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Sentencing was determined by a show of hands
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29876687]
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INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.newsweek.com/east-ukrainian-rebels-sentence-child-molester-death-first-court-case-new-282084
Alleged Child Molester Sentenced to Death by Show of Hands in Eastern
Ukraine
Filed: 11/4/14 at 1:01 PM | Updated:
11/4/14 at 1:52 PM
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A pro-Russian
separatist stands guard near the temple of Archangel Michael in Makiivka,
outside Donetsk, October 29, 2014. Maxim Zmeyev
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East Ukrainian separatists have released video
footage of the first criminal court case held in the self proclaimed republics
of Luhansk and Donetsk, where militant rebels sentence a man to death for rape
after a show of hands in favour.
The footage shows the proceedings of the
self-declared “New Russia First People’s Court” that took place on 25 October
in the town of Alchevsk in the Luhansk region. In the courtroom, members of the
pro-Russian Prizrak (Ghost) battalion press charges against two men who they
accuse of sexually abusing minors.
The court case, held in the settings of a run-down
Soviet hall, offers a glimpse of the effect the declaration of independent
republics has had on the rule of law in eastern Ukraine. Pro-Russian
separatists declared the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk independent of the Kiev
government in May. The separatists held elections last week that were both won
by fighters who had previously declared themselves president, although the
votes were not recognised by Kiev, the EU or the United States.
The sentence for both men would have entailed death
by firing squad, but after appeals to a 340-person jury the first man narrowly
avoided the death penalty and is instead sent to fight for the Prizrak
battalion as punishment.
The video showing evidence for charges against the
two suspected rapists is presented by a three-member panel of Prizrak battalion
fighters acting as judges, with the battalion's leader, Alexey Mozgovoy,
officiating the proceedings.
Before the floor is open for attending citizens to
share their thoughts and ask questions, the rebel fighter to the right of Mozgovoy
addresses the public.
“I would like to make sure you understand
why we have called court today,” he says.
“Today you have your first chance to act
like an active, civil society, with an active position and with the right to
have a say.”
“Every one of us must understand that
building this new society will not depend on only one or two people. Every one
of us has to hold themselves accountable.”
Mozgovoy then presents the sequence of events which
led to the first suspect’s capture, all evidence of which has been collected
and assessed by his battalion.
Some members of the jury, comprised of both
militants and civilians, begin boisterously debating the extent of the
suspect’s guilt.
“I have a daughter and a granddaughter,” one
elderly local declares. “If this ‘creature’ went after
my granddaughter, I would shoot him myself. Shoot him!”
Another jumps to the suspect’s defence,
highlighting that the victim went to the suspect’s home and accepted a mobile
phone from him as payment. “Is this just any normal
girl?” he asks, before answering his own question. “This is a girl involved in prostitution”.
One local woman reacts bitterly to this, turning to
the suspect and telling him “Did you not know what you
were doing? You took advantage of the situation.”
A third, much younger man chimes in, offering his
opinion on the matter as “a guest in Luhansk.”
“I came to Luhansk to deliver aid to a
children’s hospital six months ago, so I do not have a say in this vote but I
cannot stay silent,” he says. “You say you are
absolved of guilt because the girl came to you herself, but ask yourself what
would you do if your son was in her position,” he adds, turning to the
suspect.
After a show of hands sentences the first suspect
to service on the frontlines he falls to his knees in tears, while Mozgovoy
moves on proceedings to the second suspect’s case.
Mozgovoy presents a long list of evidence
allegedly found by the Prizrak battalion of sexually-based offences by the
suspect, including raping a “victim, aged 14, who suffered psychological trauma
as a result” of the man’s advances.
The suspect is not allowed to speak until after a
nearly unanimous show of hands condemns him to death by firing squad, at which
point his mother leaps up in tears, begging the court to spare him.
“It is my fault,” the woman
pleads, “I am the one to blame.”
The second suspect is then handed a microphone by a
battalion member and, seeming stunned, asks for forgiveness and “a chance to
repent” for his "mistakes."
His voice is drowned out by jeers from the crowd
and he is taken away by armed battalion militants.
In August, Ukrainian separatist rebels voted to
legitimise the death penalty for crimes like desertion and looting. Unconfirmed
evidence of capital punishment being used by pro-Russian rebels has been the
subject of speculation before. In June, a video appeared online that appeared
to show rebel leader Igor Bezler executing two pro-Kiev soldiers by firing
squad.
In May, documents signed by former rebel leader
Igor Strelkov emerged online ordering the execution of looters, using a
Stalin-era Russian law as legal grounds for the execution.
