Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 8 – People of good will in Russia and around the world are horrified
at the six-year sentence handed down by a Russian court against a Jehovah’s
Witness for supposed “extremist activities. Indeed, Valery Borshchev says, even
the judge who delivered the verdict seemed “uncomfortable” connecting Dennis Christensen’s
actions with extremism.
The
Moscow Helsinki Group leader made that observation at a roundtable organized by
the Rosbalt news agency on this case. He described the Orel trial as “a
shocking show,” adding that he had “the sense that the judge experienced
discomfort” connecting saying prayers and discussing the Bible with extremism”
(rosbalt.ru/moscow/2019/02/08/1763063.html).
Even more
outrageous, the activist continued, was the judge’s linking such calm religious
activities to some notional effort to “overthrow the constitutional order.” There is no way to connect them, Borshchev
says, except by ignorance and brute force. Putin was right to call extremist cases
against the Jehovah’s Witnesses “complete rubbish.”
But Putin’s words aren’t guiding the
government in this regard – and perhaps they never were intended to so. Some
115 Jehovah’s Witnesses have been subject to criminal prosecution already, and “about
50” more are facing trials on charges like those brought against Christensen,
Yaroslav Sivulsky, the representative of the European Association of Jehovah’s
Witnesses.
He added that it was especially painful
for him to see Russia going back to Soviet practices. His own father was sentenced
to seven years in the camps for producing religious samizdat. Christensen now
will be in jail “only because he considers his faith true,” a judicial act if
anything even worse than the one that swept up his father, Sivulsky said.
As a result of this kind of “jurisprudence,”
the Jehovah’s Witnesses leader said, “every individual [in Russia] can be
thrown into jail.” There are 175,000 Witnesses in Russia, and already “about 5,000
have been forced to flee Russia. “We do not want to leave, but we do not want
to sit in jails because we believe in God and consider our religion to be true.”
Borshchev said that in his view, the
Russian powers that be are going after the Jehovah’s Witnesses because Witnesses
prefer to keep to themselves and not interact with the government and because the
headquarters of the Witnesses are in the United States. Roman Catholics have
their HQ in Rome, and so other faiths should be worried about persecution as
well.
All other participants in the roundtable
agreed. The Christensen case establishes a dangerous precedent and can be
easily extrapolated to others if they do not band together to secure his
release and ensure that no more judges will have to be uncomfortable because
they had to read out such sentences.
In short, Russia is facing a Pastor
Niemoeller moment. And it is one that those who experienced the end of the Soviet
system did not expect would come again to their country. Vladimir Raykhovsky, a
member of the Presidential Human Rights Council noted that in 1991 Russians
recognized that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been the victims of unjustified
repression.
“What has changed since that time?”
he asked rhetorically. “Have the Jehovah’s Witnesses become different than they
were? No, this is one of the most conservative organizations which does not
change its principles. In April 2017, they were liquidated by the Supreme Court
only because of their propaganda of religious superiority and exclusiveness.”
“In reality,” participants at the roundtable
said, “the Jehovah’s Witnesses are often accused of religious ‘snobism.’ But as
was noted at the press conference, in general, all believers consider their
faith true and that of others not very much so (and Orthodox here are no exception.).”
Consequently, all believers have reason to fear the fall out from this one
case.
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