The methods used by the State Security Service – and other law enforcers, in fact – have not evolved much from the bad old Soviet days. Torture, pressure and beatings remain the key law-enforcement tools with those unfortunate suspects who end up in the SBU’s hands, according to former detainees. The SBU vigorously denies using any sort of coercive or illegal methods.
But Ukraine has the third or fourth largest number of applications to the European Court of Human Rights, and many of the allegations involve allegations of police brutality. If one is to believe the people who have been behind the walls of the SBU, torture is used frequently.
In Germany, these methods have been relegated to the past. The headquarters of the former East Germany’s Stasi secret service in Berlin, built by the Soviets after World War II and now a museum, is a good illustration of how mass torture is possible.
Midget-sized cells with one bed and a sack filled with hay are where 10 people lived together. The prisoners were also forced to stand on their feet from morning until 10 p.m. These are the images brought to mind when I read the open letter of one of the so-called “Vasylkiv terrorists,” accused by the SBU of planning an act of terrorism and detained on the eve of Independence Day. There are 10 of them altogether.
“While I was at the regional SBU center, I was questioned around the clock,” writes alleged terrorist Oleksiy Cherneha in his open letter. “I was beaten on my neck and the soft parts of the body, forced to do the splits, humiliated, threatened with physical violence and also mocked with accusations of pedophilia.”
In the Stasi prison, it was routine to interrogate suspects at night, from 10 p.m. until dawn. Then the suspect would be sent back to the cell, where they would stand all day.
They used a conveyer method for interrogation, when three or four investigators questioned the victim without a break. Three or four days later, pretty much anyone broke down and signed any confession or papers shoved in front of them.
The SBU, of course, denies that they are doing anything remotely similar to this. Volodymyr Rakytsky, deputy head of the SBU, told the press that Cherneha’s accusations are false.
“I would like to tell you that sometimes we talk with the criminals, but what we do is offer them coffee. The conversation that follows is absolutely lenient,” he said.
Vera Lengsfeld, an East German from Berlin who landed in Stasi prison for trying to organize a protest in 1988, remembers vividly what the coffee-drinking tactic is like that the Stasi also used more than two decades ago.
The officer would invite you for a coffee and a chat after several days of humiliation, beatings and pressure, when you’re so desperate that you’re about to stop feeling like a human being.
The interrogator made sure they knew your favorite drink. When Lengsfeld entered his office, she found him drinking this beverage – lemon tea – and for her the aroma was like a blow in the stomach.
Activists protest against police on Sofiyivska Square in
Kyiv on June 28. (Ukrinform)
The officer used a respectful form of address when he spoke to her, which was a vivid contrast to the usual address by the number that was assigned to her on arrival. The number was a psychological blow in the first days of imprisonment.
He didn’t offer her a drink straight away. First, she was told that the investigator is on her side, that he is just doing his job and that if she cooperates she will receive certain privileges.
“This was just another form of psychological pressure,” she recalls. She was sentenced to six months in prison then. She was 37.
In modern Germany, those pressure tactics of the secret service have become a matter of study by the historians.
But evolution appears to have failed to reach our secret service.
Not only do investigators allegedly continue to torture, they’re doing it with nostalgia for the Soviet Union and the repressions of the 1930s, if the letter of the alleged Vasylkiv terrorist Cherneha to be believed.
Lengsfeld said that none of the former Stasi guards were punished after the unification of Germany and the closure of prison. Moreover, the interrogators started a new life as psychological consultants, while the guards opened security firms.
They are banned from taking any jobs in the government, but can become members of parliament in the Bundestag. Those who served as an instrument of inhumane regimes remain unpunished even in Germany, the country which continues to study and humbly repent the historical sins it committed by opening museums like the Stasi one and memorials to Nazi victims.
There’s no history in Ukraine of law enforcers punishing lawbreakers among their own ranks
That’s why, in Ukraine, promises of an internal investigation into Cherneha’s claims can only evoke bitter smiles. “If there was an incident of brutality, we take a definite decision and talk about the professional incompetence of the official,” said Rakitsky, the deputy SBU head.
But there is no public history of such punishment and no reason to believe that the impunity of special police forces remains just as much a common reality in Ukraine as torture.
Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]