INTERNET
SOURCE:
Rebels in Ukraine 'post
video of people’s court sentencing man to death'
Footage
appears to show alleged rapist’s punishment being decided by a show of hands in
an unofficial public trial
By
Tom Parfitt, Moscow
2:38PM
GMT 31 Oct 2014
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|
A pro-Russian
separatist from the rebel Interior ministry stands near an armored personnel
carrier during an oath-taking ceremony in Donetsk. The Donetsk People’s
Republic announced it was introducing the death penalty for “gravest crimes” in
August. Photo: MAXIM ZMEYEV/REUTERS
|
Pro-Russian
rebels in Ukraine
have released a video which appears to show a “people’s court” sentencing a man
to death by a show of hands.
The
man, accused of rape, is brought before a panel of three rebels in military
fatigues, one of them in a mask, on a stage in front of an auditorium where
several hundred people are sitting.
After
a brief review of evidence, the panel asks the audience to vote on whether the
man should be executed.
Some
of the people in the room giggle as the majority raise their hands. The senior
rebel on the panel announces that he will be shot dead. A second man escaped
the punishment but was sentenced to be sent to fight on the front against
Ukrainian forces and "die with honour".
The
video could not be independently verified but has been widely shared by
pro-separatist media. It was originally published on a YouTube channel
associated with Alexei Mozgovoy, a rebel who commands the Prizrak (Ghost)
battalion.
It
was unclear whether the punishment had been carried out. The hearing reportedly
took place on October 25 in Alchevsk, a small city under rebel control in
Ukraine’s Luhansk region.
The
rebel leadership in the neighbouring Donetsk People’s Republic announced it was
introducing the death penalty for “gravest crimes” in August.
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120289/alexey-mozgovoys-show-trial-igor-ananeyev-eastern-ukraine
November 16, 2014
Sentenced to Death with
a Show of Hands
Eastern
Ukrainian rebels are reinventing justice
By
Noah Sneider
Igor
Ananeyev, a 37-year-old ex-cop, left his shift at a rebel base in the eastern
Ukrainian town of Alchevsk one night in September and went to meet a girl.
She
was 15, the same age as his son, but that did not stop Ananeyev. His wife, who
had left him earlier in the year, was living in Kiev. And his son was sleeping
at a dormitory for the children of the fighters. Night had just settled when he
brought the girl, “Nastia,” back to his apartment. She asked him if he had
anything to drink, so he pulled a bottle of vodka from his fridge. They smoked
a bit of weed. Then after getting her drunk, he brought her into his
bedroom.
"She
was young," he explained to me when I met him months later. "It all
happened quickly." The next morning, he dropped her off at work, and gave
her a cell phone as a "present." One day later, his rebel comrades
arrested him and told him it was "the end." He knew they meant the
end of him. He wrote a confession. He prayed. He drew a picture of god.
Nearly
a month and half passed, and then he landed in the People's Court of
Novorossiya, a makeshift tribunal presided over by a local warlord named Alexey
Mozgovoy, and adjudicated by several hundred locals. Ananeyev and a second man,
Vitaly Krovtsov, faced the death penalty for child rape. There were no
witnesses called, no lawyers present, and no real evidence put forward. In the
end, Ananeyev and Krovtsov's fates were decided by a show of hands. Several
members of the crowd were reportedly drunk.
Mozgovoy’s
battalion, the “Ghost Battalion,” soon uploaded video of the
October 25th trial to YouTube. It opens with a shot of the two suspects
being led, hands behind their backs, up the steps of the local House of
Culture, past white columns, and into a pink-walled theater. Cheesy, dramatic
rock music blares. Inside, the suspects sit at a desk, stage left, next to red
curtains. Three camouflaged rebels, one with a black scarf covering his face,
officiate from a bench in the center.
"I ask, in accordance with wartime
law, to sentence Ananeyev Igor Vladimirovich ... to the highest degree of
punishment: execution by firing squad," one of the rebels says to
open the trial. "The decision will be made by the
people of Novorossiya. Means of decision: a simple majority of votes."
Mozgovoy, on the far left in a black cap, then takes the microphone and calls
the court "the perfect form of people power."
Rebel justice in wartime eastern Ukraine's has been
cruel since its inception. Igor Strelkov, the erstwhile supreme commander of
the separatist movement in Donetsk, famously had
looters shot in secret military tribunals. But this "People's
Court" seems different somehow. Watching the video is like getting into
Marlow's boat and embarking down the river into a modern-day Heart of Darkness.
The "People's Court" shows a process unfold: You watch ordinary
people grapple with morality, mortality, and justice, unencumbered by legal
procedure. It hints, not so subtly, at the precariousness of civilization.
