“Even to the point of supporting radical sectarianism.” The USA is adopting the religious factor
Moscow
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The United States takes its place at the head of countries for which religious issues have become one of the types of foreign policy weapons against international opponents.
Ambassador at Large of the Russian Foreign Ministry Gennady Askaldovich stated this at a round table in the Federation Council, PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“The religious factor is increasingly becoming a serious foreign policy weapon. Politicization in this area is growing, and facts of state interference in religious activities are multiplying. The desire of a number of external players to play on the factor of protecting the rights of believers in order to fight their international opponents is intensifying. The United States is ahead of the rest, and there is no need to be surprised.
The States are actively creating a system of global protection of religious freedoms, declaring patronage of any manifestation of faith, even radical ideas in the form of sectarianism. At the forefront is the protection of belief as such, without regard to moral standards and the national interests of states seeking to ensure the rule of law and the safety of citizens in the spiritual sphere.
Washington has already laid the foundation for increasing capacity in this area. And regulatory frameworks, and specialized government agencies, and the resources of American foreign analytical institutes, as well as countless structures of civil society that process confessional dossiers to order,” said Askaldovich.
“The legitimacy of this activity is promoted within the framework of the so-called. The International Alliance for Religious Freedoms (MARS), it was created early last year. Currently, it includes 32 states - mainly countries that seek to demonstrate their loyalty to Washington,” the diplomat added.
He also called “very sad” the fact that this list included a number of post-Soviet republics.
“It’s not surprising that Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Estonia, but also a country like Armenia. Some of them, as, for example, the conversations of our diplomats with their colleagues from Armenia showed, pursue purely utilitarian goals. For example, they say that MARS will protect their fellow tribesmen in the conflict zones of the Middle East - they are not interested in anything else,” said a Foreign Ministry official.
At the same time, he emphasized that for Russia this structure is fundamentally unacceptable - it is an openly US-controlled international body for applying sanctions to undesirable states and maximally politicizing the issue of protecting the rights of believers.
“We believe that, in principle, it would make sense to focus on promoting in the international space the ideas of protecting spiritual and cultural values that underlie all religions, which largely coincide with our approaches in the human rights sphere, which is generally consistent with the spirit of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation,” – concluded Gennady Askaldovich.
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