Kazakhstan: Atheist Faces Seven Years for Stoking Religious Tension
May 15, 2014 - 1:40pm, by Joanna Lillis
Mild-mannered pensioner Aleksandr Kharlamov does not look like a typical rabble-rouser – but this bespectacled sexagenerarian stands at the center of a furor over freedom of conscience in Kazakhstan.
Throughout the post-Soviet era, President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s administration has cast Kazakhstan as a bastion of religious tolerance. Yet, Kharlamov, a staunch atheist, is accused of stoking religious tensions in a Kafkaesque case which could see him jailed for seven years.
Kharlamov has already spent six months behind bars, some of it in a psychiatric ward, broadening the controversy over religious freedom into a row over the alleged misuse of psychiatry.
Kharlamov denies stoking religious discord, he told EurasiaNet.org in an interview in his hometown of Ridder in the Altay Mountains in northeastern Kazakhstan.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/68375