2 August 2024
by Aleksandr Podrabinek
Source: Radio Svoboda
Being released from prison is like being reborn, but at a conscious age. It is incomparable to anything else, the emotions are unforgettable. A moment before there were the handcuffs, the dirty walls of cramped cells, the prison uniforms, and the limitless power of the miserable people in shoulder-boards, and now … Freedom, sky, sun, rain, wind, normal people all around, friends and family.
The freeing of political prisoners is an emotive experience twice as strong, as these people were imprisoned not for crimes, but for making a valuable contribution to society. The freeing yesterday of 16 Russian political prisoners and hostages from America and Germany was a cause for celebration not just for their family and friends, but for those who side with the cause of freedom and human rights.
But it needs to be said that the exchange of prisoners has nothing to do with legality. The decision to have the exchange is a political one and transcends justice. Do we mourn this fact, seeing the happy faces of the freed prisoners? Of course not. We are happy that at least 16 people have finally been served justice.
But this happy story has a flip side too. In a practical sense, the exchanging of prisoners is something that equalises the methods used by both democracies and dictatorships. In reality, however, they are completely different. Democracies are based on the rule of law, and dictatorships are based on arbitrary rule. In democracies, criminals go to court; in dictatorships, it is honest people who are political opponents of the regime who are jailed. People are exchanged, which is good for those who have been freed, but it damages justice. While this means nothing for Russia (where the justice system is already hollowed out and lifeless), for the West this is a serious matter. People guilty of serious crimes can get away with them. Dictatorships can use cunning methods like this to solve the problem of saving their agents – hired killers and spies – but in this way they also place themselves on an equal footing as democracies, undermining the legal systems of democratic states in the process. From the point of view of justice and legality, how can we assess the freeing of FSB officer Vadim Krasikov, who had served only five years of his life sentence for the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili? We can’t, there is no justice in this. Exchanging a murderer for prisoners of conscience, is this exchange just and like-for-like?
History has known situations of relatively even exchanges. In 1962, American pilot Gary Powers was exchanged for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. One was the pilot of a spy plane, and the other was a regular spy. In 2010, GRU Colonel Sergei Skripal and three other people were exchanged for unmasked Russian spies in the West (Anna Chapman and others, 10 in all). All of the people exchanged were spies. Even the 1986 exchange of Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky for the leader of the Chilean communists Luis Corvalan can be labelled as a fair exchange: both were political prisoners and political leaders in their respective countries. But exchanging peaceful dissidents for murderers, cyber-criminals, and money launderers?
Unfortunately, this is not just an abstract question of justice and damage to the judicial systems of democracies. Ultimately, it is possible for us to just turn a blind eye to this, placing our faith in the stability of Western countries and putting the responsibility for difficult decisions on the shoulders of leaders and high level courts. They’ll get it right. Our problem lies elsewhere. Exchanging innocent people for criminals encourages new arrests of honest citizens and political opponents that the tyrannous regime sees as hostages and human bargaining chips for future exchanges. A real twenty-first century slave trade.
We have had sad experience of this. Socialist East Germany took to trading prisoners as a mainstream activity, with the State Security Service, the Stasi, taking the lead. Not only did they trade political prisoners for their captured spies, but they also sold them to West Germany. The main specialist behind this was the East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, nicknamed ‘spy trader’. He was the mediator in the exchange of around 150 spies. In addition, he participated in the sale of more than 33,000 political prisoners to the West, and also of ordinary East German citizens wishing to escape the workers’ paradise to freedom. Refugees paid enormous sums of money for this. The West German government paid the communists for East German political prisoners. This stimulated new arrests and political repression in the DDR. The more successful the trade in human beings became, the tighter the screws of repression became in East Germany.
A similar system might come about in today’s Russia. It might be already taking place. Freeing certain political prisoners provokes the punishment of others, not yet imprisoned, but already earmarked as living bargaining chips for future trades. Alas, the price for such releases can never be paid. While some go free, their freedom is paid for by others who take their places in the camps and prisons. They pay with their freedom for the flourishing of the institutional practice of prisoner exchanges. Some of them may follow the same path. For this reason, while we are happy for those released today, we shall not lose sight of the consequences of such events further down the line. In particular, we shall not lose sight of the fact that decisions not to punish real criminals give authoritarian regimes a free hand in their destabilising espionage operations abroad.
There is not always an easy way out of bad situations. That is the nature of hostage situations, challenging and tough. Dictatorships will take more hostages, and the West will exert itself yet again to free them. The practice of hostage taking is thousands of years old. No one is quite sure how to uproot it. The clash between violence and compassion will continue. So we congratulate the liberated political prisoners with all our hearts on their newfound freedom, but remain sceptical about the institution of prisoner exchanges as a mean to resolve humanitarian and political problems.
Translated by Oscar Seecharan
