Religious Oppression Gets Airing at Helsinki Review Conference

Philip Walters covered a week of the Helsinki review conference in Madrid and filed this report for CHRISTIANITY TODAY. He is on the staff of Keston (England) College.

A neatly bound typewritten volume of 863 pages reached Madrid from the Soviet Union in time for the November opening of the Helsinki review conference in Madrid. Addressed to participants, it dealt with “willful aggression by state atheism in the USSR against the All-Union Church of the True and Free Seventh-day Adventists.” It had been published by the secret publishing house, Verny Svitetel True Witness.”

The group known as “True and Free” Adventists—harshly persecuted since the 1920s—has consistently refused to compromise with what it regards as the unacceptable demands of an atheist state: to register its congregations, to bear arms, to work on Saturday (the Adventist sabbath). Its leader, V. A. Shelkov, died in a Soviet labor camp earlier this year at age 84.

The True and Free Seventh-day Adventists have offered determined resistance in the form of a flood of documents detailing their sufferings and outlining their beliefs. This latest document opens with a message from its church council. Then follows an appeal by its late leader Shelkov, a 140-page account of Shelkov’s trial last March, 400 pages of testimony in Shelkov’s defense, a list of 257 searches of homes of True and Free Adventists between March 1978 and July 1980 with names and addresses of believers involved, and a list of 55 True and Free Adventist prisoners, nearly all with photographs attached.

Thoroughly prepared especially for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the volume indicates both the degree of persecution suffered by these believers and the importance they place on the Helsinki accord, known as the final act, as a safeguard of their religious freedom.

Thousands of victims of human rights violations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe see the Helsinki act as a standard by which their governments should be measured and as an international commitment that their governments should honor. Many of them are in jail for acting on this conviction. They were obviously counting on Western nations to refuse to close their eyes to violations and to protect the Helsinki process. Other examples:

• Representatives of the 30,000 Soviet Pentecostals who are campaigning for the right to emigrate from the USSR announced a hunger strike, organized during the first week of the Madrid conference. The five-day strike was joined by virtually all those who have applied to emigrate as well as some other Christians who wished to draw attention to the recent wave of repressions.

• Imprisoned Romanian Orthodox priest Gheorghe Calciu began a protest hunger strike to coincide with the opening of the Madrid conference.

• At a press conference Stephen Roth, chairman of the Helsinki monitoring group attached to the World Jewish Conference, deplored the arrest on November 13 of the Soviet Jew Viktor Brailovsky, who has been denied an exit visa from the USSR. He was arrested because he told foreign journalists about a hunger strike being held by 300 Jews in the Soviet Union to coincide with the opening of the Madrid conference and to bring their plight to the attention of the delegates. Roth called Brailovsky’s arrest an “act of contempt” for the Madrid conference by the USSR.

The conference began although the agenda was not agreed on. For more than eight weeks preceding the opening, fruitless controversy over the agenda between delegates from East and West had threatened the whole enterprise. Opening speeches were delivered by representatives of all 35 participatory nations in the hope that an agenda would emerge. On the afternoon of the fourth day a compromise agenda put forward by neutral and nonaligned nations was accepted first by the United States and its Western allies, and then by the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries.

Originally the West had wanted the conference to begin with a thorough and indefinitely extended review of the human rights record of all participatory states, while the East opposed this as a plan for “sterile demagogy” and wanted the conference to concentrate chiefly on plans for military detente in Europe. The compromise agenda allowed a six weeks’ review of the record on human rights. After Christmas the conference moved on to other matters.

The final act was accepted in 1975 at Helsinki, Finland, by the USSR, the U.S., Canada, and all European countries except Albania. It was seen as an evolutionary document rather than as a call for immediate and far-reaching changes, and it envisaged periodic follow-up conferences. The first of these was held in Belgrade in 1977, and the second was the Madrid meeting.

The final act contained three parts, called “baskets.” The first basket deals with security in Europe. It contains two sections defining conditions for European security that still cause controversy because of the differing emphasis put on them by East and West. Section VII calls on participatory states to manifest “respect for human rights, and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief,” while Section VL calls on them to “refrain from any intervention … in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating state …”

The agenda controversy at Madrid centered on the fact that the Western countries wanted a preliminary period of review of each country’s record on human rights. The Eastern bloc countries disagreed, saying such a discussion would violate the Helsinki agreement by interfering in the internal affairs of participating states. The Soviets proposed moving immediately to new topics and specifically a plan for a general European conference on disarmament.

The second basket concerns cooperation in the fields of economics, science, technology and the environment, and caused the least controversy during its formulation. The third basket concerns cooperation in humanitarian and other fields.

The USSR did everything in its power to cut down the amount of time to be spent discussing human rights, but in the end compromised, being too concerned with its international reputation to withdraw and allow the conference to break up.

