By PATRICK COCKBURN
MOSCOW - Officials in Moscow are seeking to close down the Salvation Army in the city because they claim it is a subversive paramilitary group dedicated to the violent overthrow of the Russian Government.
The city authorities have persuaded local courts to turn down appeals by the Salvation Army, which feeds 7000 homeless people a month in the capital, to be allowed to register before an official deadline passed at the end of last year.
In its evidence, the Moscow City Department of Justice cited the Salvation Army's uniforms and the fact that its members have military ranks as a sign that it is secretly a subversive organisation.
"It's mind-boggling," says Colonel Kenneth Baillie, the head of the Salvation Army in the former Soviet Union.
"The city government can now apply for our liquidation as a religious organisation." He does not know who exactly is behind the campaign against his organisation, founded in Britain in 1865, but the court verdicts are already having an effect on its work.
In one Moscow district, Salvation Army volunteers, in cooperation with local social services, had organised a meals-on-wheels service to bring food, cooked in a cheap restaurant, to 40 elderly people too feeble to prepare their own food or go to the shops themselves.
When news began to circulate about the organisation's legal problems with the city government the director of social services in the district said the scheme must stop.
Baillie, an American who has worked in Russia for three years, says the problems facing his organisation have increased rapidly over the past month.
The Salvation Army holds religious services at seven different places in the Russian capital. At one of them the local chief of police turned up in uniform. As soon as the service was over, he demanded to see the documents of all those who had taken part.
Elsewhere in Moscow, the Salvation Army will have to leave two properties it rents because landlords say they are fearful of renewing the rental agreement with an organisation without official registration.
The Salvation Army has been working in Moscow since 1992.
- HERALD CORRESPONDENT
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