On 1 June four armed police officers broke up a ritual and
meditation evening held at a private flat in the capital Minsk by approximately
six members of the Light of Kaylasa Hindu community, the group's leader Natalya
Solovyova told Forum 18 News Service on 7 June. The raid came exactly a week
after a similar Hindu meditation meeting was broken up elsewhere in the city.
Solovyova told Forum 18 that at around 6pm on 1 June, a local police officer
arrived at the flat where the Hindus were meeting. He told the group they had
no right to gather and escorted three of those present to the local police
station, where he took their passport details. Thereafter believing the
disruption to be over, said Solovyova, the group carried on worship, but were
disturbed several hours later by the arrival of four police officers with
machine guns. According to Solovyova, the four issued various threats,
including imprisonment, described the Hindus as "sectarians" and
commented that "if we were Orthodox Christians, they would have no issue
with us".
Solovyova also reported that during the raid on the meditation session in a
private flat in another part of Minsk on 25 May, one uniformed and one plain
clothes police officer arrived at the flat at around 7pm. She said the pair
behaved aggressively towards the approximately five worshippers present,
warning that the owners of the flat would encounter problems as a result of the
meeting and claiming that the group had "no right to gather at all, at any
time".
So far on these occasions, said Solovyova, the Minsk Hindu community has not
been fined, but she added that they had been warned that "if it occurs
again, we will go on their police records, and legal consequences will begin
the time after that." At no stage did the police officers refer to any
part of the law, she said.
Solovyova explained that these raids had forced the Hindu community to move
from flat to flat "like nomads". They can no longer meet at premises
in a semi-rural area outside Minsk which they had used as a temple, she said,
since a meeting there was broken up by police last autumn.
The group tried to register unsuccessfully before the new more restrictive
religion law came into force last November. "Since then the pressure has
increased," Solovyova added. She reported that the previous leaders of the
community, Sergei and Tatyana Akadanova, who were given ten-day sentences last
September for holding an unauthorised demonstration to protest against earlier
state actions against the community, are currently in the United States seeking
political asylum.
Forum 18 tried to find out why these Hindu meetings have been raided by police,
but on 9 June the telephone of Alla Ryabitseva, the head of Minsk City
Council's Department for Religious and Ethnic Affairs, went unanswered.
Contacted by Forum 18 the same day, Aleksandr Kalinov at the Belarusian State
Committee for Religious and Ethnic Affairs said that his department had no
documents on the Minsk Hindu community. While there was a registered Society
for Krishna Consciousness, he said, "we only work with registered
organisations."