May, 25, 2005

Ukrainian Special Services are at FSB's beck and call?

At about 10 p.m. on 4 May, a citizen of Japan Junsei Terasawa, the Buddhist monk and well-known peacekeeper, was detained at the Mostitska-2 frontier railroad crossing.

Mr. Terasawa was making his way from Warsaw to Kiev by train, and he had a valid exit visa to Ukraine . The frontier guards headed by the chief of the duty detail Senior Lieutenant Oleg Nikolayevich Pyts made him get off the train, having referred to the instruction of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU).

Referring to this instruction, the Junsei Terasawa's visa to Ukraine was annulled, and a seal appeared in his passport forbidding him the country for five years.

After that Mr. Junsei Terasawa was deported to Poland .

As is known, the name of Mr. Terassawa is registered in the black-list of the FSB, probably, owing to the fact that he was an organizer of many actions of protest against the war in Chechnya .

A few days ago, Mr. Junsei Terasawa as a delegate of the European Commission for Human Rights took part in the demonstration of the Chechen refugees in Strasbourg

Mr. Terasawa has commented on the fact of the deportation: “It's an unfriendly act on the part of the Ukrainian authorities; my students and I actively supported the revolution in Ukraine . Moreover, we initiated the project of construction of the Buddhist burial mount in Kiev in honor of the events of the “orange revolution”. And at that very instant when we began to believe in the change for the best, this kind of thing happened” – said Mr. Terasawa in his interview given on the telephone.

Mr.Junsei Terasawa is well-known peacekeeper and public figure, the student of Nitidatsu Fudzi, the companion-in-arms of Mahatma Gandy. Mr. Terasawa has visited Ukraine many times since 1991 and is a religious leader and preceptor of the Buddhist order “Nipponzan Myouhouji” in Ukraine . The Buddhist Order “Nipponzan Myouhouji” has been registered in Ukraine since 1994, and has communities in Kiev , Donetsk , Kharkov , Lugansk and Sevastopol .

From the editors of “Hro.org”:

We have known Mr. Junsei Terasawa for about ten years. He is a very honest, respectable and irreproachable person, a true pacifist and pure soul. We were amazed at his courage and constancy: together with his students Mr. Terasawa has organized a series of peacekeeping actions in Chechnya, he was kept in the “filtration camp” arranged by Russians, went on a hunger strike of many days, tried to bring the truth to the international officials in the UNO, OSCE, Council of Europe…

The FSB did not deign to explain why Mr. Junsei Terasawa was registered in the “black-list”, - the Foreign Ministry put the blame on the FSB.

It is shameful of the Russian federal authorities who forbid such an outstanding personality as Junsei Terasawa the country, and willingly grant entry visa to the chief of the Ku-Klux-Klan, a racist and anti-Semite…

It remains only to hope that the new authorities of Ukraine will correct the mistake of their SSU officers and make their apologies to the outstanding peacekeeper Junsei Terasawa.

Edition - “Human Rights in Russia ”, 11 May 2005

24.05.05
http://chechenpress.co.uk/english/news/2005/05/25/02.shtml