While everyone obsesses about the American base at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, and the potential for an Islamic uprising in this Muslim country, it's important to remember what's been happening for ordinary believers.
Forum News 18, the religious rights news service, reports:
16 January 2012
KYRGYZSTAN: "AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND DISCRIMINATORY"
Officials continue to enforce Kyrgyzstan's repressive Bakiev-era Religion
Law, Forum 18 News Service has found. No progress has been made in dealing with registration applications from - among others - hundreds of mosques, unregistered Protestant churches, and the Hare Krishna community.
Unregistered religious activity is - against human rights standards
Kyrgyzstan has agreed to implement - banned. One major obstacle to gaining
legal status is the Religion Law's requirement that those wishing to found
a religious organisation - at least 200 adult permanent resident citizens
as founders under the Law - must identify themselves to national and local
authorities, which many are afraid to do - even if their community is that
large. Human rights defenders Valentina Gritsenko of Justice, a human
rights group in Jalalabad, and Dmitri Kabak of Open Viewpoint in Bishkek,
both describe the Law as "against the Constitution and discriminatory".
"Why should communities have to collect 200 signatures to worship or pray
together?" Gritsenko asked Forum 18.
Every religious group has a way that it defines its own membership and how it defines what a religious community is. For example, for Jews, there is the concept of a minyan, a group of ten males, 13 years or older, required for conducting Jewish public worship. Christians have the saying of Jesus, "when two or more are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them" and so on through many permutations of all kinds. It would be unfathomable for an American religious organization to have to invade the privacy of its adherents and gather their signatures before being allowed to put on a religious service.
Reading this story, I couldn't help thinking how every year in our church, the school-children put on the Twelve Days of Christmas song as a pageant. The smallest boy with the clearest voice is recruited to sing "And a partridge in a pear tree!" The whole congregation assembles to watch, and a child will first read a legend that the song was a form of code, sung by Catholics when practicing Catholicism was criminalized in England (1558 until 1829).
Of course, Snopes and Wikipedia tell us this legend was only recently created in the 1970s, and doesn't have a historical basis. But that doesn't stop the congregations in many places from reciting the idea anyway, because it's part of an oral tradition they use to pass on the values of their faith. The criminalization of the faith was true, even if no one can prove that the two turtle doves are the Old and New Testament and the partridge is Jesus Christ.
And that's just it -- people will disagree about what is true and not true, what is right and not right, and in a religious context, if there isn't some actual imminent incitement to violence, and no actual crime such as fraud or harm of minors, the international religious rights stands require that the community should be able to decide its beliefs and its membership criteria itself.
