement in Europe,” Aygul said. “They were so relieved.”

They decided that Aygul and the children should go first through passport control, since they had valid passports, although no residence visas. Makset waited until they were stamped out of Kazakhstan to follow them.

The officials asked for his passport. “I don’t have one,” he told them. “I just got out of jail.”

“Startled, they asked me to wait and called over their supervisors. I watched my family walk on to board the plane, and swallowed hard, wondering what would happen.”

“What border did you come in?” the immigration officials asked. “I came in illegally,” he replied. Then they called over someone else, started searching on the computers, and talked among themselves. 

“Finally, they came back and stamped my papers,” Makset said. But just as he started to walk on, they stopped him.

“You are banned from returning to Kazakhstan for five years, until 2017,” they announced.

“My heart sank. I was so disappointed. But then I thought immediately, ‘Maybe it is Your will, Lord, for safety.’ As the UNHCR officials walked me all the way to the airplane, they said I should not try to visit any of the Central Asian countries again until after 2017. ‘All of their intelligence agencies work together,’ they explained, ‘so you are wanted everywhere because of Uzbekistan.’ ”

Makset settled himself with his family on the plane, which left Almaty at 2:30 in the morning. “We knew by then that the plane would stop over in Astana (the capital of Kazakhstan) before flying on to Germany. So the UNHCR had warned us that possibly Uzbek authorities could try to stop me there. But we didn’t change planes, and no one came aboard.

“I was so keyed up that I couldn’t sleep at all on the flight on to Frankfurt,” Makset recalled. When they arrived, they found no one waiting for them. The family spent several hours unattended, waiting for the connecting flight. Arriving in Sweden, they were met by the government’s refugee representatives.

By that time, Aygul was exhausted. She had packed for the move, reunited the kids with their father, and travelled through four airports to their final destination in Sweden, all in 24 hours. But there was still farther to go.

“Lord, where are You taking us?” she remembers praying during the five-hour drive from the airport through the snow and wind, shivering in the cold darkness. It was nearly 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 5, as she herded their four sleepy children up the stairs and through the door into a small, furnished apartment in a strange city.
 
“We still don’t know why we are here. But now we must learn the language, adapt to this climate and culture, and get our health strong again,” said Aygul, who is expecting their fifth baby in April. 
 
Christmas arrived three weeks later. The couple put up bright, handmade decorations and wrapped simple gifts for each of the boys—sock slippers, school notebooks, Play-Doh and a few small toys.
 
Aygul had prayed that somehow God would bring them all together again as a family for Christmas. “This was such a present for us, and for all of those who were praying for us, too,” she said.
 
Just before his arrest in September, Makset had been reading about the spiritual needs of the Turkic world, a region of more than 200 million people sharing ethno-linguistic links across Central Asia, Turkey, northwest China, parts of Eastern Europe and large sections of Asia. His world.
 
“There is so much work to do there for God,” he said. “So I am still asking every day since I arrived in Sweden, ‘Why are we here? And where do we go from here?’ “

Editor’s Note: Compass Direct News is now Word Watch Monitor.