October 2016: fighters of the "Donetsk People's Republic" during a planned retreat. (c) Igor Maslov / VisualRIA. All rights reserved.
This article originally appeared in The Moscow Times.
November
was unseasonably warm this year in Donetsk, an eastern Ukrainian city under
pro-Russian separatists’ control. As you walk down Pushkin Boulevard, watching
golden leaves gently drop to the ground, stop by a fancy coffee wagon and
inhale the autumn aromas mixed with the intoxicating smell of freshly ground
coffee beans; it’s hard to believe that the war is still happening right around
the corner.
Although
the sounds of shelling are no longer part of daily life in central Donetsk,
shelling and shooting still plague the city’s outskirts – just like they plague
the government-controlled towns on the other side of the contact line in
eastern Ukraine.
But the war is far from over.
From 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. a curfew is still active in Donetsk. But
the city is again full of life, kids are playing in the streets, expensive
boutiques have re-opened, a brand new department store started welcoming
shoppers just a few days ago, and music is blaring from innumerable bars and
restaurants.
“People don’t even speak to each other freely – they’re scared [everyone is] reporting on them, their neighbors, their colleagues, the person sitting next to them on the trolley”
The city center looks so normal. Yet, under the vestiges of
normalcy hides raw fear.
A
man talking to me in a brightly lit café looks stealthily over his shoulder at
a group of women chattering merrily and sipping sophisticated cocktails, “Sorry, I know we’re talking quietly,
but I’m just afraid that if they overhear a few words, they’ll call the
security services and we’ll get dragged off to the basement.”
He
smiles awkwardly, as if expecting me to be put out by his “unmanly” behavior. “You see, with the security ministry,
MGB, the fear gets the best of you, it’s overwhelming.”
He
tells me about a computer repairman who came to his home to fix his broken computer.
As the two were chatting casually, he said, the repairman suddenly asked him, “do
you by any chance know a good lawyer? My son was taken away by MGB. He’s been
stuck in the basement there for weeks.”
Autumn in Donetsk. Photo courtesy of the author.My interlocutor sighs, “I
have no idea what to do. He is a nice guy, I really want to help, so I go to
this acquaintance of mine
who is a lawyer – and he says, if a man is taken into the basement, his only
way out is to get exchanged… unless his family or whoever can pay loads of
money and buy him out… If I’m detained, God forbid, if one of my family members
is detained, what’s to be done, where to go? It’s hopeless…”
I
wish I could offer a piece of advice, that’s what people generally expect of
rights advocates, but to be honest, I’ve nothing to suggest.
Our research findings in rebel-controlled areas are very
clear on the issue: in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s
republics, local security services operate without any adherence to any sort of
rule of law, subject to no checks and balances; anyone snatched by them is
fully at their mercy, and the victim’s relatives have no one to turn to.
“The MGB is like this black hole, people
sink into it and disappear, [you can] only sit there quietly and pray that it
does not happen to you… You cannot speak of those detentions, you cannot speak
of those basements… The [authorities] make it crystal clear: you must keep quiet,
[and] not ask questions.” I nod dejectedly and sip on my orange juice. Freshly squeezed.
A young man I meet in town the next day also has fear on his mind:
“People don’t even speak to each other
freely – they’re scared [everyone is] reporting on them, their neighbors, their
colleagues, the person sitting next to them on the trolley… The fear is
paralyzing though actually, detentions as such aren’t event frequent these
days. They were massive back in 2014 when DNR was getting
consolidated, but then gradually there were fewer and fewer people for them to
‘work on.’ Pro-Ukraine activists fled, critically minded people, those who
could not dare keep silent, left. But everyone who stays knows – if you breathe
even a word, you’re off to the basement and they’ll beat you and torture you
and no one can save you.”
We’re walking slowly, leaves crunching softly under our feet. This
autumn day is so beautiful and it almost hurts.
A few days later, in government-controlled Mariupol, a colleague
and I listen to another man, a small-scale trader, tell about his experience in
the MGB’s basement prison in Novoazovsk, a small town in DNR-controlled
territory. He spent five and half months there in late 2015 early 2016, on
suspicion of collaborating with the Security Service of Ukraine.
Scars from hand-cuffs on the wrists of a man held in incommunicado detention and tortured by Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine (November 2016, Mariupol).
For
three of those months his captors had him cuffed to a water pipe,so he could only sit, crouch,
curl up on the floor, or crawl a short distance.
His interrogators beat him, hung him
up in an extremely painful position, tortured him with electric shocks, and
starved him. It was the indignity of being chained “like an animal, a wild beast”
for months that seems to have shaken him at least as much as the extreme
physical suffering.
“How can they do this?”
he queries, “How can they do this to their fellow
human? I want these people punished.”
During
the two and a half years that Ukraine has been wracked by war, Human Rights
Watch interviewed scores of victims of arbitrary detentions and torture by Russia-backed separatists and repeatedly raised
these issues with DNR and LNR de-facto authorities. So far, none of these
victims has seen justice.
I hope things will be different for that devastated man in
Mariupol.
Read the original here.