Justice                              

 

Overheard last night in Kinshasa: A man has been arrested for calling Makala prison, introducing himself as the President, and ordering the release of two prisoners. He used his own mobile phone, which was easily traced.

 

•         Egyptian donkey jailed for theft   Queen O'Danile

•         It is abnormal to find frauds among the police   Pauline

 

I went through another checkpoint and found myself in the visitor’s room.  It was 8m x 8m, had plenty of seats and benches, and a beverage machine.  I walked up to a guard and told him who I was visiting.  He called out to another guard who appeared with my friend.  He had a big smile on his face and was happy to see me.  I asked what do we do now and he said let’s introduce you to my friends.

 

His friends were, in no particular order,  a bank president, a well known doctor, a navy lieutenant, an ex president of OSE (the national water company), an ex vp of another major utility and finally the most unfortunate (sacrificed), member of the La Pasiva family.  He was the guy running the concession booth in the visitors room.   I was introduced to them one by one, in English and they replied, most of them in very good English.

 

Today, at this time, all the inmates were high profile, highly educated,  members of Uruguayan society.  I should have guessed it when I was standng outside in the line.  Most were nicely dressed and well behaved.  I wouldnt be surprised if this group of inmates held board meetings during the week and gave free consultas to prison staff.  

 

My friend took me around the corner to the prison ‘yard’.  It looked like a larger version of my ‘aire y luz’ here in the house.  The building is squarish and large.  In order to get light and air into the all the rooms/cells, you create a courtyard in the middle.  It had a brick floor and was old, but clean.  The visitor’s room was also run down, but clean.  These aren’t the kind of prisoners who write grafiti on the walls.  These people are more comfortable with spreadsheets.

 

He bought a diet coke and we sat down to talk.  A few minutes later, his mom and a cousin came in.  A half hour later, a friend from the office came in.  There are no limits to the amount of visitors for an inmate.  Several had what looked like a large portion of their family, including small children and babies.  It was a very relaxed, jovial atmosphere.   The guards were talking to visitors, and vice versa.  It wasnt a formal process.

 

There was a cat that served as the prisoners’ mascot.  Almost every group had at least one if not two thermos/mate’s.  The gourds and bombillas were moving around all over the room.

 

Early on, I asked him what everyone was here for.  All of it was white collar crime, (you guessed that already).  They are kept on the 4th floor of the prison.  They do not associate with the ‘general’ population at any time.  Since a lot of white collar crime is prosecuted on the political level, most of these people have political affiliations - all with the parties that are out of power at the moment.    The reason they’re at this moment has a lot to do with that.  Because parties change power, they must have all agreed to make this place neutral territory, lest their own people end up there when the other party takes power and be treated poorly.

 

As odd as this seems, all the inmate I met have not had a trial yet.  Just the equivalent of our preliminary hearings.  In Uruguay, you present your case in a preliminary fashion to a judge.  He decides if you’re probably guilty or not.  If he thinks you are, he sends you to jail.  You’re in there until he decides to let you out.  Your lawyer keeps bugging the judge until that happens.  Sometime after that, (assuming you’re not in for a long time), you have a real trial.  If you are found guilty, you are sentenced to time served.  If you’re not found guilty, you’re free to go.  Unfortunately, you dont get your time served back.

 

Because of the political component, you can be jailed even though both the state and the defense agree that the case is weak, and a guilty verdict is not likely.  If the ruling party wants to make an example, or doesn’t like you, they pass this on to the judge and he jails you.  In the case of the the navy guy, his boss got into a fight with the judge, (not sure if that was in the court or in chambers).  The judge decided he’d had enough and put the lieutenant in jail to close the matter for the time being.   I guess when his boss apologizes to the judge, (when the next opportunity arises), he may change his mind and let him out.

 

At the end of the visiting hours, a buzzer sounds.  The inmates go to the cells and the guards close the gates to the prison.  A person shows up at the exit door with 2 stacks of cedulas in hand, one for women and one for men.  They read the women off one by one.  You go to the door and pick up your cedula and the guard says have a nice day and you say, see you soon.  When the women are done, they call the men.  Same process.  urufish

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Sunday, June 3, 2007                Kurdistan            The women's prison Adventrue

         
The woman’s prison in Hewlêr is a sunny place. Kids play between the laundry waving colourfully in the courtyard and the women are sitting in the shade on the steps. One elderly lady walks up to us and kisses each on the forehead. “She has been here for 18 years” says my guide from the Ministry of State Women Affairs.
We just arrive for lunch time however and everyone is moving inside. So are we.

