I’ve been working on a long term project – one of those that doesn’t have an end in sight yet – about political prisons. This covers places of detention, and often torture and execution, where the victims were not criminals but had simply upset their government. Or, in some cases, another government.

Small Fortress, Terezin, Czech Republic. November 2003. Solitary confinement block.

The problem with continuing this project is that such places are quite hard to find – at any rate those that haven’t been turned into Theme Parks. If they’re still functioning the operators don’t want anyone to know – they know what they are doing is shameful and try to hide it – and when they cease to be of use the operators destroy them if they can, for the same reason. Do you think Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo will be allowed to stand around as a reminder?

The prisons that remain to be seen are those that were extant when the regime that built them fell, such as the Orwellian German Democratic Republic, or was defeated, such as the Third Reich.

I visited the old STASI prison at Hohenschönhausen in Berlin last month – a memorable location and well worth a visit (pictures soon). The surprise of this place was the mundanity of it. The patterned vinyl flooring (the same as the kitchen of a flat I used to live in!), the striped wallpaper. It was like a Cold War era East-Block hotel, but with heavy steel doors and a highly effective alarm system. As if someone had decided, back in the 70s, to “cheer the place up a bit”.

The Small Fortess, Terezin, Czech Republic. November 2003. One of the small prison cells. The Gestapo held up to seventy men in each of these rooms.

Sadly such places are by no means history – which brings me to the point of this post! I can’t see even a contrite new US administration allowing me to see the facilities at Guantanamo when they are closed, but the regime of Robert Mugabe surely cannot last more than a few months, and the thousands of people he has held illegally will be released. There will be an opportunity to record the conditions under which they were held. I hope it happens soon, and I can get to Zimbabwe to document it.

The people who suffer in these places deserve at least that much.

Tags: political prison

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 4:18 am and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.