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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