Prisoners call for help
The editorial office of RUPOR has received a letter from Vinnitsa we are presenting below. We also sent this letter to the Ukrainian Helsinki Union for Human Rights, which informed us that they were already preparing an inquiry regarding it to the Ukrainian Ombudsman Nina Karpacheva.
Good day, dear editorial board!
Please publish this letter in your newspaper. We are appealing to Yulia Timoshenko. We would like to mention in advance that we are writing this letter not with the goal to punish somebody from the administration (God will judge them!), but to stop this disorder. The matter concerns the 81st and 86th colonies.
The administration urged us to vote for Yanukovich. At first we got some gifts: cigarettes, tea, vermicelli soups and the warning: “Everyone, who would vote for Viktor Yushchenko, would be beaten”. Yet, many of us voted for Viktor Yushchenko. Chief of colony No. 81 Mahomayev ordered to beat everyone, who had voted for Viktor Yushchenko. We were closed in isolator and were beaten every day. The isolator was full of blood. The beating was not registered and medical aid was not provided. We were beaten by the ensigns on-duty. When Baniuk was the chief of the department, there were no such cases. We were not beaten, not deprived of health, we called ensigns “cops”, but not “fascists” like now, and the camp Stryzhivka was not called “Oswiecim”. They can beat for carrying your bread from the canteen, for anything, even because they just disliked your face! They force to do morning exercises at any weather, including old and sick persons. People lose consciousness.
The money we earn, which is added to our personal accounts, is not paid to us after release, it is impossible to send it to our relatives: this money exists only on paper. The canteen menu is only for commissions, in reality – pigs are fed better! Although there is subsidiary farming, but it is for the administration only. Dear editorial board, please, publish this letter so that the President and the Prime minister could read it. Help us! We are beseeching for your help!
There was detachment chief A. Bayakin in colony 81-2, who has been transferred later to colony No. 86. He demanded eggs and condensed milk from prisoners, because he went in for sports. And if you came back after an appointment with relatives and did not give a snack to ensigns, you can be regarded as a kamikaze.
Dear editorial board, it is impossible to tell about everything. It is impossible to send a complaint from these places, and those who complain are beaten and oppressed by all means. They make an infringer of a person and increase term. We get letters with delays, opened. The administration does not allot either soap, or any clothes. The law doesn’t concern them, they do what they want.
Help us, make this letter public. When a commission comes and asks about life in the zone, everyone keeps silent, everything is OK, since nobody wants problems. This letter is our last hope that everyone will learn the truth about the violations of human (prisoners’) rights, which take place here.
Several prisoners. We cannot mention our names.
Please, help US!