LAST week, Nicosia’s Criminal Court passed its final decision regarding two young men who took nine police officers to court for violation of their duty to protect and police brutality. In December 2005, Markos Papageorgiou and Yiannos Nicolaou were severely beaten by five plain clothes police and several members of the Mobile Rapid Reaction and Drug Law Enforcement Units. The case has been controversial – the young men filed a complaint of police brutality in 2005. The officers counter-claimed they had been defending themselves against the ‘hooligans’, who supposedly had spat, sworn at, and attacked them after being pulled over for a ‘routine’ ID check. The police department issued an immediate statement after the event supporting its officers.
In 2009 the Criminal Court acquitted all the defendants, despite a 43 minute video recording showing the then-students defenceless, handcuffed and repeatedly beaten – in public, on a street-side – by the clearly identifiable officers. The video evidence was ruled inadmissible. There was a public outcry. The Attorney-general filed an immediate appeal. The case was finally decided last week.
Suspended sentences. The court decided it will not sentence officers to jail who fractured the skull of one of its citizens, and broke the ribs and arm of another, and we have not reacted. We shrug our shoulders and think that with a suspended sentence, justice has been served.
The decision and its justification was an insult to the concept of justice. The decision’s highlights: because so long had passed since the beatings, the defendants’ personal and family conditions had changed significantly. They had held the mistaken belief that what they were doing was contributing to public order. They had already been punished by the crime’s publicity. They admitted and immediately regretted what they did. Therefore the judges decided to suspend the sentences, which ranged from one year to two months.
In deciding, the judges took into account the impact the crime had on the perpetrators. But they seemed unconcerned that the victims suffered further from this denial of justice. There was no acknowledgement – not a word – that the crime harmed the victims and their families, who not only had to recover from serious injuries, whose lives were ruptured but who had any faith in justice taken from them. Instead, because the crime received so much publicity, the perpetrators have suffered.
The judges took into consideration the officers’ ‘immediate’ guilt and regret for what they did. What an interesting interpretation of immediate. Instead of admitting guilt and regret, the officers ‘immediately’ counter-filed against the boys. They only withdrew that claim when the video evidence appeared. Some of the accused insisted they weren’t even there – conceding only when the Attorney-general, in this final case, compromised and withdrew the main accusation in exchange for a plea bargain. But the judges here considered the officers’ immediate admittance and regret a mitigating factor which justified suspended sentences. That is a shameless manipulation of truth.
Because the family status of the perpetrators had changed over the course of the case, consideration should be made. By this reasoning, it becomes the victims’ fault their attackers spent the last five years getting married and having families.
The police had clean records. Openly, brutally beating two people to the point of unconsciousness while they are handcuffed, then taking them back to the station to continue the beatings is a heavy first offence for a police officer.
The judges were convinced the perpetrators thought they were doing the right thing by beating the students, by pushing them to the ground and standing on their backs while they were handcuffed, by smacking them repeatedly into the cement. So they should not be unduly punished. Using that logic, Hitler doesn’t deserve his reputation – he believed he was doing the world a service by ridding it of Jews and Communists. Same idea, different scale.
The court’s decision very clearly reveals where we are as a society.
Police brutality is not a rare occurrence in Cyprus. What is rare, however, is when victims of police brutality force the police to be publicly and legally accountable for their actions. That takes enormous courage in a society like Cyprus, where, mostly, people just ignore wrongdoing. But instead of upholding the rights of these two men to seek redress for what happened to them, the justice system slapped them down – twice. The message it sends is not to interfere with the running of the state, and certainly not to question the decisions of the state’s institutions.
When police are filmed grossly misusing their power to beat citizens into unconsciousness, and are not held accountable, this sends a message that they can do what they feel like. The fact that this happened in public says ‘we don’t even need to hide what we do, we’re that certain that we won’t be held accountable’.
Since we love talking about human rights in Cyprus, let’s be really clear about what happened. The court’s decision violated the victims’ right to receive justice. What the police did to Papageorgiou and Nicolaou is a violation of their duty to protect citizens, to uphold the law, and not to use undue force.
Most of the media reported the court’s judgement as a victory for justice. After all, the police officers were sentenced. This is not a victory for justice, but a victory for keeping things exactly as they have always been. This decision says to the victims ‘we’ll give you just enough to shut you up’, while simultaneously reinforcing the single most important notion holding our society together: look after your own interests; don’t look for change. We should be screaming in protest when judges are protecting the careers of police who use such methods to keep order in society. We should be demanding that every single one of those officers who either beat the boys or refused to stop the beatings be stood down, because police brutality is not acceptable under any circumstances. We should be denouncing these crimes and the police-state mentality that underlines it.
Why are we so apathetic? Why is it that when this atrocious sentence came out, so few people demonstrated against it? Why, when ELAM clashed with anti-racism activists in Larnaca, and a Turkish Cypriot was stabbed, was there so little reaction? Why, when Nigerian students were chased and beaten in the middle of Nicosia’s busiest avenue last year, did hundreds of people merely sit and watch? Why, when Palestinian students are beaten in their school, are we mostly silent? Why do we stand by quietly when young men march down the street in military formation shouting ‘a good Turk is a dead Turk’? Why, when we were murdering each other in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, were the voices against the insanity so few? Why are we always so silent when we are confronted with wrong?
This is the behaviour of people who have never had freedom, or the obligation to exercise power responsibly. We act in such a cowardly way because we refuse to recognise and own our history. We come from slaves, and we continue to act like slaves. We believe we are a people who struggle against an oppressor, but we have not seen that we need our oppressors – it is by their shadow that we define ourselves now. We have no great leaders because we have no tradition of great leadership. Those who stuck their necks out in the past had them chopped off. That’s how it goes with slave societies. Agree with the people who rule you so you can keep your environment safe, then get what you want by manipulation, or sacrificing others. Fight amongst yourselves for the scraps of power. But never confront situations head-on. Never stand up clearly and say ‘this is wrong’, or ‘this is what I want’, because you will be punished for it. This is how oppressed people act because they have no other choice. This is our inheritance. And here is our legacy: last week’s decision continues to ingrain the message to close our eyes to misuse of power because maybe if we stay out of the way enough, it will not be misused against us.
Dr Christalla Yakinthou is country manager of the Cyprus programme of the International Centre for Transitional Justice
