Belarus Repression of Hindus

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New Belarus Law Codifies Rising Religious Repression

 

Posted: 11/25/2002

By Michael Wines

The New York Times

www.nytimes.com

 

 

INSK, Belarus, Nov. 21 — In the last four months, Tatyana and Sergei

Akadanovy have been arrested twice, sent to jail for 10 days and

fined more than $1,000, an unimaginable sum in impoverished Belarus.

 

An apartment they help rent has been broken into and vandalized. Mrs.

Akadanova has been severely beaten on the steps of their apartment, a

fate that separately befell six friends, and the police have issued

warnings that the Akadanovys and their friends are all criminals who

should be avoided.

 

In fact, the police may be right: the Akadanovys and their friends

are Hindus. And in Belarus, Hindus who gather together in their gods'

names are, by definition, almost always in violation of the law.

 

Belarus, which underwent more than its share of religious repression

under Soviet rule, now has a new religion law, "About the Freedom of

Confessions and Religious Organizations." And even before it fully

takes effect, persecution of Hindus and people of other faiths not

approved by the government — and some that are — has been ratcheted

sharply up.

 

The effect is to hamstring any rivals to the Belarus branch of the

Russian Orthodox Church, which helped draft the new law and is a

pillar of support for the autocratic government of President

Aleksandr Lukashenko.

 

A western Belarus chapel of the Russian Autocephalous Orthodox

Church, which has split from the main Orthodox faith, was bulldozed

in August. Several Minsk branches of the Full Gospel Pentacostal

Church, an evangelical Protestant faith that is among the largest

minority religions here, were notified in September that their prayer

services were illegal. The city's Hare Krishna temple received the

same notice. In October the head of the New Life Protestant Church

was summoned to a Minsk district administration office and told that

unspecified complaints had been filed against his church.

 

All that and more preceded the new law, which Mr. Lukashenko signed

on Oct. 31 and which took effect a week ago. Religious and human

rights officials say that the law fits a pattern of repression they

trace back at least three years, and that even mainstream faiths have

been targets.

 

"There's been a web of restrictions and control of religious

communities in the last few years," Felix Corley, editor of the

London-based Keston Institute's news service and an expert on

religious trends in Belarus, said in a telephone interview. "You

can't have outdoor events. You can't build a church without

permission from the authorities, and you can't get permission. This

new law has really codified and clamped down on everything."

 

The law has 40 articles of bewildering complexity, but at its root,

it outlaws regular meetings of worshipers of any faith not registered

with the state, and strictly limits the places where even registered

faiths can hold services.

 

Registering is a daunting task: no individual church may have fewer

than 20 members. Any organized faith must have at least 10 churches

and be able to prove that it had a church in Belarus before 1982 — a

time of religious repression under the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov.

 

That merely begins to describe the law's restrictions, which govern

church publications, visits by foreign priests, religious schools,

charities and a welter of other activities.

 

The State Department and the European Union, which last week denied

Mr. Lukashenko a visa because of Belarus's rights record, have said

the law violates international principles of religious freedom.

 

The bill's authors, on the other hand, say the Russian Orthodox faith

is so intimately woven into Belarussian culture that the state is

obligated to protect its leading role from dangerous sects — which,

they insist, are the legislation's true targets.

 

The state legally recognizes 26 faiths, but while a preamble to the

new law mentions Judaism, Catholicism, Lutheranism and Islam, it

singles out the Orthodox religion as playing "a determining role" in

national culture and government.

 

"This law is not directed against any religious minority, but at

protection of the rights of majority citizens," said Andrei I.

Alezhko, who played a major role in writing it. Mr. Alezhko, a legal

adviser to Metropolitan Filaret, the Belarus head of the Russian

Orthodox Church, describes himself as the head of an anticult human

rights group called Ozon.

 

All religions are equal before the law," said Vladimir B. Lameko, the

vice chairman of the Belarus Parliament's committee for religious

affairs, although "that does not mean that they are as large when

compared with each other."

 

But in Borovlyany, a prosperous village of brick homes some 20

minutes outside Minsk, Pastor Boris Cheroglaz scoffed at the notion

of religious equality here. In 1999, his outpost of the Full Gospel

Pentacostal Church had 1,000 members. Since then it has been driven

from one building where it held services and is in danger of losing

another. It has also lost 400 worshipers, 300 in the last year alone.

Most, he said, stopped attending services for fear of government

reprisal. "People were just afraid, scared because the memories were

still fresh from the time when people were persecuted for their

beliefs," he said.

 

The Borovlyany church is anything but alone in its predicament. There

are more than 450 registered Pentacostal churches in Belarus, which

makes Pentecostalism perhaps the nation's second-largest faith.

Another 200 are unregistered; it is not uncommon for registrations to

be rejected on technical grounds.

 

Then again, it could be worse. The Akadanovys' 150-member Hindu

community, the Light of Kalyasa, has repeatedly been denied

registration on technical grounds. Most recently, the couple said,

officials refused even to provide registration papers. An effort to

summon Hindu leaders to a meeting in a Minsk park last July collapsed

when the police arrested the Akadanovys and 13 other worshipers at

the park's entrance, accusing them of staging an illegal

demonstration. A month later, the apartment they used as a temple was

broken into and ransacked; when the couple and others carried banners

in a march protesting their treatment, they were arrested again.

Mrs. Akadanova, 34, suffered a concussion after she was beaten

outside the couple's flat in early September. After 10 days in prison

for her role in the July meeting, she faces a 15-day sentence if she

cannot pay a 1.5 million ruble fine — the rough equivalent of $1,000 —

for staging the protest in August.

 

"I was already in this jail once," she said in an interview in a

Minsk restaurant. "It's torture."

Rather than discouraging believers, however, the government's actions

are simply driving Hindus underground, the Akadanovys said. "Some of

them pretend to be a group of psychologists so they can meet and

meditate," Mrs. Akadanova said. "But the authorities already know

about us, so we cannot hide and conceal our activities. And we do not

know what the next sanctions will be against us. We can't gather,

even at private apartments. But we cannot give up our beliefs."

 

 

 

Tatyana and Sergei Akadanovy, who are Hindus, want religious freedom.