Storm clouds gather over Jehovah's Witnesses

[Guest Kurt]

JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES IN NORTH CAUCASUS REPORT PRESSURE BY SILOVIKI
Kavkazskii Uzel, 2 April 2016
 
Security forces [siloviki] in Prokhladnoe and Stavropol planted materials considered extremist on Jehovah's Witnesses who were conducting a worship service, the Administrative Center of the religious organization in Russia declared. Believers consider that the authorities are implementing a targeted policy of struggle with the religious society.
 
As Kavkazskii Uzel wrote, on 28 March the prosecutor's office of Kabardino-Balkariia circulated a report that a court in the city of Prokhladnoe issued to local Jehovah's Witnesses a warning because of distribution of publications deemed to be extremist. The congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses tried to appeal this decision, but it was not able to secure its cancellation, the prosecutor's office noted. And on 23 March Orthodox activists of Stavropol conducted a series of pickets against the activity of the congregation.
 
On 27 March a group of personnel of security structures [siloviki] conducted a search in the building of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Prokhladnoe. Believers were prevented from documenting the search of the premises as they had been led out of the building beforehand. After this the persons conducting the search declared that they found materials that are included in the list of extremist materials, the 28 March report of the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia states.
 
According to the report, believers conduct weekly inspections of their building in order to determine that there are none of the forbidden materials there. "Therefore they have no doubt that materials included in the federal list were planted on them. About 250 adherents of the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses reside in Prokhladnoe," the report says.
 
Also, according to information of the Administrative Center, on 25 March a similar search was conducted in the house of worship of the Jehovah's Witnesses located in Stavropol. After the search, the discovery of extremist materials in the building also was announced. "The vicious tactic of planting has become a widespread phenomenon in many regions of Russia, which believers have now reported many times," the report concludes.
 
According to information of the Jehovah's Witnesses' Administrative Center, on 30 and 31 March, such searches also were conducted at congregations in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka and Saransk. Both also concluded with the discovery of prohibited materials. In the city of Okha of Sakhalin province, on 31 March a worship service of Jehovah's Witnesses was interrupted by an anti-terrorist inspection and believers refused to sign protocols of the search.
 
All books and brochures of Jehovah's Witnesses that are included in the list of extremist materials are based on the Bible, a correspondent of Kavkazskii Uzel was told by a representative of the Administrative Center of Jehovah' Witnesses in Russia, Yaroslav Sivulsky. "They take every instance when we say that our faith is correct, and they conclude extremism from this. But after all, every faith says this!" he declared.
 
He said that the actions of the security structures in Prokhladnoe were aimed at the discrediting of the Jehovah's Witnesses. "The chairman of the religious congregation was invited to go up to the second floor of the hall, and the rest of the believers were required to leave the premises. And at this time, when nobody was in the building, suddenly publications from the federal list were "discovered." At the same time, on the day before, the believers conducted an inspection of the premises and drew up an affidavit that no forbidden literature was being kept there. They do this regularly, after every use of the hall," Sivulsky explained.
 
A day before the search, the electricity to the premises was turned off, and therefore the video cameras did not record the actions of the siloviki, he noted.
 
"We have no doubts about the deliberate goal of such actions. The goal of this policy is recognition of the activity of Jehovah's Witnesses as extremist and its prohibition throughout the country," Sivulsky is sure. "All of this is being appealed, but unfortunately there are almost no chances of achieving a positive result, since the courts mainly take the side of the law enforcers."
 
The chairman of the congregation in the city of Stavropol, Yury Maslov, explained for a Kavkazsky Uzel correspondent that the Stavropol Jehovah's Witnesses also carefully examine their building, searching for prohibited texts. "We were sure that there was nothing in the hall. This was clearly planted. Literature was found where it never had lain, and nobody could have put it there and then hide. In addition, nobody would want to bring such a quantity, 21 copies, and then hide," Maslov noted.
 
Kavkazsky Uzel still has not obtained comment from representatives of law enforcement agencies regarding the Jehovah's Witnesses' statements.
 
Because of the warning from the court, the organization is on the verge of closure, explained the president of the Russian section of the International Society for Human Rights, Vladimir Novitsky.
 
"Usually, a deadline for removal of violations is established, and if they are eliminated then the warning lapses. The chief danger of such warnings is that if, in the opinion of law enforcement agencies, the religious organization does not eliminate the violations, or the warning is not rescinded by a court, and in the course of twelve months new instances of extremist activity are discovered, in the opinion of law enforcement agencies, the religious organization may be banned," he told the Kavkaszsky Uzel correspondent.
 
