Inciting National, Religious Intolerance :: Charter'97 :: News

The Vitebsk public was angered by the recent publication in the official newspaper “Vitebsky Rabochy” (Vitebsk Worker), containing call to stop erecting “Catholic institutions”. “Let’s prevent them from leading astray the Orthodox people, - says the anonymous author of the article: We don’t want them to entice our children from Orthodoxy into Catholicism! Let them build on our soil Orthodox temples, where we could bring up real patriots of our own, rather than of Vatican or some other country.”

Among the first feedbacks to this publication was the statement by the deputy chair of the national public association “Alternative-XXI” Gennady Muratov. “It is the authorities who apply the “Divide and rule!” principle in practice. In order to distract the nation from the economic disaster, they divide people into the enemies and their own, into those obedient to the national leader and the disobedient ones, and, finally, into the Orthodox and the rest. Someone wants us to start looking into how many temples the Catholics are allowed to build, how much money goes from the pockets of Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish and atheist tax-payers to fund the church, which is so active in backing the official regime. Someone feels like stirring up national and religious xenophobia in the country, which has been for ages a place of reconciliation of all different cultures, tongues and religions.”