country, as part of a reported crack down against churches and Christians, BosNewsLife learned Thursday September 12.
The deportation of Leo Martensson, who had worked in Russia as a missionary for nine years, was ordered on September 10 when his visa was cancelled, said the Keston News Service (KNS) which monitors religious persecution.
Martensson’s lawyer Aleksandr Antipyonok described the expulsion as "an illegal" decision. "There is no basis for it," he told KNS. His wife and daughter are still in Russia.
INVITATION
Martensson had been invited to work in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, by the local diocese of the Evangelical Christian Missionary Union, a registered Protestant denomination.
Also on September 10 the Polish Catholic priest Edward Mackiewicz was denied entry to Russia despite holding a valid visa, KNS reported. Border guards reportedly told him that his parish in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don had been "abolished".
He is the fifth foreign Catholic priest to have been denied access to the Russian Federation this year. Foreigners working with other religious communities have also had their visas stripped from them, KNS said.
CHURCH CRIPPLED
A Vatican source reportedly warned that "if this strategy keeps up, they will succeed in crippling the Catholic Church in Russia." Earlier news reports said that gunmen opened fire on the Catholic church in Rostov-on-Don September 7, leaving ten bullet holes in its windows.
Speaking to KNS from Rostov Thursday, September 12, a parishioner dismissed this incident as "foolishness". The parishioner, identified as Grigori, said Rostov’s Last Supper Catholic parish was thriving and "very large," with mainly Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Armenians.
The latest developments came amidst concern about other violations of human rights. Former Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, a historian who spend 12 years in jail under Communism, told BosNewsLife that there are "now once again political prisoners in Russia."
KGB SOUL
Speaking at an international conference on terrorism in Budapest he warned that the United States that despite the September 11 attacks, Washington should be cautious in working with Russia.
"I heard that President Bush once said he had looked into the soul of Russian President Putin. But he was a KGB (secret service) officer. I have met many KGB officers during my 30 years of fighting against the cold war, and never could look one in the soul," he said.
Bukovsky, who later managed to have access to secret service documents which he published in the West, told ANS that there is "fear and no freedom in today’s Russia."
He and other activists expressed concern that the United States seems less critical towards states who violate basic human rights, at a time when it is occupied with the global war on terrorism.