The actions of the siloviki in Prokhladnoe and Stavropol are not independent actions but the implementation of a completely formulated policy, thinks Lev Levinson, an expert of the Institute of Human Rights.
 
"This is similar to what Jehovah's Witnesses suffered before the war (World War II), in the 1960s, and later, when practically all Witnesses who professed their faith openly were subjected to persecution. Disruption of worship services and inspection of libraries during worship—this is not prescribed by any laws," he declared to a Kavkazsky Uzel correspondent.
 
However one should not talk about full-scale persecutions of Jehovah's Witnesses throughout the country, and indeed the punishment meted out to believers is substantially milder than in the soviet period, Levinson noted. Levinson called the persecution an attempt of the state to protect the Orthodox Church from competitors.
 
"The authorities are not protecting public interests and they are not prosecuting extremism. They are protecting only a religious monopoly. There are new religious movements that are working on a different field than the RPTs, for example the Society of Krishna Consciousness,"—people who go there and still do not go to church are persecuted much less," Levinson thinks.
 
The practice of selective persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses will continue in the future, the expert is sure. "They will begin on the outskirts and will try to get to the Administrative Center. If they were to begin right away with the Administrative Center, this would be a very big headache, that the current administration is not interested in," Levinson concluded.
 
That the pressure on the Jehovah's Witnesses in the Caucasus may be evoked "by the zealous and even envious attitude toward them by leaders of historically familiar confessions," the author of the blog "Wind from Asheron," Kiamal Ali, opines for Kavkazsky Uzel.
 
"They are afraid of an outflow of believers to competitors, dissipating control over believers and a loss of the privileges given them by the state, comfortable automobiles and offices and maybe even covert salaries in envelopes. I do not see any other explanation," he wrote on 30 March in a post devoted to the situation of Jehovah's Witnesses in Azerbaijan.
 
Kavkazsky Uzel has written previously about a number of criminal cases in other regions of the south of Russia regarding Jehovah's Witnesses.
 
In September 2009 the activity of the Taganrog congregation was banned by a court. According to the investigation, after the group was banned, believers continued to conduct worship services and the study of literature that had been ruled extremist. The defendants did not acknowledge their guilt, thinking that they were being persecuted for religious convictions.
 
On 30 November 2015, a quartet of defendants in a case of Jehovah's Witnesses in Taganrog was sentenced to suspended sentences and another 12 were fined. This decision was the results of the review of an original verdict according to which in 2014 nine of 16 defendants were acquitted of a charge of extremism. In March of this year, the Rostov provincial court concluded that the guilty verdict was reasonable.
 
Jehovah's Witnsses reported in July 2015 the beating of a believer by siloviki in Karachaevo-Cherkesia. In the same month, a court sentenced the elder of a congregation in the Kuban capital of Briukhovetsk to 12 days detention.
 
On 4 March 2015 the Krasnodar territorial court granted the lawsuit of the prosecutor's office for liquidation of the Abinsk organization of Jehovah's Witnesses. Believers were accused of distributing publications that are included in the federal list of extremist materials.
 
On 23 November 2015 a law took effect, according to which "the Bible, Quran, Tanakh, and Kangyur . . . as well as their contents and quotations from them may not be ruled to be extremist materials." The adoption of this law was preceded by the uproar connected with the finding as extremist of a publication of the book "Prayer to God: its Significance and place in Islam," which consists of a translation of verses of the Quran and sayings ascribed to the Propeht Muhammed. That decision was issued by a court in Southern Sakahalinsk. The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, filed a complaint against the court's decision, as a result of which on 5 November 2015 the decision finding the book extremist was rescinded. He actively lobbied for the adopting of the law prohibiting the finding of sacred scriptures to be extremist.
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Legal existence of Jehovah's Witnesses center in Russia under threat

LAW ON PROTECTION OF SACRED TEXTS CANNOT PROTECT THE BIBLE
by Roman Lunkin
Religiia i pravo, 1 April 2016
 
Because the antiextremist policy touched upon the sacred texts of world religions, specifically the Quran and Bible, a law for protection of texts of the world religions from encroachment by the prosecutor's office was adopted. However it turned out that everything is not so simple. Different translations of the Bible still turned out to be under attack since it is not known what should be considered as the Bible, a generally accepted sacred scripture.
 
Vague wording of the federal law permits giving the broadest interpretation to what is a sacred text. In essence, the authors or initiators of the law proceeded from a simple conventional notion that there is some sacred text that is recognized by all: "After all, the Bible is the same for everyone. Indeed the principles of the world religions are identical and indeed all religions lead to the same god." But in life everything is more complicated.
 