Guilt becomes a slippery concept. We have two child rapists, a maniacal ruler,
and a complaisant population: Who is more in the wrong and why?
This unsettling state of moral ambiguity has
deep roots.
Ukraine inherited a Soviet-era system where the
judge hands down rulings; there have never been official jury trials. Under
former President Viktor Yanukovych, the courts were merely instruments.
Verdicts were decided before hearings—what mattered was not guilt, but the size
of your bank account. Before Ukraine’s revolution this spring, 66 percent of
Ukrainians considered the judiciary "extremely corrupt"—the
highest of all institutions in the country.
Once eastern Ukraine’s separatists began seizing
territory in April, state institutions—the shaky justice system
included—crumbled. The self-styled People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk
have yet to establish any laws of their own. Into the vacuum have come warlords
and rebels, with their own twisted ideas of how to replace the old courts. Most
of the time it involves summary justice, arbitrary detention, and widespread
torture. Mozgovoy’s “People’s Court” may sit on the civil end of this dark
spectrum.
In early November, two colleagues and I set out for
Alchevsk to meet the infamous commander and get some answers about what
actually happened to Ananeyev and Krovtsov, and why. Mozgovoy received us in
his office on the second floor of his headquarters, in a building that used to
belong to the local newspaper. He wore fatigues, and his clear blue eyes peeked
out from under an olive green cap. He sat behind a desk with seven cell phones
on it, and two rifles rested against the wall behind him. Propped in the far
corner of the room, opposite a fake lemon tree, stood a real silver sword.
 |
|
Alexey Mozgovoy, Commander of the pro-Russian
Separatist "Ghost Battalion"
|
A native of eastern Ukraine, Mozgovoy always wanted
to be a soldier, and his years in the Ukrainian army left him unfulfilled.
After leaving the service in the late 1990s, he worked odd jobs and dabbled in
music. He even wrote some poetry—strained
verses about his mother, about love, about angels. (Spoiler: It’s not very
good.) He had been working in Russia when protests broke out in Kiev. The
separatist movement in the Donbas emerged as his calling.
In February, he left his job, returned home to Luhansk,
and began recruiting fighters. He proved himself a ruthless commander, and an
effective self-promoter. He once roadtripped to Moscow to lobby nationalist
Russian lawmakers to support eastern Ukraine’s rebels. Eventually he came to
control Alchevsk, a town of roughly 100,000 near the war’s northern
front.
As the war in Ukraine has dragged on, the feverish
Russian nationalists (like Strelkov) who led the first charge have largely been
pushed out and replaced with bland and pliant stand-ins. Mozgovoy is one of the
few exceptions. He still clings to the idea
of "Novorossiya," and speaks of building a socialist system of
"direct democracy" and "people power" in his future
republic. He fancies himself a bit after Lenin, and a bit after Nestor Makhno, a famed
Ukrainian anarchist. At the People's Court, he suggested arresting women for
visiting bars, saying that "a woman should be mother and homemaker"
and commanding the women in town to "stay home and bake pies." (He
told us this was merely a scare tactic, but we did not stay long enough to see
who still dared go to the bars.)
Mozgovoy folds his hands as he speaks. He told me
the People's Court was an “experiment.” Ukraine, especially the Russophile
eastern regions, is notoriously paternalistic, trained by years of Soviet rule
to avoid civic duty. By calling the People's Court, Mozgovoy wanted to awaken
civil society. "People must feel responsibility for life," he said,
stroking his grey-streaked goatee. "Otherwise life passes by our
citizens."
In the end, Ananeyev got off relatively easy. The
crowd decided to send him to the front lines, where he would fight for his
life. Krovtsov did not. Amidst cheers and applause, 271 of the 290 present
voted to have him shot. Both men now await their punishments at a rebel base in
town.
Neither man denies his guilt. Krovtsov, with a
black beanie and a black eye, told us he is "ashamed" when two
colleagues and I met him in the base's shady courtyard. The tattoos on his
hands speak of a life of crime—a total of 14 years in Ukrainian prisons on
several separate charges. In town, women know to avoid him. (His captors
believe that he avoided even harsher sentencing under the old authorities
because of ties to the corrupt local police.)
When we asked Ananeyev what he thought of this new
court, he answered that the People's Court was an improvement on the old system.
"It's not ideal," Ananeyev said. "But it's better than when the
courts were paid for." It's impossible, of course, to know how much the
presence of his captors influenced his answer.
But even his father, Vladimir, agreed that there
was something to the idea. "It's difficult, but perhaps it's the right
approach," he said when we met him outside his aging apartment block.
