c. 1999 Religion News Service
MOSCOW _ In a voice hoarse from lack of sleep, Lena Sinyapkina, 24, described what she said was one of the longest days of her life. It began on a recent morning when she and dozens of other Scientologists were rousted from their rooms and given five minutes to leave a dormitory rented by the group.”They treated us like criminals,”Sinyapkina said.”One security guard said, ‘You’ll just go underground now. It’s not so bad. Lenin did it.'” The ordeal ended late that night, Sinyapkina said, with a three-hour interrogation by a plainclothes police officer who peppered her with questions about the Scientologists’ financial dealings. She spent the night sleeping in a chair at her office.
It was part of a two-day raid by about 70 officers from Russia’s Tax Police and Federal Security Service. They were targeting three Moscow facilities connected to the Church of Scientology, which has been under investigation for tax evasion since last April.
In recent months, a slew of apparently unconnected incidents has drawn worldwide attention to the situation of minority faiths and new religions in Russia.
The fast-growing Jehovah’s Witnesses, who claim 250,000 members in this country of 146 million people, are in the midst of a trial in which a Moscow prosecutor is seeking their”liquidation”. Meanwhile, 402 Pentecostals accused of”zombifying”the people of the remote city of Magadan have applied for political asylum in the United States. On Wednesday (March 3) 65 self-described Pentecostals who had been threatening mass suicide ended a three-day occupation of a local government building in Siberia. In St. Petersburg on Thursday, a standoff between riot police and parents and children refusing to leave the Open Christianity School continued for the 12th straight day. And for months, ultra-nationalist politicians have been blaming Russia’s half million Jews for the country’s economic woes. “Russia is exploring the limits of tolerance in both the legal and extralegal spheres,”said Lauren Homer, a St. Louis lawyer and religious freedom advocate with a focus on Russia.”As long as the economy continues to crumble and political control from the center remains paralyzed and unable to influence the regions, we will see more and more problems.” In the Scientologist raids no one was arrested and no charges were filed, but the police actions received extensive coverage in the Russian media which broadcast images of officers with bulletproof vests and automatic weapons removing box after box of files from the Scientologists’ Hubbard Humanitarian Center.
Law enforcement officials have said nothing about the results of their search. Scientology leaders have angrily denounced the raids, calling them part of a campaign of harassment orchestrated by the German government and the country’s dominant faith, the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Scientologists’ Moscow lawyer, Vladimir Vasiliev, said he is drafting a complaint to Russia’s federal prosecutor’s office. From Los Angeles, the president of the Church of Scientology International, Rev. Heber C. Jentzsch, said in a telephone interview with RNS that,”What we are concerned with is that this is really a march backwards towards totalitarianism.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
In a Feb. 25 letter to Russia’s ambassador in Washington, Jentzsch wrote,”Officials of the German government have tried to influence Russian officials to take repressive measures against Scientology. There is strong cause for suspicion that today’s raids came about due to German influence.” A spokesman for the German Embassy in Moscow denied any direct pressure by his government but said he could not exclude the possibility of there having been informal discussions between officials of the two countries. Germany’s Conference of the Ministers of the Interior has decried what it calls Scientologists’ emotional and financial exploitation of members, the spokesman said.
Jentzsch, in the interview, also accused Alexander Dvorkin, a U.S. citizen who heads a Moscow-based cult-monitoring center connected with the Russian Orthodox Church, of doing the bidding of the German government and unspecified groups keen to thwart Scientologist efforts to fight Russia’s drug problem.
Dvorkin, who was set to testify Friday for the prosecution in the Jehovah’s Witnesses trial, dismissed Jentzsch’s accusations of a campaign against minority faiths and denied any links to the German government. “I heard about these raids first through the newspapers, so there is no way I could have been involved,”said Dvorkin, an expert on non-conventional religions who has been demonized by groups as disparate as Hare Krishnas and Mormons.”This is typical to blame one person for all the evil.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)
A controversial 1997 law governing Russia’s religions is being used in a Moscow trial pitting a local prosecutor against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who stand accused of inciting”religious enmity”and endangering members’ lives by prohibiting blood transfusions. The trial is being closely watched by Western governments and human rights groups as a test case.
Eight time zones to the east, in the Siberian port city of Magadan, the same law is being invoked by prosecutors seeking to close down a thriving Pentecostal congregation. Church leaders are accused of using hypnosis to turn parishioners into zombies and part them with their money.
Pastor Nikolai Voskoboinikov said last week the allegations come, in part, from a misunderstanding of standard Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues. Voskoboinikov and 400 of his parishioners are waiting to hear from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow about the fate of their appeal for political asylum as persecuted believers.
Elsewhere in Siberia, the 1997 law was used Wednesday by a judge to close down a Pentecostal congregation, 65 members of which had seized an administration building and threatened mass suicide in a wage dispute, ITAR-Tass, a Russian news agency, reported. Few details of the incident in a remote logging area were immediately available, but officials with Russia’s two largest Pentecostal associations said the Siberian group was not registered with either of them and questioned the Siberians’ Pentecostal credentials, suspecting a provocation.
On Thursday night in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, parents, teachers and students were ending their 12th day holed up inside an ecumenical Christian school surrounded by Russian riot police seeking to seize the building. One parent, Irina Bolshakova, reached by telephone inside the school, said the authorities had disconnected the electricity Wednesday in an effort to oust the protesters. Bolshakova characterized the conflict as a”dispute about property,”not a religious freedom issue.
The politically powerful 80-million member Russian Orthodox Church, often cited by minority faiths as an oppressive force, rarely speaks out against specific faiths. At a March 3 news conference, the church’s leader, Patriarch Alexii II, criticized”destructive”religious groups which”often cripple people’s souls.”
DEA END BROWN
