29.11.2006
BELARUS: FAITH-BASED POLITICAL OPPOSITION EMERGES


By Geraldine Fagan, Forum 18 News Service

"Only believers can be a real moral force for change," one local
Protestant remarked to Forum 18 News Service in Belarus this summer. "Just
look at what was achieved by Karol Wojtyla [Pope John Paul II] and Fr Jerzy
Popieluszko [prominent anti-communist Catholic priest murdered by the
Polish secret police in 1984]." Forum 18 notes that some religious
believers in Belarus - after exhausting other methods of negotiation with
the state authorities - are indeed turning to tactics more usually
associated with secular political activism in their pursuit of religious
freedom.

Belarus has the tightest controls on religious activity of any European
country. All religious activity needs official permission before it is
legal and unregistered religious activity is punishable by penalties that
can be heavy.

Four thick files of correspondence with municipal officials and 18 months
of court cases having failed to secure the right to use their own land and
building for worship, members and supporters of the Minsk-based charismatic
New Life Church went on a high-profile hunger strike on 5 October 2006.
Within just two weeks the church's pastor, Vyacheslav Goncharenko, was
invited to see a top-ranking presidential administration official (see
F18News 20 October 2006
). On 26 October a
senior judge cancelled a 27 October 2005 decision against New Life and
called for the church's case to be heard again (see F18News 3 November
2006 ). On 4 November
the Higher Economic Court cancelled every court decision issued against
New Life since 27 October 2005 and confirmed that it would reconsider the
church's case on 27 November.

On 24 November more than 100 members of the Catholic parish of Our Lady of
Ostrobrama delivered an ultimatum to the offices of their local Regional
Executive Committee. Having petitioned unsuccessfully to build a church in
the city of Grodno [Hrodna] for nearly ten years, they intend to go on
hunger strike if they do not receive official state permission by 1
December. While Grodno Regional Executive Committee chairman Vladimir
Savchenko reportedly promised the Catholics that the authorities would
soon grant the relevant permission, parish priest Fr Aleksandr Shemet told
Nasha Niva newspaper that he remained sceptical: "Promises are promises and
a written answer is a written answer. I was born in this country and have
lived here long enough to know what promises are worth."

New Life's example appears to have inspired the Grodno parish. "We are
grateful to the Protestants for giving us courage," Fr Aleksandr remarked.
"We prayed for the hunger-strikers every day during their protest."

While a relatively small proportion of believers are demanding freedom of
worship in this way, Forum 18 has found that religious motivations are
beginning to feature prominently within the political opposition movement.
As general restrictions are progressively tightened under President
Aleksandr Lukashenko, believers appear to be questioning whether they can
now square a passive position with the moral obligations of their faith.

In the wake of this year's presidential elections, the Evangelical Belarus
Information Centre reported that on 20 March more than half of those
demonstrating against the regime in central Minsk raised their hands when
asked who would join in prayers for Belarus: "The next day almost everyone
responded to the same request, and the day after that the majority of songs
heard in the tent camp were Christian." Forum 18 has seen a photograph of
one column of post-election demonstrators marching behind banners bearing
New Testament verses: "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for what is
right" [Matthew 5:6] and "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
freedom" [1 Corinthians 3:17].

Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe
(OSCE) found that the 19 March presidential election "failed to meet OSCE
commitments for democratic elections" and that "arbitrary abuse of state
power, obviously designed to protect the incumbent President, went far
beyond acceptable practice".

On 20 March opposition activist Boris Khamaida was fined 180 times the
minimum wage, 5,580,000 Belarusian Roubles (16,370 Norwegian Kroner, 1,984
Euros or 2,610 US Dollars) for staging an unauthorised post-election
demonstration. According to the Belarusian service of Radio Free Europe,
he had walked around Vitebsk [Vitsyebsk] city centre with the placard: "He
who endures to the end will be saved" [Matthew 24:13].

On 1 June, three evangelical Christians were issued official warnings for
their participation in a 24-hour vigil in Brest city centre. The three had
silently read the Bible as an expression of solidarity with demonstrators
arrested in the wake of the presidential elections (see F18News 13 June
2006 ).

