3 December 2012
On Saturday, November 24, 2012, hundreds of prisoners at
Penal Colony No.6 in Kopeisk, Russia walked out onto the roofs of the prison
with banners in order to protest the horrific conditions inside. The signs,
some of them allegedly written in blood, plead for help. The protest led to a
violent confrontation between the police and the prisoners’ relatives gathered
outside the prison gates—the protest had been staged on a visitors’ day.
The following are three testimonies: the first a statement
from Valeria Prikhodkina, a member of the Public Monitoring Committee of the
Chelyabinsk region; next, a description of conditions inside Penal Colony No.6
from former inmate Mikhail Ermuraki, who was released in April 2012; and,
finally, human rights activist Nikolai Shur’s interview with Russian
independent news site slon.ru upon visiting the prison on Tuesday.
Valeria Prikhodkina
Public Monitoring Committee, Chelyabinsk
Saturday was visiting day at the prison. People started
coming early in the morning, some having traveled long distances. All visitors
were stopped at the prison gates without explanation. Something was going on
inside. Suddenly, the riot police stormed into the prison along with other
police forces and even fire trucks. The visiting relatives began to panic.
The inmates had organized a strike; they went out into the
prison yard and refused to go back inside.
More relatives gathered at the gates. By evening, it seemed
that military operations were underway inside the colony: you could hear
screams, people were running on the roofs, and then prisoners hung out a sheet
with the message “People, help us” written on it. Members of the Public
Monitoring Committee arrived, but they were not admitted into the prison. After
they left at around 23:00, a bloodbath began. The police beat the prisoners
with sticks, indiscriminately and swinging wildly.
From among our colleagues, only Oksana Trufanova stayed. She
met the prison warden and was told that the prisoners had captured the
watchtower and that she would not be allowed inside. She went into the grounds
as far as she could and then left when she found she could go no further. While
we were talking to her on the phone, we suddenly heard screams and the line
went dead. It turned out that the riot police had attacked the assembled crowd
of relatives to disperse them. Oksana was hit on the head with a police club
and she lost consciousness. I don’t know anything about the drunken young
people they’re talking about in official reports. I think it’s just nonsense.
Who visits prisons? Mothers, wives—they’d been standing at the shut prison
gates in the cold since the morning.
This particular penal colony is, of course, problematic, and
we tend to visit it more often than we do other places.
If you come to a prison and the prisoners don’t say anything
or tell you everything’s fine, that’s no reason to believe that it’s a regular
Young Pioneer summer camp. Prisoners only start speaking when they can’t take
it anymore and believe it can’t get any worse. Apparently that’s what happened
in Kopeisk.
We are currently reviewing the case of Nikolai Korovkin
along with the prosecutor’s office. Investigators have kept themselves busy by
refusing all our requests since June. We have a lot of evidence that he was
simply beaten to death. The authorities claim he died of late stage AIDS.
The problem with that story is that he only spent two months in the penal
colony after his trial. So either something happened to him in prison or they
sent a gravely ill man to the penal colony. We have found someone who witnessed
the beating.
Another prisoner, Daniil Abakumov, when he wound up in a
pretrial detention facility, disclosed details and wrote a statement. But then
they sent him back to the colony. I can’t even talk about what happened to him
after that, but there is video of his testimony online. We’re talking about
extortion, beatings, rape—in a word, torture.
Why does all of this go on? They’re trying to shake the
relatives down for money. I don’t know whether it’s for themselves or for the
colony as whole. Prisons in Russia are being reformed right now, and the penal
colonies are supposed to be outfitted to European standards. But they don’t
have the money for it. And so the relatives are paying for everything from fans
to game consoles. You want to be paroled? That will cost you. Do you want your
son or husband to be safe from beatings? That will cost you.
There aren’t standard rates—they stop at nothing. Someone
was bringing them desk lamps, someone else, toilets. And the relatives were the
ones who took out the loans, who actually bought these toilets, in exchange for
parole. Parents are constantly complaining that their children are completely
eligible for parole but it is not being granted because they can’t afford to
pay the authorities. They were extorting money from Korovkin as well.
