An Orange-Robed Revolution?

Abdujalil Abdurasulov

February 8, 2007, Almaty. Kazakhstan  Hare Krishna followers in Kazakhstan fear their community could lose its legal existence after a court ruling against them. A district court in Karasay ruled on 30 January that 47 hectares of farmland belonging to the Society for Krishna Consciousness should be confiscated because it was purchased illegally. «We are one step from being expelled»,  says Maxim Varfolomeev, the spokesman of the society in Kazakhstan. The ruling is the culmination of a standoff between the Krishna followers in Kazakhstan and the Karasay local administration, but it may have implications far beyond this small settlement near Almaty: without this land, the Krishnas will have to re-register as a religious community, but community members fear they may be prevented from doing so. This would mean that, in effect, they would no longer be able to practice their religion as a group. According to their spokesman Varfolomeev, the community has between 500 and 1,000 members in Kazakhstan.

Tangled delations

The dispute goes back several years. The low point of relations between the sides came last November when 13 homes of Krishna followers were demolished because they lacked proper registration. Now, Varfolomeev fears, the community's farmland might be taken away. The 47 hectares that have just been ordered confiscated adjoin the land where the demolished homes stood.

Two days after the court ruling was announced, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights issued an appeal to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) stating that the process Тresembled more a farce than a fair trial.У The Krishna society members were never officially informed of the verdict.

The court had already ruled the purchase of the land to be illegal in a 2005 decision. However, that ruling referred to the initial purchase in 1999, when three members of the Society for Krishna Consciousness bought the land. Later on, the land was re-sold to a single community member and finally to the society itself. The three initial buyers were found by the court to have forged the original sales agreement. Under the ruling, the land was to be confiscated. Kazakhstans Supreme Court then recognized the right of the Krishna community to use the land and instructed the local administration to register the community. Karasay district administration refused, stating that the land had been purchased illegally.

Despite the absence of registration, the community continued using the land. But in January, the local authorities went to court over the most recent change of ownership in April 2004, when the Society for Krishna Consciousness bought the property from one of its members, a purchase that has now been found to be illegal. Community members also expect the local administration to appeal to the Supreme Court to seek to overturn its 2005 decision, which allowed Krishna followers to use the land.

On 29 January, three house owners received five-day notice from the court that their houses would be demolished, though so far that has not happened. Two more owners were sued by the administration for lack of registration, but the decision in their case is still pending.

Targeting the Krishnas

To resolve these various conflicts and legal actions, a special commission was established by the government in September last year. Its findings, which are not legally binding, were announced just recently. The commission concluded that certain members of the Society for Krishna Consciousness violated the laws, commission chair Amanbek Muhashov told reporters on 5 January. In the commission's view, the court ruling to demolish the 13 homes was justified and the local authorities acted legally in implementing the decision, Muhashov said. Human rights activists and a Krishna representative who sat on the commission as observers were frustrated that the decision was made without their participation.

One of the dissenting commission members, Ninel Fokina of the Helsinki Committee Kazakhstan, claims that this is a clear act of religious discrimination. «There is a single-minded campaign directed against both the entire [Krishna] community and its members. The aim of this campaign is to expel the community from Karasay district», she told.

Krishna followers say the demolition of homes was a drastic step that suggests the community is being targeted by the authorities. There are many other homes whose ownership has never been legally registered, says Varfolomeev. «But only the owners who belong to our community were sued and only their houses were demolished».

Bolat Baykadamov, the ombudsman of Kazakhstan, thinks that the Krishna community is also partly to blame. «The property of Hare Krishna, the land and the houses, were sold and resold many times. Therefore, the documents they had were not unstained», he said. «The new owners, the members of the Society for Krishna Consciousness, were not careful when they made lease and other agreements. The judicial authorities have now found these defects.»

Some experts agree that the local administration has acted properly and that the conflict is not black and white. «Formally, the law is indeed being violated [by Krishna followers», Anatoliy Kovsichenko, an expert on religion from the Institute of Philosophy and Political Science in Almaty, told. He names two factors that contributed to the current deadlock: «First, the state has not developed a strategy towards non-traditional confessions. Second, the interests of various groups clash in this issue due to the high land prices». Kazakhstans real estate market has been booming, and the KrishnasХ land is almost certainly worth considerably more today than when they originally bought it.

International repercussions

Such views notwithstanding, the issue has already earned Kazakhstan international criticism. Prime Minister Tony Blair discussed the case when he hosted Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev in the United Kingdom last December. Similarly, the U.S. State Department expressed its concerns over how the community was being treated by local authorities. The OSCE also criticized the Kazakh authorities. A meeting of OSCE foreign ministers on 5 December postponed a decision on KazakhstanХs bid to chair the organization in 2009; although the postponement was not made in connection with the Krishna affair, it has increased Kazakh sensitivity to outside pressure. The row was even mocked by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays fictitious Kazakh journalist Borat on his show and in a recent movie that gave even bigger publicity to the case.

Since the affair touched on human rights and freedoms, Baykadamov says, the religious affiliation of the group in question should have been taken into consideration. The authorities should have given much more care and attention to this issue, because the Krishna followers «are not ordinary citizens but members of a religious community», he told. «This case involves the feelings of believers, hence [the authorities] action could be interpreted as a violation of religious freedoms». Even though a special commission was set up to investigate the matter, its approach did not differ much from legal institutions, according to Baykadamov. «Its mission was to smooth the negative atmosphere created by the courts and local administrations, something it failed to achieve».

In the end, however, it may be its international repercussions that help resolve the case. The country is eager to chair the OSCE, and newly-appointed Foreign Minister Marat Tazhin recently declared that he would put all his efforts into working towards that end. The government may find that the road to the OSCE chairmanship leads through a small rural settlement.

Source:

http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=204&NrSection=1&NrArticle=18298