BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

20/04/2006

Christian Leader May Be Fined for Organizing Bible Study

Jeremy Reynalds

ASSIST News Service

BELARUS (ANS) -- The administration of the town of Baranovichi in western Belarus, is trying to fine a local Pentecostal leader for organizing a Bible study group within his congregation.

Belarus is located in Eastern Europe, east of Poland.

According to Forum 18 News Service, Tatyana Zhitko, head of the Ideology Department of the town administration had no comment about the situation.

"Why are you calling me?" Forum 18 reported Zhitko said. "I don't know your publication and I'm not prepared to give you any information." According to Forum 18, Protestant churches have borne the brunt of increased use in recent months of the Administrative Violations Code to restrict the activity of religious communities.

In the wake of a police raid on New Generation Church at the beginning of 2006, local officials accused Gennady Akhrimovich, who chairs the church's council, of organizing a study group of eleven church members without registering its statutes.

Forum 18 reported that in a Feb. 22 report, officials said this violated Article 193 of the Administrative Violations Code - a Soviet-era provision punishing the foundation and leadership of an unregistered religious congregation or a group within a religious community not connected with the performance of religious rituals with a fine of up to five times the minimum monthly wage (up to 53 U.S. Dollars).

However, at its hearing on April 6, at which Akhrimovich set out his position, the Administrative Commission postponed further consideration of the case for another two weeks, complaining that it had insufficient time to prepare properly.

Forum 18 reported that Akhrimovich argued the study group was not a separate organization but an integral part of the church's work, since its aim was "in-depth Bible study, in particular such issues as Biblical foundations of the family and marriage, the nature of faith, prayer, the Holy Spirit, the Church."

Akhrimovich maintained, Forum 18 reported, that organizing such study groups is within the parameters of his church government as outlined in its statutes, and as a registered religious community under the country's 2002 Religion Law.

Forum 18 reported that under Belarus' "tight web of restrictions on all religious activity - and in defiance of the country's international human rights commitments," the government maintains that all religious activity without official approval is illegal.

While New Generation Church has managed to re-register under the 2002 law, it has encountered difficulties acquiring a place of worship. Last year Pastor Leonid Voronenko told Forum 18 that, although his 150-strong congregation bought a 530-square-yard warehouse in 1997 with the intention of converting it into a church, the town authorities refused to allow the designated purpose of the building to be changed or to give the church full rights over the land beneath it.

In long-running correspondence on the issue between the church and Baranovichi Municipal Executive Committee seen by Forum 18, committee chairman Mikhail Pavlov claimed in July 1997 that conversion of the warehouse was "inexpedient."

Forum 18 reported that his successor Viktor Dichkovsky wrote to Voronenko in Aug. 2004 that there was "no basis" to alter the building. He warned, Forum 18 reported, that if the designated usage of the plot of land was not complied with - in this case, storage of goods and products - then the church's right to use it would be terminated in accordance with the Land Code.

With the help of public pressure, Forum 18 reported that New Generation Church has so far managed to resist state threats to seal and demolish the building (see F18News www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=619).

A fellow Full Gospel Association congregation in a similar predicament is the Minsk-based charismatic New Life Church. On April 18, Forum 18 reported that its administrator Vasily Yurevich told the news service that the church had just received a court summons from Minsk City Economic Court to attend an April 24 preliminary hearing on the forced sale of the church's worship building to Minsk City Property Department.

Yurevich told Forum 18 that the church is still considering its response, but is determined "not to sell our church building at any price." A copy of the summons was seen by Forum 18, the news service reported.

In late Oct. 2005 New Life Church lost its challenge in the same court against Minsk City Executive Committee's Aug. 17 instruction curtailing the church's land rights and ordering the sale of its worship building, a disused cowshed it purchased in 2002 (see F18News www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=700).

The Executive Committee's decision was based on the church's alleged violation of Article 49, Part 4 of the Land Code, Forum 18 reported, which states that rights to land may be curtailed if it is not used in accordance with its designation.

Forum 18 added that the 2002 Religion Law requires state permission for religious gatherings in premises not specially designed for worship, but the Minsk municipal authorities have consistently refused to grant both this - on the grounds that the building is a cowshed - as well as permission to change the designated usage of the building and reconstruct it as a church (see F18News www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=516).

Two Protestants have recently been freed after each serving ten days in prison for religious activity the government regards - against international human rights standards - as illegal, Forum 18 reported. Sergei Shavtsov, a religious rights lawyer who was imprisoned for ten days on charges of organizing an unapproved Christian seminar in a privately owned restaurant, was freed at the end of his sentence on 3 April (see F18News www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=750).

"Conditions in prison were not too bad," Forum 18 reported he told the news service, "though of course it was not up to the standard of foreign prisons."

On April 5, Vladimir Bukanov, a Reformed Baptist pastor based in Gatovo (Minsk region), told Forum 18 that neither his congregation nor that of Pastor Georgi Vyazovsky had encountered any restriction since Vyazovsky's release from prison on 13 March (see F18News www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=737).

Also facing charges for leading unapproved home worship is the Pentecostal bishop of Minsk region, Sergei Tsvor, but he told Forum 18 that he as unaware of further developments since the March 9 postponement of a court hearing to consider his case (see F18News www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=743).

"They told me to wait for a summons," he told Forum 18, "but all has gone quiet."

Meanwhile, Forum 18 reported, Christians and political opponents of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, detained by police during election demonstrations in Minsk and elsewhere, are now gradually being released from prison.

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observers found that the March 19 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."

Freed on March 28, Kristina Shatikova from the town of Mogilev, told the opposition news website Charter 97 that members of the OMON special riot police confiscated Bibles from some female demonstrators as they arrested them. Forum 18 reported she claimed that when they asked for their Bibles back, the OMON members laughed and threatened to rape them. Members of some Christian churches took part in the demonstrations and a number were detained for up to two weeks.

In the wake of the expulsion from Belarus in Dec. 2005 of the Catholic parish priest of Borisov, Polish citizen Father Robert Krzywicki, Forum 18 reported that a group of his parishioners wrote to the government's Religious Affairs Committee demanding that he be allowed to return (see F18News www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=715).

In his March 22 response, however, Forum 18 reported that Committee deputy chairman Vladimir Lameko said the complaint had been sent on to the Minsk regional executive committee as this group had originally given Father Krzywicki permission to serve in the parish. At the same time, Lameko pointed out that, as the Catholic leadership holds the exclusive right to name priests to parishes, Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek appointed Father Zbigniew Grigorzewicz to the Borisov parish. "The state does not interfere in the activity of religious organizations."

Local journalist Viktoriya Ravinskaya wrote on a Borisov website, Forum 18 reported, that the parishioners said the response had been as they had predicted.

Source:

http://www.crosswalk.com/news/religiontoday/1391622.html