There are rumors that if a prisoner complains, they break
his hands. I don’t have any proof of this, but this kind of injury, fractured
fingers, is very common in the Chelyabinsk region, and often ends in
amputation. Especially in this colony, where there have been several cases. No
one will say what happened. And what would you say if they broke your fingers?
Yes, this penal colony is mostly populated with “maximum
security” inmates, repeat offenders. But the government admits that 30% of the
incarcerated are there undeservedly, while in reality the number is even
greater. As human rights advocates, we are not concerned about what people are
in prison for. People are people. They have been convicted and sentenced to
incarceration. No law legislates slave labor, humiliation, round-the-clock
beatings and torturous conditions.
Mikhail Ermuraki
Former Inmate at Kopeisk No. 6
When I left No. 6 on Monday evening it was still cordoned
off. They had started letting buses in, but they weren’t letting cars in. There
were a bunch of OMONvehicles. A bunch of traffic cops. The bloody sheets
[the demands on the sheets were written in blood—Openspace.ru] that prisoners
had written “People on the outside, help us!” had been removed from the barracks
and towers yesterday, when the riot police had gone into the colony.
I’ll say this: it was reasonable people in No. 6 who
organized themselves. They don’t want to be beaten. They decided they can’t
take it anymore. They’ll either slit their wrists, commit suicide or go down
swinging. This wasn’t an uprising, but a declaration of their rights. Around 6
PM Moscow time on Monday I got a call from the prison and was told that 250
people, including those who had been on the roof in Kopeisk over the weekend,
were sent to the medical unit, and the majority of them had been made to stand
in the yard naked. They stood there naked for no less than five hours, keeping
in mind that on Monday, it was -9 degrees Celsius in Kopeisk. They weren’t
allowed to drink or put on clothes.
When I was there, things like this happened as well. It’s a
kind of torture. An hour into it, you want to go to the bathroom. You fidget
and the guard will tell you to stand still. If you disobey, they drag you into
the duty room, put you on the “stretcher” [which involves handcuffing the
prisoner’s hands and feet to the bars as far apart as possible—Openspace.ru],
start beating you and tell you that you’re so lawless, why are you breaking the
code of conduct?
It’s especially horrible in No. 6. The guards take you to
solitary confinement and practice on you like you’re a punching bag. They hit
you anywhere, even in the balls. Until you’re foaming at the mouth — some
people lose consciousness. They don’t care how old you are—20, 48, or 65. I went
through this myself. I was released on April 4 of this year, and I went in for
oral surgery on April 5 and again on April 10. The two oral surgeons could have
wept. I opened up my mouth and told them I’d been walking around in this
condition since March 24. My jaw was completely broken: they did that to me in
prison. When I got out, I found the mothers of various other inmates and
explained to them their sons didn’t write them for months because their hands
had been broken.
One of the convicts, Korovkin was his last name, they killed
him last summer because he refused to pay them. It goes like this: a new batch
of prisoners arrives, and they find out what people’s financial situation is.
God forbid they find out that your wife has a hair salon or that your
mother-in-law runs a kiosk. Then the extortion begins.
If you want to live, you pay them. They charge 200, 300, 500
rubles. If you don’t pay, they pour chlorine on you, strip you naked, and throw
you out into the yard where it’s -20 degrees Celsius. After four days of that,
I got pneumonia. I filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office and got
solitary for five days as a result. A day in, I lost my voice. Then my blood
pressure dropped. Just then investigators from the prosecutor’s office came—I
got lucky. They took me out of there to a [regular] cell and the prosecutor
asked, “What’s going on here?” I just pulled up my t-shirt without saying a
word. There were marks from the beatings on my body, seven stripes four
centimeters wide and 12 to 36 centimeters long. They saw this, yelled at the
prison authorities, but no one lost their jobs. The worst part is that they’re
not letting any human rights advocates into the prison right now.
