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Meet the forgotten terrorist

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21396362-952,00.html

Meet the forgotten terrorist
March 16, 2007 11:00pm

In a hellish gulag in a remote region that was the heartland of
Stalin's
labour camps, Australia's forgotten terrorist rots.

Noorpolat Abdulla, 36, faces nine more years locked away in deepest
Kazakhstan on terrorism charges his supporters say are highly
questionable.

He has never met his youngest son, who was born after he was shut away
following a secret trial.

Australia's honorary consul in Kazakhstan endures a six-hour journey to
visit Abdulla every six months to deliver rations of sugar, nuts and
chocolate.

"He seems to be Australia's forgotten terrorist," consul Steve Kappelle
says. "David Hicks gets so much attention for being locked up in
Guantanamo Bay, but nobody really knows about Noorpolat."

Abdulla became an Australian citizen in 1986.

He attended the same Adelaide mosque as David Hicks.

"The last time he saw me, he asked: 'Have you got any news from
David?'," Kappelle says.

The Karaganda jail where Abdulla is held is where Nobel prize-winning
novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, which brought the Soviet prisons' labour system to the
world's attention.

The last time Mr Kappelle visited, he vowed to get Abdulla moved.

"It's crap where he is," he says.

Mr Kappelle said Kazakhstan, in central Asia, took a hard line on
terror
suspects.

"I've made initial inquiries to try and get him shifted but it will be
hard. If he was a murderer or a rapist, we might be able to get
something done for him. But they take a particularly hard line on
terrorists."

Abdulla was sentenced a month after the September 11 attacks on New
York. He was rounded up with dozens of other suspects for his links
with
a Uighur group accused of murdering two police officers. Uighurs are an
oppressed separatist movement, but Kazakhstan authorities claim they
are
connected to Al-Qaeda. The Karaganda region is home to the world's
largest steel plant - and also has the highest AIDS rate in Kazakhstan.

The planes Mr Kappelle takes for his visits to the prison are so old,
he
says he could undo the fuselage with a pocket knife.

About 1000 prisoners room together in giant dormitories. Abdulla is
allowed a few phone calls and visits each year.

Kazakhstan's prisons are renowned for high levels of organised crime,
and prisoners frequently make violent protests - such as slashing open
their stomachs en masse - to protest the harsh conditions.

In a hellish gulag in a remote region that was the heartland of Stalin's labour camps... The Karaganda jail where Abdulla is held is where Nobel prize-winning novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich... The Karaganda region is home to the world's largest steel plant - and also has the highest AIDS rate in Kazakhstan.

I resent their comments on Karaganda, but I wish they had mentioned the HIV rate BEFORE I went :-O

Here's an article about the prison that Mr. Abdullah finds himself in (from the Karaganda paper "Noviy Vestnik" (New Herald), link removed:

...In Karabas, in the men's 'zone' to where our brigade headed right after Koksu, everything was different. At the entrance to AK 159/18, our eyes met a high, concrete barrier, crowned by large spirals with iron thorns. In contrast to the female penal colony, every building here is secured with iron bars and chicken-wire. Between these sets of metal-work there are narrow asphalted paths. One has the feeling that they are in some kind of a zoo. Only there are only no animals in the cages here, but people, all dressed the same in black.

The prison workers prepared for the journalists' visit much earlier. All the prisoners were sent to their barracks, and from the windows and balconies heads would pop out and shout something similar to greetings as we passed by. Sometimes something indecent, or they whistled and clucked their tongues.

We were first conducted to the dining room, then to the assembly hall. On the stage of this hangar-like building, a local vocal and instrumental ensemble was playing. From roaring speakers poured a lyrically composition about how a 'zehk' (criminal jargon: prisoner) will soon be released and return home to beg forgiveness of his mother for his sins. After listening to another three songs from this 'blatnoy' (criminal jargon: underworld) repertoire, we continued our excursion to the infirmary. The prison patients greeted us politely and settled onto their beds, allowing the cameraman to film them.

Under the letters Barmysyn bauyrym?*, we met with the prisoners on the sport grounds, through the center of which a volleyball net was stretched. Five men briefly told the Khabar TV crew about those whom they wished to find: father, daughter, mother. And they filled out forms that the television people held out to them. Only one, however, agreed to an in-depth interview.

In 1998, twenty-three year old Ruslan Kuriyev of Osakarovka beat someone badly. Back then he was charged under article 103 part 3, 'Causing grievous bodily harm'. "But I got scared, so I decided to go to Chechnya," Ruslan shyly smiles. "My mom lives there in Daragorsk village. In 2002, I went see my brother in Lipetsk, but while there the Russian police detained me and sent me on prison transport back to Kazakhstan. I tried to tell my brother about it, but I'm not sure that he got my message. It's possible that mom still doesn't know where I'm at and what happened. So here I decided to write a letter for the show."

At the end we looked in on one of the cellblocks. A broad-shouldered fellow with a black rosary in his hands met us.

"You couldn't make up on one of the bunks, could you?" a lady journalist asked him. "We need some pictures."

"Right away," the fellow turned and called to someone in an adjacent room. Within a minute, several men had turned the barracks into a hive of activity. Someone was making the bunks, someone was washing the floor, someone else was reading a letter from home. The prisoner with the rosary, very pleased with himself, watched them all from the threshold.

The men's barracks was very different from the women's. The rooms were much smaller. The order was somewhat ideal, but there was something missing, just like in a bachelor's apartment.

And the prisoners' faces. They were looking at us, as if we had arrived from another planet.

"Oh, you haven't seen the HIV patients yet. You go to them, and you'll want to run out of there as fast as you can. The appearance of a woman for them, it's like a holiday," the head of the UKUIS education department said to us later...

Barmysyn bauyrym? = "Brother, where are you?" (Kazakhstani language)