Security?

KESTON INSTITUTE, OXFORD, UK ______________________________________

KESTON NEWS SERVICE, 20.00, 11 December 2002. Reporting on violations of religious liberty and on religion in communist and post-communist lands. ______________________________________

RUSSIA: ARE CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY? Recently-leaked extracts from a 15- page draft paper on the prevention of religious extremism due to be presented at a joint session of three government bodies next month “simply cannot be used in a document of that level,” Vladimir Zorin, a government minister without portfolio dealing with religious and ethnic issues, told national TVS television. However, Nadezhda Kevorkova, a journalist from Gazeta newspaper, which published extracts from the draft paper, insisted that “we have not invented anything”. According to Kevorkova’s article, the draft paper names several confessions as threats to Russian national security. First to be cited is the Roman Catholic Church, which has declared “the territory of Russia to be an ecclesiastical province” and is winning over “individual priests and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church as converts to catholicism [sic].” Second are Protestants. “Under the pretext of providing humanitarian aid, many new Protestant organisations are fostering self-alienation from the Russian state within various sections of the population,” Gazeta quotes the draft paper as maintaining. The Moscow- based Slavic Centre for Law and Justice and the Institute of Religion and Law described the draft paper as “scandalously incompetent and anti- constitutional”. The most likely result of implementation of such a project, they maintain, would not be national security, but “an increase in interconfessional and interethnic tension within our country”.

RUSSIA: ARE CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY?

by Geraldine Fagan, Keston News Service

Recently-leaked extracts from a draft paper on the prevention of religious extremism in Russia which is due to be presented at a joint session of three government bodies next month “simply cannot be used in a document of that level,” Vladimir Zorin, a government minister without portfolio dealing with religious and ethnic issues, told national TVS television channel on 5 December.

In the same report, however, a journalist from Gazeta newspaper, which has published extracts from the 15- page draft paper, insisted that “we have not invented anything.” Keston News Service has been unable to contact Nadezhda Kevorkova in order to obtain further details about the document, which was reportedly prepared by “32 state officials and one expert” under the supervision of Zorin and the head of the Chechen state administration, Akhmed-haji Kadyrov.

According to Kevorkova’s 5 December Gazeta article, the draft paper names several confessions as threats to Russian national security. First to be cited is the Roman Catholic Church, which has declared “the territory of Russia to be an ecclesiastical province” and is winning over “individual priests and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church as converts to catholicism [sic]”. Second are Protestants. “Under the pretext of providing humanitarian aid, many new Protestant organisations are fostering self-alienation from the Russian state within various sections of the population,” Gazeta quotes the draft paper as maintaining. “New Protestant organisations, which have their headquarters abroad,” are also said to be spreading in Far Eastern Russia, it continues.

In third position are “representatives of foreign pseudo-religious communities” (Gazeta names Jehovah’s Witnesses, Moonies and Scientologists), satanists and “religious groupings based on various strands of Eastern doctrines”. Fourth are Islamic extremists, who plan to “set at odds with one another the interests of Russian Muslims and those of the state and society”. In this context, a particular threat to national security is deemed to be posed by “a tendency by younger, educated graduates of foreign centres of [Islamic religious] education to replace loyal and law-abiding clerics”.

The fifth threat to Russian national security from the religious sphere is allegedly the attempt “to foist the ‘clash of civilisations’ idea – the supposedly irreconcilable contradictions between Christians and Muslims – upon Russian society”, although no source for this is apparently given.

According to Gazeta, the draft paper boasts of successful attempts by several regional authorities in expelling various foreign religious workers from Russia, including an Estonian Pentecostal missionary previously based in Astrakhan. The newspaper also quotes as being “of important significance in the context of strengthening the external contacts of the Russian Orthodox Church” the Moscow Patriarchate’s recent creation of a permanent delegation attached to the European Union in Brussels. Consideration of the setting-up of a federal body to deal with religious and ethnic issues is also reportedly proposed by the document.

In a follow-up interview with Zorin published in Gazeta on 9 December, Kevorkova asked why Catholics, Protestants and Muslims were described in the draft paper as posing a threat to national security. This was “an absurd theory,” according to Zorin, who insisted that “neither Islam nor the Catholic Church are a threat to security, of course”. He also queried, however, whether Kevorkova surely “would not claim that the Catholics’ administrative steps have not given rise to tensions on the part of Orthodox believers?” The state’s proposal for a “ministry of religions,” he added, would be feasible “only with the consent of the leading religions – otherwise there is no point to this body”. Moscow Patriarchate representatives have repeatedly expressed opposition to the creation of such a government organ.

Quoted by the English-language Moscow Times newspaper on the same day, Zorin claimed that the purpose of the draft paper was merely to “analyse how confessions develop and expand in Russia”. The document is due to be presented in January at a joint session of the Security Council, the presidential Council for Co-operation with Religious Organisations (which includes a number of religious leaders representing confessions criticised in the draft paper) and the State Council, whose function is to assist interaction between state departments.

Notwithstanding Zorin’s remarks, the document has already attracted strong criticism. The head of the Catholic Church in Russia, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, recently reportedly described the association of the Catholic Church with “such a frightening phenomenon as terrorism” as “unheard of,” while a joint 5 December statement by the Moscow- based Slavic Centre for Law and Justice and the Institute of Religion and Law described the draft paper as “scandalously incompetent and anti- constitutional”. The most likely result of implementation of such a project, they maintain, would not be national security, but “an increase in interconfessional and interethnic tension within our country”. (END)

Copyright (c) 2002 Keston Institute. All rights reserved.

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