Pope to honour Stalin victims

Kazakhstan are tightening security ahead of the papal visit in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Astana, Kazakhstan -- Pope John Paul II has touched down in Kazakhstan amid tight security for a trip in which he will remember the region's troubled history.

The Pope's first stop will be an obelisk set up to honour the victims of Joseph Stalin's regime who were imprisoned in the Soviet era.

Armed security forces lined the streets of the capital, Astana, for the Pope's visit and an armoured personnel carrier was stationed at the memorial.

Catholic officials and other religious leaders were at the airport to greet the Pope, along with a military band and a group of Kazaks in embroidered folk costumes.

Under Stalin, the Soviet government deported thousands of ethnic Germans, Chechens and others accused of Nazi collaboration during the second world war to the camps.

The sparsely populated region of northern Kazakhstan was shrouded in secrecy until the "glasnost" campaign of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Prisoners from across the former Soviet Union remained trapped in the camps until Stalin's death in 1953.

Alexander Taygarinov, whose mother was a prisoner in the camps, told The Associated Press news agency: "There were people from all over the Soviet Union, Poland, and as far away as Palestine."

In 1936, entire ethnic Polish villages were deported en masse from western Ukraine to the camps.

Taygarinov's mother, Yefrosinia Yakovenko, was imprisoned in a camp known as Site 26, also called ALZHIR -- Akmola Camp for Wives of Enemies of the Motherland."

"There was no place around where they could run away. Just endless steppe," Taygarinov told the news agency. "The first thing they had to do was build a barracks for themselves."

The regime slackened towards the end of the second world war.

Yakovenko was reunited with her two daughters and allowed to carry out field work outside the camp.

Taygarinov told AP: "We never talked about (our parents' backgrounds,) only whispers at home.

The camp at Malinovka now has its own memorials: an "alley of remembrance" at the former entrance to the camp, with metal plaques listing prisoners' names.

There is also a small museum documenting the history of the prison camp system in northern Kazakhstan.

Taygarinov said he will be travelling to Astana to attend two open-air Papal masses planned for Sunday and Monday.

He told AP: "I am an atheist, but like everyone else, I hope for something from the visit, maybe just a stop to the rain so we can dry our grain."

A large group of former Polish exiles is also set to attend.

Maria Buchinskaya, 75, told AP: "There was a time when we thought we'd never be able to pray again, much less pray with the pope."

Buchinskaya said when her family was deported to northern Kazakhstan, the only sign of human life was a row of sticks marking out where the eighty deported families should build their barracks.