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________________________________________________________________________
Putin's Torture Colonies
By BRET STEPHENS
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
February 13, 2008
"The protest began after OMON [riot police] had been brought to
correctional colony No. 5 (Amur Oblast, Skovorodino Rayon, village
Takhtamygda) and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in
camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside
undressed in the freezing cold....As a protest, 39 prisoners
immediately cut their veins open.
"Next day, on 17 January, the 'special operation' was repeated in an
even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700
inmates cut their veins open...."
The description here comes from a report received by the Moscow-based
Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners. The time reference is
to 2008 -- that is, last month. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
Russia. It's Vladimir Putin's. And correctional colony No. 5, located
not far from the Manchurian border, does not even make the list of the
worst penal colonies in the country.
That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of Pytochnye
kolonii, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s
under the liberal regime of Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50
pytochnye kolonii among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk
of Russia's convict population, according to FDRP cofounder Lev
Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet Gulag in
terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any
real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.
The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual
sentencing. "When people are transported from prisons to courts to
attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can
barely stand. There's no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves,
it has to be right there," says Mr. Ponomarev. "Then they are put on
trucks. It's extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no
ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They
have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with
people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease."
Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to
distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from
relatively lax "general regime" colonies to "strict," "special," and
(most terrifying of all) "medical" colonies. Arrival in the camps is
particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by
Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony
in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture
colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500
miles east of Moscow.
"The receipt of convicts 'through the corridor' takes place in the
following manner," Mr. Ponomarev reports. "From the [truck] in which a
newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought...employees of the
colony line up, equipped with special means -- rubber truncheons and
dog handlers with work dogs....During the time of the run, each
employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon....The convicts
run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those
[places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict
is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash."
The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a
broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to
conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights
Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. "After this," Mr. Baroyan
reported, the commandant of the colony "threatened to rot me in the
dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg
festers [and] pus runs from the bandage...The festering has crossed
over to the second leg."
Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One
convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing "a
wire and nails tied together crosswise." As punishment, he was denied
medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was
held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully
recovered motor function in his hands.
As a legal matter, the torture colonies don't even exist, and Mr.
Ponomarev doubts there has ever been an explicit directive from Mr.
Putin ordering the kind of treatment they mete. Rather, for the most
part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony
commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the Gulag never
went away.
That doesn't excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison
system had operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger
effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. "But when Putin came
to power, a new tone was set," Mr. Ponomarev says. "The sadists who
had previously been 'behaving' simply stopped behaving."
Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while
regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants
at "general regime" colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts
with transfer to a torture colony -- a useful way of keeping them in
line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. "The correct
word for this is Gulag, even if it's on a smaller scale," warns Mr.
Ponomarev. "This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state.
Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country."
Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do
a YouTube search for "Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp." The short video,
apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Mr.
Ponomarev's organization, is a modern-day version of "One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich." It isn't easy to watch. But it is an
invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin,
Person of the Year.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120285342959463383.html
http://www.tubemall.net/undeletube.php
kOmCdMcZz80
to get the video type or paste the above code into the search bar at
undeletube
________________________________________________________________________
Putin's Torture Colonies
By BRET STEPHENS
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
February 13, 2008
"The protest began after OMON [riot police] had been brought to
correctional colony No. 5 (Amur Oblast, Skovorodino Rayon, village
Takhtamygda) and started massive beatings of the prisoners. People in
camouflage and masks were beating with batons inmates taken outside
undressed in the freezing cold....As a protest, 39 prisoners
immediately cut their veins open.
"Next day, on 17 January, the 'special operation' was repeated in an
even more humiliating and massive form. At that time, about 700
inmates cut their veins open...."
The description here comes from a report received by the Moscow-based
Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners. The time reference is
to 2008 -- that is, last month. This is not Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
Russia. It's Vladimir Putin's. And correctional colony No. 5, located
not far from the Manchurian border, does not even make the list of the
worst penal colonies in the country.