The large rooms with ten to twenty beds are a little more austere, but better equipped than the student residences here, in as much as they have the generators needed to provide round the clock electricity for the TVs and fans. Out of politeness the women all stand up when we come, like pupils in a primary school, but I smile and ask them to make themselves comfortable.
In the room with the long-term convicts (ten of them), there is a girl in heavy make-up of whom I intuitively understand that she was a prostitute. I like her best at once. She is the most talkative, too. When, pretty much as a matter of course, I enquire how the food is and how they are being treated she uses the few words Sorani that I understand to answer both questions: “zor baş, zor zor baş”- “very good, very very good”. Afterwards back in the office my intuition about her gets confirmed “this one liked her job, but there is a different girl who has a horrifying story. After she slept with her “boyfriend” who promised to marry her, she was passed on to a souteneur. At that point, she was not a virgin anymore and had no choice but to do it.”
One woman is in there for plotting with her new boyfriend to kill her husband. In order that they could be together, his death was the only way in this culture.

I remember the grey-haired woman with facial tattoos on chin and around the mouth who sat on the ground. She said she did not want to answer any questions because “We are too worried about the people who were in the explosion today. They are our brothers and sisters, too, you know”
Talk about hypocrisy -now I am told that precisely this woman has to sit 23 years together with her husband and son for a series of contract killings.

There are no activities or any kind of rehabilitation programs going on, but it is something they are working at at the Women's Ministry.

Adventrue

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                                                                                                       The trial of Foday Sankoh                   fleeing the jurisdiction

The judge sat in silence for a full five minutes, his wordless rage expressed only through flailing gestures of dismissal, directed at his infamous courtroom guest. Stroking his unkempt and greying beard, there was nothing to outwardly mark the man who had gone from corporal in the Sierra Leone Army (and part-time wedding photographer) to commander in chief of a revolutionary movement vying with stiff competition for the title of the bloodiest in West Africa. If, aside from the training he recieved at Gaddafi’s notorious “House of Blood” in Benghazi, charisma played a part in his rise, there was none of it on show now.

Perhaps he knew, sitting quietly in the dock, that thugs in his employ had, some months previous, attacked the judge’s house at night, forcing him to flee over a high wall. The judge was still nursing a limp from the fall, in which he had broken his leg. Given Sierra Leone’s meagre medical resources, the bone would probably never be properly set and the man with the gavel would likely carry for the rest of his life an all too apparent reminder of the violence and fear that the RUF had brought.

Finally able to sputter a few words through his fury, the judge announced that the trial would take seven days. After which, he added, before a packed gallery of eager BBC and CNN hacks, Foday Sankoh would be sentenced to death. Sweat trickled down his face from beneath the absurd horsehair wig he wore, another unproductive and counterintuitive legacy of British administration. Waveringly, the accused raised his hand, and the journalists readied pens and dictaphones for an utterance that might well make the history books. Instead, Sankoh asked for permission to go to the toilet. Apoplectic, the judge ordered that he be removed before he defecated all over the courtroom.

Swept up by the mandate of the newly constituted Special Court, Sankoh never faced sentence in the domestic jurisdiction. Awaiting transfer to his suite in the UN-guarded detention blocks, he was held at Pademba Road Prison, a crumbling colonial monolith now teeming with four times its intended population. Apart from the prisoners, many of them having spent years without charge for some minor offence committed against a government official, there is a parallel community of insects swarming in the untended filth. Reputedly placed below even this on the evolutionary scale, is the man set to guard Sankoh. He is known for the pleasure he takes in torturing inmates.

Following his entry into the custody of the Special Court, it was apparent Sankoh’s health was failing. Before he could reach trial, in a great loss for the annals of international criminal law and - more importantly - for the Sierra Leoneans who had waited long to see him face justice, he died, reportedly of complications from a stroke. The Chief Prosecutor who had been readying the case against him remarked that his passing had granted him “a peaceful end that he denied to so many others.” I was not there to witness these events; this story was related to me by one who was.

fleeing the jurisdiction

 

Gurbanbibi Atajanova (file photo)

(RFE/RL)

