BY JUDITH PALLOT, PI “GULAGECHOES”
Judith Pallot analyses the state of prisons in Belarus in a blog post on the project website. A previous, shorter version of this post was published as an article in OpenDemocracy Russia, entitled “Overcrowded and violent: what awaits Belarusian protesters in prison”.
The prison system in Belarus has hit the news headlines in the past few months as many protesters against the outcome of the presidential election have been arrested and held in police cells, detention centres and remand prisons (sizos). The numbers of people arrested have reached 16,000. [1] There have been numerous reports of how they have been subject to brutal physical and psychological abuse and confined to overcrowded and unhygienic cells. The majority of the people detained have been held on administrative charges which allows them to be detained for up to fifteen days. The use of administrative arrest and punishment against peaceful demonstrators violates rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to which Belarus is a signatory.[2]
In addition to the thousands who have suffered administrative penalty, approximately 700 individuals, detained in pre-trail prisons (sizos) are being investigated for criminal offences. Notwithstanding the release of seven of those held in the KGB prison, (colloq. The Amerikana), who participated in Lukashenko’s “Potemkin” round table a week or so ago, the auguries for the protesters’ facing criminal charges are not at all good. Conditions in remand prisons are notoriously inhumane and the sudden addition of hundreds of new alleged offenders to already over-crowded facilities can only worsen conditions of people awaiting trial. The prominent human rights activists, journalists and political opponents who are detained in the Amerikanka are at particular risk of receiving severe sentences, but the prospects for everyone facing criminal charges are not good. In one of the first cases to come to court, a sixty-year old protester was sentenced on November 4th by the Zhlobin court, Gomel oblast, to 4 years in a general regime colony. His crime was that he threw a bottle at a member of the militia in one of the August demonstrations.
The question that arises from the Zhlobin case, is what awaits the protesters if, or more likely when, they are found guilty. In the GULAGECHOES project we are examining the different trajectories followed in the post-Soviet states away from the Soviet penal model.[3] Of all the post-Soviet states, Estonia has travelled furthest from the Soviet model, replacing all its Soviet-era penitentiaries with three modern prisons, although it is true that not all prisoners (this will be the subject of a later blog) have welcomed the changes. But, if we are looking for an example of a prison system that is firmly stuck in the Soviet time-warp, Belarus is the only real candidate. In this blog, we present evidence from interviews we have taken with people who have served sentences in the past decade in the correctional colonies in Belarus.
First, some background of Belarus prison system. According to the World Prison Brief on 1st October 2018, there were 32 500 prisoners detained in both pre-trial and correctional institutions in Belarus, giving it an imprisonment rate of 383 per 100 000 population, the highest in Europe.[4] There are 16 correctional colonies spread across Belarus divided into two categories – general + enhanced regime and strict regime. There is, also, one juvenile colony, 3 correctional-settlements for people convicted for minor and ‘accidental’ offences, and 30 colonies ‘of open type’ known colloquially as chemicals or khimii,[5] and three cellular-type prisons for the most severe offenders. The election protesters can end up in any of these, depending upon the articles under which they are convicted, the degree of political involvement in their placement, their gender and age.
Belarus’ penitentiaries differ in fundamental ways from the prisons of “old” Europe. The majority were established during the Soviet period with today’s penitentiaries occupying the same sites, and in some cases, the same buildings as their gulag predecessors.[6] The basic building blocks of the Soviet system of prisoner management – the principles of collectivism, militarism, and correction through labour – have carried through to the present day. What this means for the convicted protesters is that they will be transported to the type of correctional colony appropriate for their offense where they will serve their sentence as a member the ‘detachment’ (otryad) to which they are assigned. On arrival, they will have to endure a two-week period of quarantine during which they will be assessed and inducted into the regime. The assessment includes determining their fitness for work, what skills they have, their health and, importantly, whether they are likely to be regime-conformists or regime-violators, the latter being assessed by subjecting them to humiliating rituals, such as scrubbing the floors. If they resist, they are sent to strict regime detachments; if they conform, to one of the labour detachments. The detachment is both a physical living space and a social formation consisting, if legal norms are applied, of 100 prisoners who sleep, eat, and are assembled on the parade ground for headcounts twice daily, marched to work, socialise and participate in interventions, together. From the quarantine induction and other prisoners, they will have learned that if they violate the internal regime rules, they will be confined to a cramped, cold and dehumanising punishment cells.
