LOS PUEBLOS DEL OPIO

The faith of the oppressed can topple the worst tyrants (Henry Porter)

"Religion poisons everything, says my friend Christopher Hitchens. Looking at the Buddhist monks being clubbed and shot on the streets of Rangoon, Mandalay, Sittwe and Pakokku in Burma I thought, well, not quite everything, Christopher. Until the monks were seized or held prisoner in their monasteries by General Than Shwe's troops last Thursday night, they led the heroic demonstrations in Burma, proving a trend of modern times that organised religion is very often the only means people have of challenging a dictatorship and bringing about the enlightened political values that Hitchens holds dear. He will know that among the many things forgotten about the neglected miracle of the uprising in East Germany in 1989 is that it all began in a Lutheran church - the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig - when a pastor called Christian Fuhrer inaugurated prayers for peace after the Monday evening service. It was a small gesture of defiance but through September 1989, the crowds swelled in the square outside the church. Many carried candles to show that they planned no violence or vandalism, the idea being that you cannot throw a brick when you're shielding a candle in the night air. The vanguard of barefoot monks in Rangoon denoted the same peaceful intention. The turning point in Germany came on 9 October when 400,000 people filled the centre of the city. From then on, the communist regime in the GDR, among the most repressive in Eastern Europe, was doomed, although no one could have predicted that 31 days later the Berlin Wall would fall and the regimes in Czechoslovakia and Romania would follow quickly. No one had any doubt about what had happened at the Nikolaikirche. One of the six luminaries of the Leipzig protests, Bernd- Lutz Lange, remarked that the leadership was not a person, but a place. 'There was no one leader of the revolution. In fact, the only leadership was Monday, 5pm, the Nikolaikirche.' The discussions about freedom of speech, travel, assembly and association would have taken place anyway. The point is that church provided the institutional context in which to challenge the state, while the faith of so many ordinary people gave them the courage to go into the streets on that critical evening when paratroops had been flown in, the Stasi were armed and hospitals cleared to receive hundreds of casualties. Together, faith and passive mass resistance create an inspired force that is more than the sum of the parts. That is why the churches across the GDR in 1989 and temples in Burma last week were points of ignition. I don't say it always happens - the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, was shunned by Catholic colleagues before being shot in his cathedral in 1980 - just that religion can be a platform of resistance and any history of liberty and modern civilisation must concede that"...