He is at the origin of an unprecedented leak of videos of organized rape and torture in Russian prisons: after an incredible journey, Belarusian Sergei Savelev asks for asylum in France.
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Passed through Istanbul and Tunis, the 31-year-old ex-detainee arrived in the night from Friday to Saturday at Roissy and has been in the waiting area for asylum seekers ever since. AFP met him there on Sunday.
At the beginning of October, unbearable images of a prisoner being raped using a long pole in a prison-hospital in Saratov caused a scandal in Russia. Four regional prison officials are sacked, and even the Kremlin spokesman reacts to the horror.
It was in this establishment that Sergei Savelev was imprisoned, convicted in a case of drug trafficking.
This is also where, under the guise of his computer maintenance functions, he patiently and discreetly downloads video files from prisons all over Russia, these being linked together by an intranet.
“At first, they controlled me, then this surveillance gradually relaxed until it disappeared,” says this frail and shy-looking man.
The NGO Gulagu.net, which published the images of Saratov, explains that Mr. Savelev gave him quantities of videos, proving the systemic nature of the ill-treatment in Russian jails.
Sergey Savelev recounts having succeeded, shortly before his release in early February 2021, to conceal the media on which he recorded data near his exit from prison.
The day of his release, after having been thoroughly searched, he retrieves them, neither seen nor known, in the confusion of a mass departure.
“This idea had been maturing in me for a long time. It is very difficult psychologically to keep such things to yourself. What else can we do, once we know? “
The violence committed in prisons and recorded on these videos is very often done by other prisoners, in the pay of the prison authorities in search of cookies or confessions.
One scenario consists of filming sexual abuse inflicted on a victim, then the video serves as a means of blackmail for the tortured inmate to cooperate.
Because if the rape is made public in the prison, the prisoner will fall to the lowest rungs of a very hierarchical prison world, becoming an outcast, a “pétoukh” (rooster) in the rich vocabulary of convicts.
Sergei says he suffered ill-treatment in a Krasnodar prison so that he “cooperates”, without knowing the worst. And he claims to have never taken part in violence against other detainees.
Blows, he received “about once a week, but not too hard to avoid too visible bruises.”
To describe the psychological pressures, he tells this anecdote: “My father traveled 1000 km to bring sausage to his son. He tried one day, then the next day he slept in his car for three nights and they wouldn’t let him in ”.
Seeing all these videos and seven and a half years in prison leaves its mark.
His psychologist in Minsk “was horrified by what I was telling him. He organized sessions, but nothing helped, “says Sergei,” he prescribed me some pills, then others and others, more powerful, still, but none of that gave me any relief ” .
For having stolen and distributed the videos illustrating this system, Sergei Savelev, who seeks asylum in France, says he now fears reprisals from the Russian prison administration (FSIN) and the security services (FSB).
He says he narrowly escaped them in Russia, assuring that agents had offered him, in exchange for his cooperation, four years in prison for “revealing a state secret” rather than 10 to 20 years for espionage.
“They were not interested in knowing that there were human rights violations.”
To escape them, he climbs into a “marchroutka”, a minibus that takes him to Minsk, passing through the porous Russian-Belarusian border.
As cooperation between Russian and Belarusian law enforcement authorities was essential, upon his arrival in Belarus at the end of September, he flew to Istanbul and then Tunis, a country where no visa was required.
There, in quarantine in a hotel, he takes a ticket to return to Minsk with a stopover at Charles-de-Gaulle. Arrived at Roissy, he puts an end to the journey and asks for asylum.
“He has the profile of a person who can be the object of an enforced disappearance and an extrajudicial execution so the fears are serious”, estimates with AFP his lawyer Aude Rimailhot.
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