The Belarus prison service, which part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, publishes no information about its prisoner population so we have to rely on witness accounts to describe life in Belarus’ penitentiaries. Ivan, in his thirties, and since his release, living outside Belarus, is one such witness. I interviewed him in the summer of 2020. At that time, he was two years clear of drug and alcohol addiction that had resulted in seven convictions and four custodial sentences, which he served in a variety of penal institutions since the age of fourteen. Ivan’s life before prison was relatively normal; his father died and his mother remarried but home life evidently was calm, he did well at school and his ambition was to join the army. However, as he tells it, he got in with the wrong crowd. His first conviction for car theft and joyriding earned him a 2 ½ year sentence but he was released after six months, only to re-offend and be sent back to jail. By now, he had been introduced to hard drugs, including heroin.
Of all the institutions in which he served sentences over the next decade, Ivan insists the juvenile colony was by far the worst:
The juvenile colony … was dreadful and frightening. There were prisoners there who were much older than me, some over 18 … 19, 20 even 24, 25 – who had been kept on by the administration as organisers, section chairmen and so on and they could just do what they want. I remember my Mum sent me a parcel – it was large parcel and it must have cost a lot for her to buy everything – and in twenty minutes there was nothing left. They had taken it all … the organiser and those around him took it all. Everyone was terrified of them as they could do anything; they could beat you up so badly that you had to be taken to the surgery. But they didn’t do anything for you there, they just would say that you had fallen down the stairs, even though it was obvious that you had been beaten up.
There is so much that is familiar in this story; bullying, theft and cover up. The organisers and section chairs, to which Ivan refers, are the administration-appointed prisoners who are given positions of authority to supervise life in the detachments. Effectively, they fulfil roles that in other jurisdictions are undertaken by prison staff. The detachment organiser or zavkhoz, has most power; officially, he is the main point of liaison between prisoners and personnel. The section chairs are responsible organising teams of prisoners to oversee various functions such as keeping the detachment block clean and tidy, mentoring prisoners, culture and education. These ‘self-organisation’ institutions, the idea for which dates back to the gulag when they were introduced because of the shortage of prison personnel, are today represented as a vehicle for instilling a sense of responsibility in prisoners – but, judging from other interviews, the story Ivan tells of the scope such self-organisation gives for bullying, is nearer the truth.
Juvenile prisoners are supposed to be transferred to adult colonies once they are 18, but, as Ivan explained, the older youths are kept on because of their usefulness to the colony administration. The zavkhoz in Ivan’s juvenile colony had his own room separate from the dormitory occupied by the rest of the detachment. Ivan described how prison personnel would bring him back at night drunk and that he was having an affair with the, civilian, teacher in the colony school. Ivan answered my naïve question about why the administration would choose to give a position of responsibility to such a person:
It’s easy. He had rich parents. So, he writes to his parents and asks them to send the administration some money – lots of dollars and materials to do repairs – and that if they do that his life will be alright … and of course the parents want their son to survive so they send money … and he gets a nice room; it had a pretty aquarium …
The other youths in the detachment knew that the zavkhoz would always be backed up by the administration, so there was no point complaining about him, but it was essentially his size and physical strength, together with the ‘assistants’ he gathered around him, that consolidated his power. When he eventually was transferred to an adult colony, Ivan relates, he was badly beaten which left him paralysed.
The powerful position occupied by the administration-appointed prisoners tells us that Ivan’s colony was, to use the popular term, “red”. Colonies in Belarus are reputedly various shades of red, meaning that the administration is firmly in charge, exercising its power through ‘activist’ prisoners and penal backup – the ever-present threat of being confined to punishment cells. Unofficial prisoner hierarchies found elsewhere in other Soviet successor states, including Russia, are weakly developed and relatively powerless in Belarus: ‘The powerful people [in the detachment] are those who are closer to the authorities. It’s usually hidden but that’s what I saw with my own eyes, that’s what it’s like’, insisted Ivan.
Initially, he was a rule-breaker, narushitel’, contesting the regime. In the early years of his ‘prison career’, Ivan self-harmed in protest, cutting his wrists and drinking chlorine. He was also a parachutist (he jumped out of a three-story window from a courtroom when faced with going back to prison) which resulted in three months in the prison hospital. He wrote complaints about the conditions of detention. However, he soon learned that complaining about conditions only brought retribution:
By the second time, I already knew what happened when you complained. Two days later the oper [operations officer] would come and would call on one of the activists who would come and give you a black-eye.