We recall that on 25 November 2015 amendments to the federal law "On combating extremist activity" took effect making four sacred scriptures—the Bible, Quran, Tanakh, and Kangyur—legally immune. The draft law was introduced by President Vladimir Putin after an appeal from Ramzan Kadyrov. His requests were evoked by a decision of a court of South Sakhalin of 12 August 2015 which found the book "Prayer to God: its Significance and Place in Islam" to be extremist, and accordingly several passages from the Quran were extremist.
 
Translations of sacred texts have already been the subject of judicial proceedings. In 2013, the October district court of Novorossiisk found the "Idiomatic translation of the Holy Quran into the Russian Language" by Elmir Kuliev to be extremist. (On 17 December of that same year a Krasnodar territorial court overturned the decision of the October district court.)
 
In a roundabout way, quotations of biblical texts connected with proclaiming the truth of one's faith had already been investigated in the course of a trial of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Golovin court of the city of Moscow in the early 2000s. Then there was a return to this theme in 2009 when a campaign was begun for the banning of the literature of Jehovah's Witnesses and their congregations which, most likely, is leading to the liquidation in the near future of the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia. The Jehovah's Witnesses have been quite seriously accused of thinking their beliefs to be better and more correct than those of other religions and confessions.
 
The truly diabolical logic of the prosecutor's office leads to the fact that it is necessary to prove that the Jehovists do not have a Bible at all, and then this is not the Bible. Then perhaps nobody will feel sorry for them at all, and it will be possible to prohibit them entirely, and that means to prosecute them as terrorists and extremists in criminal proceedings. And this really is somewhat easier than to find real criminals or racketeers, for example, since Jehovists do not resist.
 
Now the Vyborg city court, since the summer of 2015, has been conducting a case for finding the Bible in the translation that the Jehovah's Witnesses use (The New World Translation) to be extremist literature. In 2015 an expert analysis of the Bible in the Jehovist translation was conducted at the request of Vyborg customs by the Center for Socio-Cultural Expert Analysis (Investigation 240/15 of 3 August 2015). The experts did not include a single person with an academic degree with a religious studies specialty (V.S. Kotelnikov, A.E. Tarasov, N.N. Kriukova). The expert analysis includes a section "The Canonical Understanding of the Bible." It gives an Orthodox definition of the Bible and the Word of God, from the point of view of the experts themselves, of course. It includes the following quotation: "Sectarian practice, which is usually based on carefully selected and reinterpreted quotations from the Bible, desiccates Christianity, turning it into legalism." Then the experts study the "Sacred Scripture. New World Translation," the Jehovists' version of the Bible. It is pointed out that there the name of God appears as "Jehovah," the word "cross" is translated from the Greek as "torture stake," and some of the books receive different names. Moreover, the Jehovah's Witnesses' translation, the experts note for some reason, follows the Masoretic tradition and not the Septuagent, which, in its turn, the Synodal translation follows. After comparison of the Synodal translation and the New World Translation, the experts draw the conclusion that the Jehovist text "allows for assembling a system of doctrinal and ethical texts that is different from the Christian tradition."
 
After a whole array of quotations with variant translations of the biblical text and calls in the Jehovists' resources to study the Bible, the experts' conclusion follows: "Proceeding from what is said above, the New World Translation is not a variant translation of the Bible in the Christian tradition, and accordingly it is not the Bible as a canonical collection of texts." One of the arguments consists in the fact that study of a translation requires facility in interpretation of the text, and "therefore the New World Translation contains connections with all the notions existing in the doctrinal and ethical literature of the Jehovah's Witnesses."
 
The activity of the prosecutor's office and their experts upset the Russian Bible Society, which has already issued several translations of sacred scripture, that are by no means uncanonical, that is, not recognized, for example, by the Russian Orthodox Church for use during worship services. The recognized translation in the RPTs remains the Synodal, from the 19th century and this text has the blessing of the church.
 
The executive director of the Russian Bible Society, Anatoly Rudenko, in a special conclusion gave an explanation regarding what the Bible and its translations are.
 
The most general definition of the Bible is the following: "The Bible, or Sacred Scripture, is a collection of diverse texts, created at various times and in various languages, which are confessional for adherents of two world religions, Judaism and Christianity. That part of the Bible that is called the New Testament is recognized as Sacred Scripture only by Christians and is not recognized as such by adherents of Judaism. The New Testament consists of 27 separate books. A special portion of the books of the Old Testament is recognized as sacred by both Chritians and Jews. These are the so-called canonical books of the Old Testament, numbering 39.
 