Despite the lack of an agenda, the opening week of the conference proved eventful. While the inaugural speeches were going on in the Palace of Congresses, Madrid hotels were alive with all kinds of alternative seminars, press conferences, and exhibitions generally devoted to the theme of human rights. Such well-known figures as Alexander Ginzburg and General Pyotr Grigorenko, the ex-Soviet general who spent many years in Soviet psychiatric hospitals for his human rights activities, participated in the events, which were relatively well publicized in the West’s communications media. The French-based Help and Action organization displayed some samizdat (typewritten and smuggled) documents from the USSR. Poland, and Czechoslovakia. There were 50 or 60 Latvian exiles in Madrid during the opening week. They organized two demonstrations. During one of them, a Soviet flag was burned and a Latvian priest slashed his arm and dripped blood on the Soviet flag.

Apparently to balance these events, leaders of the Orthodox, registered Baptist. Catholic, and Muslim religious communities in the USSR held a press conference in Madrid. The substance of their remarks was predictable: Is there freedom of worship in the USSR? Yes, it is guaranteed by the constitution. How do churches regard the activities of religious activists imprisoned for their faith? Such people are only arrested if they break civil laws; the church is separated from the state.

Opening speeches at the conference reflected a divergence of aims. The U.S. and other Western delegations made it a policy to name names and raise specific human rights cases, while this was exactly what the Soviet Union hoped to avoid.

Two themes were raised again and again by Western delegates: Afghanistan and human rights. The U.S. representative, former U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell, spoke on Afghanistan, and devoted about a third of his speech to a “lamentable record of continual denial of human rights written over the past three years by the governments of some signatory nations.” He deplored the fact that Jewish emigration from the USSR had fallen sharply in 1980 as compared to 1979. He then outlined the fate—confinement or exile—of 71 Soviet citizens who had set up organizations in the USSR to monitor observance of human rights. He mentioned specifically: Yari Orlov, Anatoli Shcharansky, Mykola Rudenko, Viktoras Petkus, and Andrei Sakharov. The entire Soviet delegation took off translation headsets and sat in stony silence during that section of the speech.

The Soviet Union’s response was more moderate than had been expected. Deputy Foreign Minister Leonid Ilyichov did not threaten to block the conference: he called instead for concentration on European disarmament. He voiced “strong feelings of indignation and bafflement” at the speech by Bell, but expressed Soviet readiness to discuss Basket Three and in particular indicated that the USSR “would consider in a businesslike way problems concerned with the conditions for the reunification of families and the facilitation of marriages between citizens of different states.”

Once the agenda was agreed upon, the conference got down to business. On the first day the head of the British delegation, John Wilberforce, set the tone adopted by successive delegates. He spoke of the need for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and criticized the Soviet Union’s repression of human rights and restriction of religious freedom. He also criticized the Council for Religious Affairs in the USSR for refusing to register some religious congregations, thus putting them in a position of official illegality. At the beginning of 1979, he said, 49 unregistered Baptists were under arrest or restraint for this reason.

The USSR seemed interested in keeping the Madrid conference alive. It is also obvious, however, that the Eastern bloc countries will not approve any discussion of the Afghanistan question, and that they were profoundly disturbed at the prospect of a thorough review of their own internal human rights records. Over the last several years the Soviet Union has conducted its most comprehensive crackdown on dissidents since Stalin. Its unwillingness was therefore understandable.

Archaelogy

Iraq Takes A New Dig At Its Ancient Capital

The site of once-mighty Babylon is being excavated by the government of Iraq, which has committed $40 million to the project. Director Ali Muhammad Mahdi explained to Joseph Kraft of the New Yorker, “Babylon is the leading feature of our long cultural heritage. The revival of Babylon is a national duty.”

For the past 26 months he has led a team of more than 20 archaeologists and some 750 workers in the dig. Their basic goal is to lay out in fullest detail the city as it existed at the time of Nebuchadnezzar some 2,500 years ago. The site was first worked by German archaeologists before World War I. Mahdi claims they were chiefly interested in “sending back trophies to Berlin,” and that their conclusion about the original site of the Hanging Gardens was incorrect.

Using thousands of cuneiform tablets describing life in Babylon, Mahdi’s team purports to have identified the full outlines of the city and the sites of the great Southern Palace of Nebuchadnezzar and other major temples, including the Tower of Babel. The latter, according to reporter Kraft on the scene, is a “huge hole in the ground, half filled with water, choked with weeds and grasses, and surrounded by crumbling earth streaked with traces of salt accumulation.”

Salt appears to be the major danger to restoration. In a speech at an archaeological seminar, Mahdi himself warned: “Our eternal city, Babylon, is in danger of decay and destruction due to the serious dangers surrounding it, particularly the high level of underground water … and salinity which cause the decay of the foundations and walls of the structures.”

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