Nikolai Shur
Member of the regional public commission on prisoners’ rights,
interviewed by Roman Dobrokhotov
[Source:
Slon.ru. Published
November 27, 2012].
Nikolai, today your group was finally allowed into the penal
colony. Did you find evidence of violence there, beatings?
During the protest, there was no violence from either side.
The prisoner’s protest was completely peaceful: they did not attack anyone. And
they ended it of their own free will because they had achieved their goal: to
draw the attention of the media, human rights advocates, and the prosecutor’s
office to what was happening in the prison.
There had been reports of torture and beatings. Have you
been able to confirm them?
Yes, beatings and torture were a regular occurrence in the
prison on a mass scale. We were able to gather specific examples of this
corroborated by photographic evidence and videotaped testimony, which we will
present at a press conference tomorrow.
Were you allowed to see the solitary confinement cells?
Yes, we were allowed in everywhere. In the solitary
confinement cells there is a man who has been on hunger strike since the 19th and
is in critical condition. They are not allowing doctors in to see him, and
today, he cut his veins in desperation. And that’s not the only such case.
What kind of torture goes on at this prison?
Today, we heard stories of how inmates were given electric
shocks. Bracelets are put on their legs to which a generator is hooked up. The
generator is cranked up and the person is shocked.
Why do they do this?
For various reasons—mostly in order to extort money.
So you were also able to confirm instances of extortion?
Yes, in large numbers. It wasn’t just a handful or dozens of
cases, but hundreds of cases: it really a mass phenomenon.
But the prisoners earn pennies—what can be extorted from
them?
They make their relatives bring money or goods. There are a
huge number of instances of this.
How much money do they ask for?
One inmate estimated that about a million rubles (about $32
K USD—Trans.) is taken from a unit (a unit contains between 100 and 150
prisoners) per month. Which is to say about 10 to 15 million rubles a month for
the whole colony. However, these figures are only from one source: they need to
be corroborated.
Your committee will continue to watch this penal colony
since it’s highly likely that the administration will decide to get even with
the prisoners for their protest.
Yes, the prison administration is just dreaming of this, but
right now, they are more concerned with saving their skin than getting revenge.
Do you think they’ll manage to save their skins?
I really hope that everyone guilty will be punished, I
sincerely hope for this. If you journalists continue to support us, we might
have a chance.
[...]
Kremlin human rights council chief Mikhail Fedotov said
Thursday a number of inmates had been held in isolation cells for “months or
even years.”
“There was one man who could only crawl,” he added. “His
legs didn’t work anymore after being kept in a punishment isolation cell for
months.”
The disturbances made headlines across Russia and were the
subject of intense online debate by the country’s increasingly politicized
internet community. Police also made 12 arrests at a November 26 protest
against torture in the Russian prison system outside the Moscow headquarters of
the Federal Penitentiary Service (FCIN).
“The attention being paid to the abuse in Kopeisk is a great
step forward for Russia and another sign that civil society has at last woken
up,” veteran human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov told RIA Novosti.
“Four prisoners were killed in this very same prison in 2008
and there was no attention paid to their deaths at all,” he added. “It was as
if people thought then this was how things ought to be.”
Investigators have since filed assault charges against five
inmates. One prison guard has also been charged with extortion.
“People who complained [about extortion] were beaten,”
council member Igor Kalyapin said, adding that “a stream” of complaints to
local officials about the alleged abuse had been ignored.
Chelyabinsk Region Governor Mikhail Yurevich said last month
the riot was sparked by a “corrupt” system.
The council’s news conference came two days after deputy
FCIN head Eduard Petrukhin admitted that attempted reforms of Russia’s prison
system had been a “failure”.
More than 700,000 Russians are currently behind bars. Human
rights activists frequently complain of sub-standard living conditions,
torture, and disease in the country’s prisons.
[...]
