23.05.2007
BELARUS: FOREIGN PROTESTANTS EXPELLED FOR "HARMING NATIONAL SECURITY"


By Geraldine Fagan, Forum 18 News Service

Jaroslaw Lukasik, a Polish citizen active in the Belarusian Pentecostal
community, has told Forum 18 News Service that he must leave the country by
the end of 7 June. The official reason given in the state's notification of
his deportation, he confirmed on 15 May, is "activity aimed at bringing
harm to the national security of the Republic of Belarus in the sphere of
interconfessional relations".

The 8 May decision to annul Lukasik's residency permit - valid since 1999
- was taken by the Citizenship and Migration Department of Myadel District
(Minsk Region) on the basis of information from the KGB secret police, he
told Forum 18. At Myadel Department for Interior Affairs, he explained, he
was shown - but not given - the KGB's accusations. "That I had participated
in 'illegal religious activity by Protestant communities and gatherings of
radically inclined, politicised groupings'."

Lukasik, whose wife and three small children are Belarusian citizens, has
already started to appeal the decision. "We don't want them to decide the
fate of a family in this way - without a court case, based upon
unsubstantiated rumours," he remarked. Also speaking to Forum 18 on 15 May,
Lukasik's wife Natalya stressed that her husband has never been charged
with any violation of the law while living in Belarus.

On 17 May the Evangelical Belarus Information Centre published an appeal
to the state authorities in Lukasik's defence, signed by Sergei Tsvor, the
Pentecostal Union's bishop to Minsk and Minsk Region; Vyacheslav
Goncharenko, bishop of the Full Gospel Union and pastor of the Minsk-based
New Life Church; and 27 other Protestant pastors in Belarus. They describe
Lukasik as "a Christian active in the life of evangelical churches (..) a
person of high moral qualities (..) a bearer of Christian values who
conducts educational work in the spheres of history and culture." The
Protestant leaders also express their hope that "the principle of
presumption of innocence will continue to be the foundation of Belarusian
legal norms, and the accusations against Jaroslaw Lukasik will remain
groundless in the absence of a court ruling".

In a similar recent case, Travis Decker, a US citizen active in the Minsk
Baptist community, was ordered to leave Belarus within 15 days of being
notified of his deportation on 20 March. According to a local Protestant
source, he is no longer in Belarus. Viewed by Forum 18, documents issued by
the Department for Internal Affairs in Minsk's Frunze District inform
Decker of its 14 March decision to annul his stay in Belarus. One bears his
signature, dated 20 March, and acknowledgment that he has been familiarised
with its content.

According to the document, "in the course of his [Decker's] continued
residence on the territory of [Frunze] District, as well as of his stay in
Belarus in general (..) information was received from the Citizenship and
Migration Department of the Interior Ministry of Belarus in relation to
this foreign citizen concerning his relationship to activity aimed at
bringing harm to the national security of the Republic of Belarus."

Until his deportation, Decker had formally been engaged in the
humanitarian sphere, and held a one-year visa valid until 1 October 2007.

The country's National Security Concept, signed by President Aleksandr
Lukashenko on 17 July 2001, includes "the activisation of the activity of
foreign religious organisations and missionaries to monopolise the
spiritual life of society" among fundamental factors posing a threat to
national security in the humanitarian sphere. It also calls for the
counteraction of their "negative influence".

On 15 February 2007 seven US citizens were deported from Belarus following
a local police warning that they had been conducting illegal religious
activity in the eastern city of Mogilev [Mahilyow]. A further three left
voluntarily (see F18News 28 February 2007
).

Also in Mogilev Region, an Israeli rabbi based in the town of Bobruisk is
still trying to get his state permission to conduct religious activity
renewed, he told Forum 18 on 17 May. Permission was not renewed in
September 2006 on the grounds that Rabbi Borukh Lamdan was conducting
commercial activity - a charge he denies (see F18News 28 February 2007
).

In a 10 May interview with the Russian-language Jewish News Agency, the
chairman of the Hassidic Union of Jewish Religious Communities of Belarus,
Vladimir Malinkin, acknowledged that Rabbi Lamdan has "committed some
violations of the passport regime and the authorities dropped heavy hints
that he should go". Malinkin added that the local Jewish community is keen
for him to stay, however, "because Borukh has done much to revitalise
Jewish life in Bobruisk".

Foreign religious workers invited by local religious communities of
various confessions are increasingly being barred from Belarus (see F18News
18 October 2006 ). Seven
Polish Catholic priests and five nuns were forced out of the country at the
end of 2006, apparently because of their high levels of religious activity,
including youth and alcohol rehabilitation meetings open to all (see
F18News 12 January 2007
). (END)

For more background information see Forum 18's Belarus religious freedom
survey at .

A survey of the religious freedom decline in the eastern part of the
Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) area is at
.