78
Concerns in Europe: January - June 2001
AI Index: EUR 01/003/2001
Amnesty International September 2001
national flag by all pupils. The authorities reportedly
believed that the children were forced by Artygul
Atakova to act against their own will.
Artygul Atakova and her five children were
deported from the town of Mary, to the village of
Kaakhka some 200 kilometres from Mary on 3
February 2000 and were put under "village arrest".
Torture and ill-treatment of conscientious objector
(update to AI Index: EUR 01/01/00)
In
May
eighteen-year-old
Baptist
Dmitry
Melnichenko was detained and tortured after refusing
to carry arms and swear an oath of military allegiance
on grounds of conscience.
Dmitry Melnichenko, who belongs to an
Evangelical Baptist Church in Ashgabat, was
reportedly called up for military service on 10 May.
He apparently objected on conscientious grounds, and
was taken to a military unit in the town of Serdar
(formerly Kizyl-Arvat), some 200 kilometres
northwest of Ashgabat. On 15 May he was reportedly
brought to the local offices of the KNB and tortured.
According to Missionswerk Friedensstimme,
Dmitry Melnichenko was “beaten on the knees, on the
buttocks and on the head with a truncheon. He was
insulted and humiliated in an attempt to force him to
swear an oath [of allegiance]. When he continued to
refuse to swear the oath they took a dynamo from a
field telephone and forced him to hold the ends of the
wires. Next they fastened the wires to his ears and sent
the current through his head. His face was distorted
and the saliva in his mouth became frothy and acrid.
Then they put a hood over his head... and beat him
about the face and neck. At about 8.00 pm they took
him to the guardroom, where he was kept
overnight...”.
On 1 June Dmitry Melnichenko was reportedly
transferred to a different military unit in Serdar on the
orders of the Ministry of Defence. The following day
he was apparently brought before the local
prosecutor’s office, where the Deputy Procurator told
him that criminal charges would be brought against
him if he did not swear the oath of military allegiance
by 10 June. However, no criminal charges appeared to
have been brought against Dmitry Melnichenko by the
end of June.
Dmitry Melnichenko had reportedly been
harassed and ill-treated for his religious beliefs
previously: During a December 1999 crackdown on
Protestant churches, he was apparently beaten
severely and threatened with false criminal charges.
KNB agents allegedly told him that when he reached
18, the age at which Turkmenistani men are called up
for compulsory military service, he would be “repaid
for his faith in Jesus”.
U K R A I N E
Possible "disappearance" of Georgiy Gongadze
(Update to AI Index: EUR 01/001/2001)
During the period under review little progress had
been made in determining who was responsible for the
apparent abduction and killing of the independent
journalist, 31-year-old Georgiy Gongadze. The
whereabouts of the journalist became unknown late in
the evening of 16 September 2000 when he failed to
return home after leaving a friend’s house in the
capital, Kyiv. The leader of the Socialist Party of
Ukraine, Olexandr Moroz, implicated President
Leonid Kuchma in the abduction in late November
2000, after he released audiotape recordings of
President Kuchma allegedly discussing with other
leading state officials about how to silence Georgiy
Gongadze, charges which the President has
vociferously denied. The alleged involvement of
President Kuchma in the abduction created a political
scandal
in
Ukraine,
resulting
in
numerous
demonstrations and pickets throughout the country,
some of which ended in violence (see Freedom of
assembly below).
The audiotape recordings were reportedly made
by a 34-year-old former officer of the Ukrainian State
Security Service, Mykola Melnychenko, who was said
to have surreptitiously digitally recorded around 40 to
50 hours of conversations involving the President
from under a sofa inside the President’s office while
working there. AI is informed that the conversations
also
allegedly
broached
another
independent
28
IPI Report, 2001, No
.1
journalist, Oleh Lyashko, who has also been an object
of state attention (see Freedom of expression below).
Since making his allegations, Mykola Melnychenko
has reportedly been charged by the Ukraine’s
prosecutor’s office with abuse of office, divulgence of
state secrets, slander of a state official and forgery and
use of forged documents. In mid-April, Mykola
Melnychenko, reportedly obtained asylum status in
the USA, which refused to deport him to Ukraine.
Georgiy Gongadze’s 31-year-old wife, Miroslava
Gongadze also obtained asylum in the USA around
the same time.
In the light of the seriousness of the allegations
against President Kuchma the authenticity of the
audiotape recordings became a subject of considerable
debate. On 21 December 2000 Ukraine’s parliament,
Verkhovna Rada, passed a resolution requesting that
the Council of Europe carry out an independent
investigation into the authenticity of the audiotape
recordings. The Vienna based organization, the
Independent Press Institute (IPI), and the US based
organization Freedom House, after attempting to
establish the tapes’ authenticity, stated that, although
they were unable to completely affirm authenticity,
they decided it was highly unlikely that it was possible
to manipulate 300 minutes of tape.
28
Controversy also surrounded the efforts made to
establish the identity of the decapitated corpse