Dealing with the consequences of war in a culture of mistrust

Houses such as that of yekaterina len 61 have been damaged or destroyed by ukraine shelling may 20 2014. photo maxim shipenov epa

Simon Schlegel

Eastern-Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives

Ukrainians do not trust the government or the media very much. This was true before the war and it didn’t change much through the war.

The deeply engrained mistrust of state institutions becomes particularly painful for families that have lost someone in the war but do not believe the state’s theory about their loss.

Take for example the case of Kovalchuk family (surname changed) from central Ukraine that mourns the loss of a man who was husband, father, and son to them. He was serving in a mechanized unit in the army but saw no combat in the war. He died of a gunshot wound to the head in his battalion’s quarters. The army’s investigation concluded that the man killed himself. The family doesn’t believe that.

Civil society organizations often act as an intermediary when it comes to straighten out strained relations between citizens and the state. During the ongoing war in Donbas they help documenting crimes committed by both warring parties. NGOs and volunteers enjoy much higher trust than the state and the media. They can, however, not take over the role of either of these two pillars of democracy. The state should be the one to investigate and punish crimes. NGOs can put pressure on the state to act, but they shouldn’t provide parallel structures to the state. Especially when people don’t trust the state’s findings about someone lost in the war, NGOs find themselves in a very awkward position.

The lack of detail in the description of the suspected suicide above is intentional. Such cases, when family members accuse state institutions of sloppy investigations or even of cover-up operations have to be dealt with carefully. Time and time again we meet people, who have lost someone during the war but do not believe the theory of death that is offered to them by the army, the police, the SBU, or the prosecutor’s office. This topic is hard to deal with for a number of reasons: Firstly, people, who mourn the death of a beloved one look for meaning in this loss. If the investigators conclude that the reasons of death were a banal accident, human error, or even suicide, this often leaves those behind bereft not only of a family member but also of trust in a meaningful connection between cause and effect. Their grief, and often their anger, are certainly understandable. NGOs can do more in helping build an inclusive commemorative culture that accommodates this grief, than paralleling the state as investigators.

Anyhow, cases, in which the family’s conclusion and the prosecutor’s conclusion diverge, are incredibly hard to verify. In cases where the circumstances of somebody’s death are open to doubt, the ones who could dispel this doubt are usually forensic experts. Such people are not only in short supply, they are also usually employed in an organ of law enforcement, the very institutions that often face mistrust. Bereaved families may express a feeling that something did not go quite right in the investigation, but often they can’t quite put their finger on what it was. Often, the real circumstances of someone’s death cannot be investigated quickly. Rumors start to spread, sometimes picked up by the media, so that indeed the reasons of death declared sometimes have to be revised, as has recently happened in the case of an infantry man from Odessa Oblast, who was killed in combat but had originally been declared dead of heart failure.

Victor Kandaliuk, who died from sniper`s shot. Photo: Dumskaya

One more reason for which mistrust towards investigators is hard to discuss is that it often involves allegations that state organs themselves have broken the law. For human rights activists, who insist that war crimes must be prosecuted and perpetrators punished, allegations against investigators are always problematic. They suggest that authorities try to cover-up something but mostly lack the necessary evidence. To voice allegations without evidence would make human rights activists guilty of the crime they often accuse state organs of: to use rumor or circumstantial evidence in order to silence their opponents. Therefore, it is nearly impossible to make a solid case against the state without the long, in-depth research it takes to gather evidence that the state’s investigation was flawed. There are not many families or, for that matter NGOs, that can afford such investigations.

Suicides have been recognized as one of the armed forces’ chief problems and measures have been taken up recently. Suicides, especially when they occur in an environment full of weapons and violence, leave behind a great deal of uncertainty and doubt, as has been recently shown by the much-discussed death of celebrated fighter pilot Vladyslav Voloshyn. In his case too alternative theories of his death were investigated.

A lack of trust in the institutions involved in fighting a war is perhaps not surprising. There is a host of motives why a state would try to keep numbers of those killed in combat low. High losses not only make a war unpopular, they also make it costlier. The Ukrainian side in this war may sometimes come under suspicion of trying to avoid rent payments to the families of fallen soldiers. The other state involved in this war, Russia, not only outright denies its soldier’s involvement in the Donbas, if they get killed in combat, the state has to come up with its own theory why its soldiers die. Citizen groups representing the families of Russian soldiers have long drawn attention to the total lack of information about the circumstances of the death of Russian in Ukraine.

If the bodies of killed soldiers are hard to identify, only sophisticated technologies, such as DNA analysis or forensic dentistry can help identify a body. These technologies are not intuitively understandable to non-experts, which makes it harder to accept their findings. Also, the army is often very reticent with releasing data from such analyses. They frequently contain classified information. In two of the cases documented by the “Coalition”, relatives of deceased soldiers have also reported that their inquiry for more information was met with unfriendliness and bureaucratic hurdles.

There are civil society groups that try to offer relief to those, whose close ones have disappeared, such as Black Tulip, an organization that identifies bodies and matches the results with data about disappeared soldiers. But for soldiers, who are officially declared dead, it is a very long bureaucratic procedure to change the official theory of their death. If the state’s theory and the family’s theory do not match, the family often does not only have to deal with their loss but also with the deepening of mistrust in the state they live in.