Kazakhstan to close one third of registered religions

    Kazakhstan is ending its compulsory re-registration of religious groups, and could shut down about one-third of the country’s religios for failunre to meet government requirements, the Agency for Religious Affairs Director Kairat Lama Sharif said.
    For organizations to exist, they must be active and have at least 50 members, he said at a roundtable in Almaty, according to Newsru.com.
    The reform will give a "real picture of Kazakhstan’s religious situation," he said. In March, Sharif said that Kazakhstan had 3,900 religious organizations but that 579 of them had very few members. Some of those small groups existed only on paper, he added.
    The re-registration was mandated by a law on religious activity that Kazakhstan enacted in 2011 after a number of terrorist incidents.
    Meanwhile, Kazakhstani extremists are becoming financially self-sufficient, Kanat Lakbayev, head of the "A" Administration of the Interior Ministry, on October 11 said at an Astana roundtable on fighting terrorism, Zonakz.net reported.
    "It’s a moment of great social peril when organized crime, extremists and terrorists join forces," he said, explaining that Kazakhstani radicals seeking independence from foreign donors were beginning to share spheres of influence with organized crime to make money. Extremists recruit in prisons and in mosques, he added, according to Central Asia Online.