That distinction belongs to the newly revived institution of Pytochnye
kolonii, or torture colonies. After all but disappearing in the 1990s
under the liberal regime of Boris Yeltsin, there are now about 50
pytochnye kolonii among the roughly 700 colonies that house the bulk
of Russia's convict population, according to FDRP cofounder Lev
Ponomarev. And while they cannot be compared to the Soviet Gulag in
terms of scope or the percentage of prisoners who are innocent of any
real crime, they are fast approaching it in terms of sheer cruelty.
The cruelty to prisoners often begins prior to their actual
sentencing. "When people are transported from prisons to courts to
attend their hearings, they are jammed in a tiny room where they can
barely stand. There's no toilet; if they have to relieve themselves,
it has to be right there," says Mr. Ponomarev. "Then they are put on
trucks. It's extremely cold in winter, extremely hot in summer, no
ventilation, no heating. These are basically metal containers. They
have to be there for hours. Healthy people are held together with
people with tuberculosis, creating a breeding ground for the disease."
Once sentenced, prisoners are transported in packed train wagons to
distant correctional colonies that, under Russian law, range from
relatively lax "general regime" colonies to "strict," "special," and
(most terrifying of all) "medical" colonies. Arrival in the camps is
particularly harrowing. According to prisoner testimonies collected by
Mr. Ponomarev, in the winter of 2005 convicts from one torture colony
in Karelia, near the Finnish border, were shipped to the IK-1 torture
colony near the village of Yagul, in the Udmurt Republic, about 500
miles east of Moscow.
"The receipt of convicts 'through the corridor' takes place in the
following manner," Mr. Ponomarev reports. "From the [truck] in which a
newly arrived stage [of prisoners] is brought...employees of the
colony line up, equipped with special means -- rubber truncheons and
dog handlers with work dogs....During the time of the run, each
employee hits the prisoner running by with a truncheon....The convicts
run with luggage, which significantly complicates the run. At those
[places] where employees with dogs are found, the run of the convict
is slowed by a dog lunging from the leash."
The prison gantlet is just the welcome mat. At IK-1, a prisoner with a
broken leg named Zurab Baroyan made the mistake of testifying to
conditions at the colony to a staff representative of the Human Rights
Ombudsman of the Russian Federation. "After this," Mr. Baroyan
reported, the commandant of the colony "threatened to rot me in the
dungeon. They did not complete treating me in the hospital. The leg
festers [and] pus runs from the bandage...The festering has crossed
over to the second leg."
Not surprisingly, suicide attempts at these colonies are common. One
convict, named Mishchikin, sought to commit suicide by swallowing "a
wire and nails tied together crosswise." As punishment, he was denied
medical assistance for 12 days. Another convict, named Fargiyev, was
held in handcuffs for 52 days after stabbing himself; he never fully
recovered motor function in his hands.
As a legal matter, the torture colonies don't even exist, and Mr.
Ponomarev doubts there has ever been an explicit directive from Mr.
Putin ordering the kind of treatment they mete. Rather, for the most
part the standards of punishment are determined at the whim of colony
commandants, often in areas where the traditions of the Gulag never
went away.
That doesn't excuse the Kremlin, however. Under Yeltsin, the prison
system had operated under a sunshine policy, as part of a larger
effort to distance Russia from its Soviet past. "But when Putin came
to power, a new tone was set," Mr. Ponomarev says. "The sadists who
had previously been 'behaving' simply stopped behaving."
Now reports of torture are systematically ignored or suppressed while
regional governments refuse to act on evidence of abuse. Commandants
at "general regime" colonies can always threaten misbehaving convicts
with transfer to a torture colony -- a useful way of keeping them in
line. The Kremlin, too, benefits from the implied threat. "The correct
word for this is Gulag, even if it's on a smaller scale," warns Mr.
Ponomarev. "This is the reappearance of totalitarianism in the state.
Unless we eradicate it, it will spread throughout the entire country."
Readers interested in a closer look at what is described above may do
a YouTube search for "Yekaterinaburg Prison Camp." The short video,
apparently filmed by a prison guard and delivered anonymously to Mr.
Ponomarev's organization, is a modern-day version of "One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich." It isn't easy to watch. But it is an
invaluable window on what Russia has become in the Age of Putin,
Person of the Year.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120285342959463383.html