TURKMENISTAN 2006   THERE is not much to laugh about on state television in Turkmenistan. But viewers may be forgiven for feeling a little quiet satisfaction at the spectacle, late last month, of Gurbanbibi Atajanova, the former chief state prosecutor otherwise known as the iron lady, tearfully begging not to be sent to prison after being accused of possessing 25 houses, 36 cars and 2,000 head of cattle. Ms Atajanova led the purges that, in recent years, systematically removed anyone who tried to challenge, or simply to rein in, President Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled Turkmenbashi, or father of Turkmenistan.                                                                                       Stalin is back Bruce Pannier Turkmenistan: Former Prosecutor 'Confesses' On State TV   Gurbanbibi Atajanova, Turkmenistan's prosecutor-general for more than a decade, appeared on Turkmen state television on April 24 to confess to stealing property and taking bribes. The "Iron Lady" of Turkmenistan begged an unmoved President Saparmurat Niyazov for mercy. But Atajanova was not known for showing any mercy to the scores of Niyazov's political opponents who she prosecuted, and she may now become a victim of the same style of justice she practiced for so long. PRAGUE, April 25, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- For the people of Turkmenistan, former Prosecutor-General Gurbanbibi Atajanova was one of the most feared officials in the country. They were used to seeing her appear on state television to confront fallen officials with charges of illegal activities. In a typical appearance in August, she was on television to list the crimes committed by Saparmurat Valiev, the former head of the state oil company Turkmenneft. "As of today, we have confiscated 21 houses belonging to Valiev and 20 foreign-made cars that he had," she said then. "We also seized personal funds totaling $9.5 million from eight safes he owned. We found an additional $1 million and 560 million manats and six illegally owned weapons." What Comes Around... But this time, the Turkmen nation saw a very different Atajanova on state television. The new prosecutor-general, Mukhammet Oshukov, took 15 minutes reading out the charges against Atajanova. Just a few weeks after she retired for "health reasons," she was suddenly answering questions from an unsympathetic President Niyazov. Niyazov: "You've heard the charges against you. What can you say for yourself? About what you've done? You heard what was found." Atajanova: "Great leader..." Niyazov: "Speak louder!" Atajanova: "I am guilty of many things. All that was said here [by Oshukov] I admit to. I cannot say anything. My great leader, I appeal to your people, our people, to all the workers. Forgive me! I am sorry! I have three daughters but no son. Save me! Don't take away my freedom. For the rest of my life I will live by your policies, follow your path, do your honest work. I'm ready to till the soil." Who Watches The Watchers? Atajanova put ministers, the heads of big business, and political opponents in prison for years. But her turn had come. Despite having praised her work just weeks ago -- when she retired at the age of 58 -- Niyazov did not spare her this time. "Six months ago, doubts [about your performance] as prosecutor-general appeared," he said. "Several cases seemed to be dragging on. She violated justice many times. She had special investigators, four or five people. They were specially selected and they had orders to do things that are unimaginable to the mind. She started openly taking bribes." Atajanova stands accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes; of having stolen money confiscated from former officials who she helped jail; and of having 25 cars, 36 homes, and thousands of sheep and cattle. Niyazov also said Atajanova took bribes early in her career when she worked in provincial prosecutors' offices. Web Of Corruption Atajanova will not be the only person facing charges. Niyazov indicated that he already had information that the Interior Ministry, the judiciary, and the Prosecutor-General's Office were working together to enrich themselves at the state's expense. Similarly, Atajanova's brother, Rasul, seems destined for prison. In December 2003, there were rumors that Rasul was caught trying to cross from Iran into Turkmenistan with a large amount of heroin. There were also rumors that Atajanova was involved. Prosecutors have now said publicly that Rasul did, indeed, try to smuggle some 16 kilograms of heroin into Turkmenistan. Her sudden and dramatic fall from grace is also another reminder that the roots of corruption are deep in Turkmenistan and that no official, however Niyazov may seem to trust them today, is beyond the kind of justice Atajanova dispensed for years and now faces herself. (Rozinazar Khoudaiberdiyev of RFE/RL's Turkmen Service contributed to this report.) A man sitting in front of a white wall looked into the TV camera with lifeless eyes and told the viewers amazing things. The public learned that he, Boris Shikhmuradov, an ex-vice-premier of the Turkmen government, is an inveterate criminal and villain, that together with his accomplices he had formed a criminal group for “destabilizing the situation in Turkmenia, undermining its constitutional system and making an attempt on the life of the president”, and that “while living in Russia, they had used narcotics and, while high, recruited hirelings for a terrorist act”. Concluding his address, the man with lifeless eyes said almost without faltering that Saparmurat Turkmenbashi (this word means the head of all Turkmens) was a gift of the heavens to the people of Turkmenia