"In addition to the canonical books, the Old Testament contains a number of additional works. Their number and canonical status differ in different Christian denominations. The Russian Orthodox Church includes within the makeup of the Old Testament additional books under the general title of 'noncanonical books of the Old Testament.' The Roman Catholic Church considers them just as authoritative as the other books of the Old Testament and calls them deuterocanonical. Protestants exclude the noncanonical books from the makeup of the Bible and call them 'apocryphal.'"
 
Jews do not use the title "Old Testament," but they call the 39 canonical books of the Old Testament the Tanakh, which comes from the ancient Hebrew tradition of calling Sacred Scripture by the first letters of the ancient Hebrew names of its parts: T for Torah, which is also the Pentateuch of Moses; N for Neviim, that is, prophets; and Kh for Ketuvim, literally "writings" (the remaining books).
 
As part of the judicial proceedings there also arose the question that everybody has different books in the Bible, at least as it seems so to prosecutors and uninformed experts. Anatoly Rudenko notes: "The names of individual biblical books in different attestations of the biblical text vary considerably. Thus the book of Bytiia has the title Genesis in the Septuagent (the Greek translation of the Old Testament of the third century B.C.) and Bereshit in the Tanakh. The composition known in the Synodal translation under the title Third Book of Kings is called the First Book of Kings in the Catholic and many other Christian traditions; in the Hebrew Bible its title is Melakhim Alef. The books of Paralipomenon are called Chronicles in European translations of the Bible and in the Tanakh, Divre-ha-Yamim, and so forth."
 
For biblical scholars it is evident that the entire fullness of the biblical text may be understood through its various translations. As Anatoly Rudenko notes: "Translation is a most important and integral part of the history of the formation and existence of the Bible, or Sacred Scripture. The process of translation of the books of the Bible began in deep antiquity and it has continued to our days. Its foundation was laid by the translation of the doctrinal books of the Jews from the ancient Hebrew language into the ancient Greek language, carried out in the third century B.C. in Alexandria. According to tradition, this translation was accomplished by 72 Jewish sages, from which comes its Greek title Septuagent, that is, the translation of the 70. In the first century A.D., when the New Testament authors lived and worked, they used and quoted in the creation of their works primarily the Septuagent and not the ancient Hebrew sacred texts. There are in the Bible also some books that have come down to our days only in the form of later translations in various in various languages. . . . Thus already within the Bible itself, translations of the Bible are an essential and integral part."
 
Undoubtedly this is too complex a topic for judicial proceedings, but it becomes yet more confusing when one realizes that different confessions use different translations: "The Roman Catholic Church calls as its Sacred Scripture the Bible in translation into the Latin language, the so-called Vulgate, created in the fifth century A.D. by the Blessed Jerome. The liturgical Bible of the Russian Orthodox Church goes back to the Slavonic translation carried out in the ninth century by the saints, equal with the apostles, Cyril and Methodius. It was from this translation that the beginning of Slavic literature derived. The Slavonic translation was made from the Septuagent, which, as noted above, in its turn also is a translation. Thus the Church Slavonic Bible is a translation of a translation. Protestants use in worship services and in home reading various translations of the Bible, which were made in modern and contemporary times.
 
The translation of the Bible into Russian was begun in 1816, on the initiative of Emperor Alexander I. In 1821, the first Russian translation of the New Testament was printed under the aegis of the Russian Bible Society. The first full translation of the Bible into the Russian language (1876) was carried out under the guidance of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, and therefore it received the title Synodal. The Old Testament in the Synodal translation was translated mostly from the Hebrew Masoretic text, although a number of places of special doctrinal importance were translatedon from the Septuagent, that is, the Greek translation of the third century B.C.
 
The Russian Bible Society published a contemporary Russian translation in 2011 and in 2015, jointly with the Institute of the Translation of the Bible of the Zaoksky Ecclesiastical Academy and the Holy Apostle Andrew Biblical Theological Institute.
 
What conclusion may be drawn from all of this diversity of translations of the Bible? According to one of the directors of the Russian Bible Society, Anatoly Rudenko: "In a modern law-based society, secular authority cannot take upon itself the role of arbiter of theological disputes and establish some kind of standard out of the multiplicity of church traditions, which all Christians must follow in their religious practice."
 
According to the spirit of the law for protecting sacred texts, any attempt to prohibit the Sacred Scripture of any confession (in this case, the Bible—or Quran—in various translations) is a violation of the rights and freedoms of citizens and the law on freedom of conscience. The political trend in Russia is such that agencies of the prosecutor's office consider each manifestation an occasion for opening a criminal case and a prohibition. The presidential law also has become grounds for gross interference in the internal affairs and creation of religious organizations.