By the time of his last conviction, Ivan was well versed in the ’folkways’ of prison life in Belarus and knew how to get around the rules he didn’t like. In line with Lukashenko’s law against parasitism, work is obligatory for all able-bodied prisoners but Ivan did not want to work for miniscule wages on offer. Nevertheless, five days a week, Ivan would march in formation to the industrial zone (promzona) to the sound of Tchaikovsky’s, Slavonic March. Evidently supervision was poor in the clothing factory he was assigned to, so instead of sitting at his sewing machine, Ivan would spend the work-day visiting people he knew in different workshops, keeping an eye out to the charge-hands. As he explains, as far as personnel of this particular “semi-red” colony were concerned, their job was done so long as all the prisoners were where they were meant to be at the right time according to the regime timetable. In this respect, the colonies in Belarus are different, Ivan insisted, from most colonies in Russia where prison authorities have mostly given up on controlling the prisoners and allow them to spend days in the detachment dormitories. This is forbidden in Belarus.
In fact, there is a lot in Ivan’s description of his prison experiences that will sound familiar to students of the Russian prison system. However, there are important differences, not all necessarily to the advantage of Russia. Those that come immediately to mind are the following:
- Unlike a majority of the former communist countries in Europe, Belarus, is not a member of the Council of Europe – it still has the death penalty which is an automatic bar to its membership. This means that it is not subject to the same requirements as Russia to bring its prison system in line with the norms outlined in the European Prison Rules. The impact of COE membership on the development of the Russian prison system can be exaggerated, but it has been influential is shaping the direction of change in Russian prisons.
- The Belarus prison service is embedded in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This is dangerous for prisoners because it means that the agency responsible for investigating alleged criminal offences, is the same as the agency in charge of guarding prisoners. This is like foxes being trusted to stand guard over hen houses. All prisoners are vulnerable to investigators manipulating their treatment in custody to exact confessions and witness statement from them. This danger is particularly great in the Amerikanka, the KGB prison, where the leading oppositionists are detained. A condition of Russia’s COE membership was the transferral of the Prison Service from the MVD to the Ministry of Justice and the closure all its KGB (FSB) isolators. This has not eradicated the problem, but it is a step in the right direction for Russia.
- The lack of transparency of the Belarus prison service is almost absolute. A combination of lack of access by independent human rights monitors and fear of reprisal helps to maintain the invisibility of human rights violations and poor conditions of detention in Belarus prisons. Even though under Putin, independent monitoring of prisons has been curtailed in Russia, the country does have a variety of official and unofficial institutions – the residual few examples of free and semi-free press and human rights NGOs and individual human rights defenders – that can bring to public attention and violation of prisoners’ rights.
- In Belarus, channels for making complaints against violations of prisoners’ rights are strictly limited, and prosecutors and domestic courts are firmly under political control. Of course, ‘telephone law’ is a problem in Russia. However, with the right lawyers, funds and courage, complainants can take cases of mistreatment in prisons as far as the European Court of Human Rights if they believe they have been unfairly treated by the domestic courts, and there have been some landmark cases that have had an impact on domestic practice.
- However, by clinging to the Soviet mode, Belarus has avoided some of the current problems in Russian prisons. Most important among these, is the level of corruption in the Russian prison service, involving personnel at every level from the very apex to the lowest squaddie (otryadnik). Corruption creates a dangerous, violent and low trust environment in prisons. No doubt, corruption it is a problem in the prison service in Belarus but without the unchecked free-for-all of the market economy, it does not reach the industrial proportions we see in Russia.
To finish Ivan’s story. During his last prison term in the strict regime colony to which he was sentenced, Ivan took the decision to behave differently. He began taking classes to obtain the qualifications he had missed out on at school, studied well and was selected to chair the education section in his detachment. He was promoted to ‘privileged’ conditions of detention, which allowed him to receive more parcels from home and enhanced entitlement to visits. He also started attending services at the colony chapel and slowly, as he put it, ‘like a plant growing’, he found religion offered him a different life-path. When I interviewed him, he was living as a volunteer at a religious sanctuary in his adopted country. Looking back, he sees prison as a period of emptiness, lost years from which he was delivered by his conversion. He resisted my suggestion that maybe without his prison experiences, he might not have found a path away from his offending behaviours: ‘No, the opposite, without God I wouldn’t have survived. I don’t know what it is like in other countries but in Belarus it is simply that you are deprived of freedom … prison doesn’t do anything for you.’
[1] https://www.epde.org/en/news/details/human-rights-situation-in-october-2020.html
[2] Belarus, Ukraine and Russian Federation all signed and ratified the ICCCPR together when they were part of the USSR the convention came into force on 23rd March 1976.
[3] https://blogs.helsinki.fi/gulagechoes/
[4] https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/belarus Belarus leads all other post-Soviet states for the rate of imprisonment with the one exception of Turkmenistan which in 2018 was estimated to be 552.
[5] This term comes from Soviet times referring to the camps prisoners who had work to work in chemical industrial plants were held.
[6] In fact, there were no gulag camps, per se in Belarus. Like other of the former Soviet republics Belarus had correctional labour colonies