Religious believers have complained to Forum 18 that they are barred from
speaking publicly on general social issues (see F18News 3 March 2006
). A foreign Protestant
who used to work in the humanitarian aid sphere in Belarus has suggested to
Forum 18 that he was denied a visa because his partnership with Christian
churches involved teaching "responsibility, a change of attitude - that it
is not Jesus' example to sit down and accept what happens in your
community" (see F18News 18 October 2006
).

Apparently due to heightened state sensitivity towards unauthorised
gatherings during the March 2006 presidential election period, Reformed
Baptist pastor Georgi Vyazovsky and religious freedom lawyer Sergei
Shavtsov were handed down ten-day prison sentences for organising
unsanctioned religious events, and Pentecostal bishop Sergei Tsvor was
only spared a possibly similar fate due to the expiry of the legal
deadline for his prosecution (see 13 March 2006
and 27 March 2006
).

Now that independent political, business and social organisations have
been crushed in turn, one Minsk Protestant maintained to Forum 18 this
summer, "evangelical churches are the largest remaining social
organisations". Formed to revive Reformation ideals, he said, a movement
has been working within these churches in recent years "so that
evangelical Christians become active in daily life, influence society, and
are united as one front".

A September 2006 contribution to "What I Believe", a programme on Radio
Free Europe's Belarusian service, suggests that faith-based opposition is
also developing within the Catholic Church. Imprisoned for ten days with
other post-election demonstrators, Fr Andrei Sidorovich, a Catholic parish
priest in Orsha in Vitebsk region, declared: "I believe that in future no
one will pray in holy places built at a cost of silence and concession to
evil (…) that the Lord will deliver us from the curse of fear, and none of
my friends will regard visiting the editorial offices of Nasha Niva [an
independent Belarusian newspaper] as opposition activity (…) that today my
lungs are still full of the keen frosty air of March - my favourite month -
and that it was worth living if only to take just one gulp of that air
without regard for cost or consequences."

Forum 18 has also found a number of political opposition figures to be
active Christians. Unable to exist officially after analogous parties were
denied re-registration in 1999, the Belarusian Christian Democracy Movement
stands for aims such as "honest, moral and responsible politics" and
"freedom of conscience and Christian tolerance" according to its
literature. Those mainly associated with the Movement include practising
Orthodox and Pentecostals. One prominent Protestant representative, Pavel
Severinets, is currently serving a two-year sentence at a corrective
labour camp for organising an unsanctioned opposition demonstration in
2005. On his personal website, he maintains that the Belarusian national
idea "is the idea of the New Testament - faith, hope and love (…)
Belarusians bear a unique spiritual instinct which is Christian in its
principles."

Sentenced to 18 months in a general regime prison camp on 1 November 2006
for acting on behalf of an unregistered organisation, Belarusian Youth
Front leader Zmiter Dashkevich is also a committed evangelical. Commenting
to Christian Human Rights House soon after Dashkevich was detained in
September, Pastor Boris Chernoglaz of the Minsk-based charismatic Church
of Jesus Christ pointed out that "Zmiter never concealed his relationship
with God and always openly expressed his position - that every person
should have a choice, that God gave us this right."

A participant in both the post-election opposition demonstrations and New
Life's recent hunger strike, Zmiter Marchuk calls for prayer for greater
participation by believers in public life in his 17 October article on the
Belarusian Christian Democracy Movement's website. "The Bible destroys the
myth that believers should not engage in politics," he argues, maintaining
that the 2006 presidential election posed the nation with a choice of which
path it should follow: "Either democratic - on the basis of the Bible,
truth, freedom and economic development, or of slavery - chained by the
darkness and lies of a pagan-atheist monarchy."

Marchuk also suggests that Christ's call to "render unto Caesar the things
which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's" [Matthew 22:21]
limits the authority of the state in relation to the Church: "What right do
officials have to grant or withhold permission to conduct services or
baptise, if this right was given by God himself - 'Go therefore and make
disciples of all nations' [Matthew 28:19]? Not to sit, that is, but to
act!"