Moldova: Caged in Darkness
Duration: 9'20"
Reporter/Camera: Sue Lloyd-Roberts
Producer/Camera: Ian O'Reilly
The plight of children in orphanages in Romania and the former Soviet Union has been widely publicised since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now aid agencies are turning their attention to a new horror - the conditions inside old Soviet-style prisons where TB is raging and prisoners on remand are held for years without trial. Sue Lloyd-Roberts, the first foreign journalist to be given access, goes behind the prison walls in Kishnow, Moldova - a newly independent country on the border of Romania. With powerful images the story exposes the Dickensian conditions of children imprisoned for petty crimes.
Prison number three, the cell door is opened to reveal nineteen boys, fifteen to eighteen years old, crammed into a small dark stinking cell. With one square metre per person, and no access to air or daylight, the conditions contravene every law on the treatment of prisoners. The boys complain of being beaten and treated like animals. "These are not proper living conditions. There is just not enough air. We can hardly breathe. Nobody cares. We get sick from it and nobody thinks why."
Teenagers who have yet to be convicted may never get to court, often too sick with TB. One in five of the prisoners is infected with TB and last year 300 died. French aid agency Pharmaciens sans Frontieres has been drafted in to provide drugs for the TB pandemic, but they say the first priority is air: "As human beings they have the right to get fresh air. You can't start healing people, giving drugs, giving food or anything else, if you don't first bring air to them."
The iron shutters, a legacy from the Soviet era, are pulled down in this prison with money given by the Swiss. For the first time since imprisonment the boys have natural light and oxygen. But there is no money available to tackle the other penal institutions of Moldova.
Many of the boys claim that they've been wrongfully charged. Sixteen-year old Misha has been sentenced to seven and a half years: "the woman who had her necklace stolen, she went up to the police and told them that it wasn't me who stole it... and yet in court they paid no attention."
Out on the streets of the poorest country in Europe hundreds of children are driven by poverty to beg and steal. Once locked up, many will die before having a chance to protest their innocence. Moldova may have a long way to go in social and economic reform, but justice for their children may come too late.
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