For Immediate Release
February 12, 1999

Jehovah's Witnesses fight back at smear campaign
during pivotal human rights case

While a Moscow civil court considers a pivotal case that could ban Jehovah's Witnesses in Moscow, media reports indicate an increased effort to plant false stories about this Christian faith.

"It is interesting the depths to which someone is stooping in order to smear Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia," said Vasilii Kalin, director of the Witnesses' Administrative Center in St. Petersburg. "With their legal arguments falling apart, our enemies are exploiting terrible human tragedy in a heavy-handed effort to turn the public against us."

Church members are disturbed by recent efforts to link Jehovah's Witnesses to the suicide of three girls in Balashika, in the Moscow area, and to brand Jehovah's Witnesses as Nazi collaborators. News reports making these claims appeared on February 9, 1999, the same day that the Moscow trial resumed.

Kalin said that Jehovah's Witnesses have been the target of an orchestrated smear campaign for more than two years. However, "the timing of the two recent false reports seems to me to be more than coincidental," he said. "We hope that the public and the media will greet these reports—and any future ones—with the skepticism that they deserve."

Several Russia media outlets speculated that the deaths of three girls in Balashika were the result of involvement with a religious group and specifically named Jehovah's Witnesses as being suspect. During its report on the deaths, ORT television showed footage of group suicides committed in the United States by members of cults. In reality, the girls had no involvement with Jehovah's Witnesses, and later media reports retracted the earlier speculation.

Jehovah's Witnesses see the charge as ironic, particularly considering that they recently sponsored an international campaign to educate the public on warning signs of teenage suicide. Jehovah's Witnesses distributed more than 20 million copies of an article series entitled "Suicide—A Scourge of Young People" in more than 150 countries during September 1998.

Historians see no collaboration with Nazis

On the same day that the suicide story appeared, Moscow TV-6 claimed that Jehovah's Witnesses are anti-Semitic Nazi collaborators. The story was supplied by the Committee for the Defense of Youth, a group that has ties to the Russian Orthodox Church and that is assisting the prosecution in the Moscow court case to ban Jehovah's Witnesses.

Documented accounts show that 25,000 German Jehovah's Witnesses were targeted as enemies of the State during the Hitler regime. The Witnesses were, according to British historian John Conway, "against any form of collaboration with the Nazis and against service in the army." They would not heil Hitler, join the Nazi Party, vote, support the military, or participate in Nazi atrocities. For adhering to their religious belief, about 10,000 Witnesses were subject to economic sanctions, arrest, torture, imprisonment, starvation, or execution. Nearly 2,000 Witnesses died. Of these, nearly 300 were executed as conscientious objectors. Polish sociologist Anna Pawelcznska called Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany "a tiny island of unflagging resistance existing in the bosom of a terrorized nation."

The charge of collaboration with the Nazis and other manufactured propaganda about the Witnesses was promoted by the East German Stasi in the 1960s, according to Dr. Detlef Garbe, a leading authority on the history of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Nazi era.

Jehovah's Witnesses are members of an established Christian faith present in Russian for more than a century, 70 years of which were spent under Soviet ban. Five thousand Witness families were deported to Siberia under Stalin. Some of the accusations used against Jehovah's Witnesses today are identical to the ones circulated by the Nazis and Stalinists more than half a century ago.

Detailed information on the Moscow trial can be found at www.jw-media.org. For more information on Jehovah's Witnesses, visit www.watchtower.org.

Media contact: (718) 560-5600