"They just need to refine it." The problem, he said, was not the
court itself—the people should decide—but the lack of procedure. "What
punishment can there be,” he asked, “if we have no laws?" It was a fair
point. It’s hard to say what is ultimately more barbaric: the unequal justice
of corruption or the vengeful justice of the collective id.
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29876687
3 November 2014 Last updated at 11:08
Ukraine
conflict: Summary justice in rebel east
By Dina Newman BBC News
A show of hands was what it took to decide the fate
of two alleged rapists in Ukraine's rebel east.
Residents of Alchevsk, a city in the Luhansk
region, had been urged to attend the "First People's Court" on 25
October.
The separatist "Prizrak" battalion
(ghost), which controls the area, said it had conducted its own investigation
into the alleged crimes and invited everyone to condemn the suspects.
Speaking on the phone from Alchevsk, a fighter
using the nom de guerre Smuggler told me he was present at the
"trial", and he was proud of it.
"I believe criminals and scumbags
should be erased from the face of the Earth," he said.
"We all believe that," a comrade
could be heard in the background.
"I've met their victims," said
Smuggler. "They are devastated. We live under
emergency laws, we have a lot of crime, we have no proper courts at the moment,
so our people create 'people's justice'. I hope after this election we will
have proper authorities, laws and courts."
Tanay Cholkhanov, a journalist sympathetic to the
rebels who was embedded with the battalion at the time, attended the so-called
trial and said it was a "complete farce".
"Most people who were there did not understand
what was happening. It was tragic," he said.
The battalion's video of the trial, posted online at the weekend, shows some 340
people present, in a town whose pre-war population stood at more than 100,000.
The video shows the battalion commander, Alexei
Mozgovoi, using the opportunity to issue a warning to all residents.
"Too many women go to restaurants," he
said. "What kind of example do they show to their children? From now on,
we will arrest all women we find in restaurants and cafes."
Incredulous gasps are heard from the audience.
The video shows how both suspects were presumed
guilty on the basis of evidence presented by battalion investigators.
One was spared the death penalty and condemned to
being sent to the front line, to "redeem himself and die with
honour".
The other was sentenced to death by firing squad,
despite desperate pleas from his mother, present in the audience.
By a large majority, the suspect is sentenced to
death. "Good people, spare him," the
man's mother screams. "Blame me, I am the one to
blame!"
The battalion confirmed to the BBC that both
convicts were currently held in custody and the sentences were to be carried
out in the next few weeks.
The "Prizrak" battalion is reported to
number some 1,500 men and controls an area with a population of 10,000
civilians.
"They intimidate these civilians, says Tanay
Cholkhanov, who believes Commander Mozgovoi should be brought to justice.
But in the areas of eastern Ukraine now run by
rebels, justice lies in the hands of those in power.
Sentenced
to Death by a Crowd: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 86)
Published
on Nov 12, 2014
During the
war, various areas of eastern Ukraine under separatist control have been under
the jurisdiction of field commanders, who run these areas under their own laws.
VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky traveled to Alchevsk in the Luhansk region to interview Alexei Mozgovoi, who's been running a "people's court" in which people are tried for various crimes, from rape to theft, with residents acting as the jury.
Subscribe to VICE News here: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-VICE-News
Follow @simonostrovsky on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/SimonOstrovsky
Click to watch "The Firefighters of Donetsk: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 85)" - http://bit.ly/1qCEyMH
Check out "Military Convoys on the Move in Rebel-Held East Ukraine as Donetsk Fighting Intensifies" - http://bit.ly/1wcgj9L
Click to watch "The Donetsk People's Republic" - http://bit.ly/1wLO6vN
Check out the VICE News beta for more: http://vicenews.com
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VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky traveled to Alchevsk in the Luhansk region to interview Alexei Mozgovoi, who's been running a "people's court" in which people are tried for various crimes, from rape to theft, with residents acting as the jury.
Subscribe to VICE News here: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-VICE-News
Follow @simonostrovsky on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/SimonOstrovsky
Click to watch "The Firefighters of Donetsk: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 85)" - http://bit.ly/1qCEyMH
Check out "Military Convoys on the Move in Rebel-Held East Ukraine as Donetsk Fighting Intensifies" - http://bit.ly/1wcgj9L
Click to watch "The Donetsk People's Republic" - http://bit.ly/1wLO6vN
Check out the VICE News beta for more: http://vicenews.com
Follow VICE News here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vicenews
Twitter: https://twitter.com/vicenews
Tumblr: http://vicenews.tumblr.com/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/vicenews
VIDEO
SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV70uDYUqlc
Первый народный суд Новороссии.
VIDEO SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Ymaq4m1zY
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