Operation Resocialization
'Children mothered by the street . . .
Blossoms of humanity!
Poor soiled blossoms in the dust!' (from The Street-Children's Dance (1881) by Mathilde Blind)
(This poem is dedicated to the memory of the eight who died in the Almaty camp, within the walls of rejection and helplessness thrown up by adult indifference, and to those young people, numerous as the stars, who have known only those walls - or no walls at all.)
We, the peoples of the United Nations determined1 . . .
'Nobody invited you here, boys, 2
You came by yourselves . . .'
To affirm faith in fundamental human rights,
'Here you are in a prison camp,
Some may call it a pioneer camp . . .'
In the dignity and worth of the human person . . .
'It's well protected . . . there are guards
At every watchtower, armed with live ammunition . . .'
The Universal Declaration . . .
'We gave back everything that we'd stolen,
Except the ice cream, which we ate in one go . . .'
Of Human Rights, Article . . .
'The sentence was four years . . .
One, two, three, four . . . One, two, three, four . . .'
² Excerpts are from 'Experiment of the Cross', a TV Report (Channel 4; 30/7/96) about corrective youth camps in Kazakhstan, based on clandestine footage of one camp at Almaty obtained by a shocked psychiatric doctor, Dr Taras Popov. Internees, many of whom had committed only petty crimes, were subject to a brutal punishment regime. Disease and sexual abuse were rife, and suicide common. The inmates' self-inflicted injuries were attempts to escape the gulag for the relative comfort of hospital; it backfired in Zhenya's case (he hoped that the cross would open up in his stomach, causing limited damage). Since the first screening in Russia in 1995 (which cost Dr Popov his job), 8 of the inmates have died: 5 died from TB, hepatitis and malnutrition; 3 were murdered. Amnesty International is now campaigning for an investigation into these deaths and for the reform of such prisons in the former Soviet Union.