The U.S. State Department has released the 2011 report on international religious freedom. While significant areas of concern are present, there are also some signs of hope. The website with the report is quite helpful and easy to navigate. Visit: http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm
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Persecution of Pastor
Sunday Adelaja in Ukraine: 08/22/2012
Time for the
world to act
By Segun Olanipekun
In
August 2011, I had a marathon interview in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, with Pastor
Sunday Adelaja, the Nigerian-born founder and senior pastor of the Embassy of
God Church in Ukraine about his pace-setting ministry, his perennial ordeal at
the hands of the Ukrainian government and the local Orthodox Church. The
interview which covered a range of issues was part of a Christian communication
project about to formally unfold. But for exigencies, part of it has to be used
for this write-up in order to drive home the kernel of the persecution Pastor
Sunday has been going through under the present regime in Ukraine. As at the time of the interview, many people did
not know (and I am sure even up till now), that Pastor Sunday, as he is fondly
called, is under probation in Ukraine.
This
type of probation is not the one commonly known as a period of tutelage or apprenticeship
under a master before proper certification. But in the classical sense of the
post-communist Ukrainian society it connotes absurd restrictions on his freedom
of movement; something akin to a humiliating conditional freedom. It is like a war
of containment normally reserved for enemy of the state.
It
is a probation that prohibits Pastor Sunday from travelling out of Ukraine. It
also subjects his actions and activities in and out of the church to state
surveillance. Like a criminal under parole, he is constantly under watch. That
has been his experience since 2009 when he was fraudulently framed in a ludicrous
charge that he was a scammer along with some of his church members in a failed
real estate business he knew nothing about. The frivolous charge by Ukrainian
Interior Ministry accuses him of defrauding the country’s citizens of money, an
amount which the ministry’s Department for Media Liaison and International
Activity then put at $100m.
In
spite of consistent denial of the allegations by Pastor Sunday, a testimony
corroborated several times by the actual owners of the business, King’s
Capital, the state and its propaganda apparatchik continue to rubbish the name
of the man of God through a deft use of both local and international media
To reiterate his side of the story, Pastor
Sunday was again asked during the interview to explain the genesis of this
allegation. Here are his words as recorded unabridged: “Apart from persecutions, I do not think I face any challenge. I
am enjoying the ride. I call myself pastor without tears. But the greatest
challenge I face now has to do with government, society and persecution. I am
undergoing one right now. There is a case in court. It is a case that involves
members of our church that have investment company that collapsed during the
recent economic meltdown, lost money and
the government found it as a good opportunity, a good excuse to charge me to
court. I have survived 22 court cases so far. This to the government was a good
one because members of our church were involved. The only thing the police were
asking me is: Do you know them? And my answer is: I know them.
“So
as long as I know them they believe I must be involved. So it is just a way to
be able to corner me. They have been looking for a way and Satan did a good job
this time. He gave them a good excuse. The people who started the company are
not denying it. They say it is our own; pastor does not have anything to do
with it. But the media, the government do not even talk about them but they are
only focusing on Pastor Sunday. They only need the big name; the one that can
be sensationalized and scandalized. But they would fail as they did in the
past.”
In
a nutshell, this is the story of the alleged scandal or Ponzi scam for which
Pastor Sunday has been put in a box, fettered in his ministry work and
disallowed to travel out of Ukraine to preach the gospel to the world. To
compound the case, the neighboring country, Russia Federation, also declared
him persona non grata, allegedly fearing
that his charismatic approach to Christianity would “corrupt” the age-long
orthodoxy of the Russian Native church and its citizens generally. As a matter
of fact, this false fear is one of the underlying contentious reasons he and
his ministry are also facing persecution in Ukraine. Apart from state hostility
to him, the Ukraine Orthodox Church is falsely accusing him of spreading “strange”
Christian doctrine and of using voodoo to attract new members to Embassy of God
church. Whereas the truth is that the church has been experiencing phenomenal
growth because it cultivates, as an evangelistic priority, the salvation of the
jetsam and flotsam of the society, namely, the lowly, the alcoholics, drug
addicts, prostitutes, mostly people on the fringe rather than the elite. These
were souls massively saved and rehabilitated through the power of the living
word, rescued from crashes in life and restored to wholesomeness.
Many
of these born-again and redeemed people are today members of the more than
25,000 congregation and playing prominent roles in Ukrainian public life. For
instance, a judge in the country’s highest court and a one-time mayor of Kiev
are members of the church while many others are competently leading several
nongovernmental organizations that are improving the conditions of the people
in different spheres of life.
In
spite of these good works, Pastor Sunday continues to suffer a barrage of
misinformation and to face hostility from the state. And in a bizarre twist to
the on-going case, latest report from the church says that Pastor Sunday was
invited on August 21, 2012 to the police station where the charge against him
was “re-qualified from fraud to organizing a criminal and dangerous bandit
group that specializes in committing heavy crimes. In this new case Pastor
Sunday is being charged as the head and organizer of this dangerous criminal
bandit group.”
In
addition, the report states that all the five people accused along with him
were arrested by the police while Pastor Sunday has been asked to report to the
police station by early next week. The church fears that this invitation and
the deliberate change of the charge to a criminal one are part of the plot to
jail the innocent pastor as he is seen to be a threat to the present
government.
One
reason this conclusion may be true is that the members of the Embassy of God
church took active part in the demonstrations that ushered in the successfully
carried out Orange Revolution between November 2004 and January 2005 during
which the present president Viktor Yanukovych’s rigged election victory was
resisted through series of protests and acts of civil disobedience. A re-run gave victory to his then opponent,
Viktor Yushchenko. But he won back the presidency in 2010, and it looks like
his administration thinks it is payback time for anyone who played prominent
role in the Orange Revolution. This is not a far-fetched deduction if it is
recalled that the former prime minster, Ms. Yulia Tymoshenko, is already imprisoned in spite of global
protests against the trumped up charges against her, the unfair trial and
unjust jailing. Without doubt, the present Ukrainian regime still exhibits
vestiges of the draconian communist mentality. This is the more reason while the
world, especially the Christendom, must rise up against these false allegations
and the imminent unjust trial of Pastor Sunday. We cannot wait any longer.
Pastor
Sunday has suffered a lot of indignities in the course of preaching the gospel
to a post-communist society in Ukraine. Like a stoic believer that he is, he
has borne with grace incidents of bananas being thrown at him at a public event
just because he is a Black missionary in a predominantly White society. For
many years, the church was not granted the right to acquire land for its own building;
the members had to move from one open place of worship to another, inclement
weather notwithstanding. While there is no doubt that Pastor Sunday is beloved
by overwhelming members of his congregation, the truth is that he is intensely
hated by the extreme right wing and the state in Ukraine. There is no justification
for this blackmail and ordeal, especially for a person who has spent most of
his adult life in the host culture and speaks Russian fluently to the detriment
of his mother tongue.
So while we pray and ask God to intervene on
behalf of his servant, the global church has a responsibility to speak truth to
power in Ukraine that “Enough is enough? The Ukrainian authorities should be
told in clear terms that the case has dragged on for too long, without Pastor
Sunday being formally taken to court but kept waiting in suspense. The authorities
should let Pastor Sunday go and continue to serve the Lord unfettered, because
the word of God cannot be chained.
Dr.
Olanipekun, a former political editor of NAN is President of ChristNoW
Publishing House, Inc, Washington DC Email: soacom11@gmail.com
Well glad that US finally came up with freedom of religion documents but it is still hard to apply it in the real world with people imposing their religious ideologies on certain individuals.