Missing people

According to the Department for Public Relations and International Activity of Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, most missing people are eventually found by the police. For example, 2,286 out of 3,217 people who went missing in the first nine months of 2009 were found. Nevertheless, 2,600 Ukrainians who were missing in 2005–09 would never return to their families. In the dry language of police reports the reason is stated in the following way: “In connection with the identification of missing persons among the unidentified bodies of citizens.”

“Your kid must be partying somewhere; that’s the age, you know,” said the policeman on duty. Volodymyr T. of Donetsk informed the police when his 16-year-old daughter had failed to come home after a birthday party at her friend’s. He says that the investigators ridiculed him for his panic. Wait until tomorrow; youth is youth, they said. He persisted, arguing that she could not, as the party participants said, have gone out into the cold winter night without her fur coat and boots.

Volodymyr prevailed, and his application was accepted and registered. However, the search proceeded at a sluggish pace and hence produced no results. The girl’s body, frozen stiff, was accidentally found a few months later when the snow melted in the ravine outside the township. Her father still believes that she became the victim of a crime, which remains unpunished due to the sluggishness of the law enforcement system.

“Tragedies are not so rare as you may think,” says Vitalii Tarasov, head of the Criminal Investigation Department at the Directorate for Criminal Investigation in Luhansk oblast. “In May 2009, we solved a double murder committed back in the winter of 2004. At the time, we were informed by villagers in Starobilsk raion that two young people had disappeared. Five years later we found that they had been murdered. A resident of the same village where they lived killed one out of jealousy and the other one for being an accidental witness to the crime. The murderer took the bodies to a forest in his car and buried them without leaving traces, so people in the village thought that the young men had left in search of employment.”

In the miners’ village of Snizhne, unidentified people have left maimed bodies of men on the porch of the local hospital on numerous occasions. The coal dust on their faces is sure proof that they worked in small illegal coalmines. There are no work safety measures in such makeshift coalmines, and each hired man mines at his own risk. Thus, underground accidents with casualties are not rare, and if the victim came from a different region, he would be buried at the community’s expense as an unidentified person. Meanwhile, his relatives would wait for him somewhere for a long time, thinking that he had gone to the Donbas to earn some money and then went missing.

Police reports show that underage vagabonds are picked up in attics and at railway stations and are forced to work in such coalmines. The owners’ calculation is simple: even if they start searching for the teenagers who have run away from home, they will surely do so in other places.

Without getting help from the law enforcement agencies, the relatives of the missing people turn to human rights NGOs. “The causes behind disappearances may vary. We take only those cases where government bodies may somehow be involved,” says Liudmyla Klochko, head of the public reception room of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group. “We are now looking into the case of a young man who, according to certain testimonies, was detained by the police before he went missing. The police deny everything; the case has been open for six years, while the person in question is missing.

“In another case a person got on the train, disappeared, and was later found dead on the railway tracks.” Ms Klochko says that because the Ukrainian judicial system proved to be powerless in these cases, complaints will be filed against it to the European Court of Justice.

Most of the people who disappear do not become victims of criminals or accidents. They do it on purpose.

Andrii, 28, lived in Dnipropetrovsk and found a job as a lawyer in a respectable firm. In May 2009, he disappeared on the way from work. “We searched for him for several months,” says Serhii Hez, senior detective in the Investigation Department for Missing Citizens in Dnipropetrovsk oblast. “Policemen noticed that the young man’s parents were beside themselves, while his sister was calm. She told the police later that Andrii wanted to change his life drastically and left to work at a construction place in another city.” He had not told his parents about his plans, fearingn a scandal.

According to the International Human Rights Centre La Strada–Ukraine, their hotline received over 1,500 calls (100 last year) regarding Ukrainians who have gone missing abroad.

Nearly half of those who have disappeared, both in western and eastern Ukraine, are people who have left in search of employment for the EU or Russia and have lost contact with their families. Less frequently, these are teenagers who run away from their parents’ home because of family conflicts or in search of romantic adventures. The risk group also includes citizens who have an asocial way of life, do not have a job, and drink a lot or use drugs, as well as mentally ill and lonely elderly people.

The absence of some people is detected a decade after they, for example, emigrated. People file requests to the housing administration, asking to deregister a relative at an apartment, or to the local executive committee, asking to appoint subsidies. However, their requests are turned down unless they submit a reference from the police to confirm that a person in question no longer lives at the given address. The applicants choose to write statement claiming that their relatives have disappeared, because a reference is not enough for them. In most cases they don’t know their relatives’ whereabouts abroad and want the police to also find them. Detectives say that approximately 40 percent of applications fall into this category.

“They forget that we are not a TV show that finds people who have lost contact with their families,” says Hez. “The director of a medical company once asked us to find an employee who had failed to come to work for a week. When we found her, she was genuinely surprised, because she had written a letter of resignation and put it on her boss’s table.”

When the financial crisis hit, about a dozen of residents of Lviv oblast who had previously taken out large bank loans suddenly disappeared. Among them is a young woman who had several large loans to pay out. Her disappearance was reported to the police by her mother. An apparent kidnapping in broad daylight of the famous local businessman R. was a sensation. However, according to The Ukrainian Week’s sources, the police are not convinced by this scenario, surmising instead that he did a disappearance act in order to relieve himself of certain financial obligations.

“Financial problems are a strong reason for people to disappear,” says Eduard Bahirov, head of the International League for Protecting Ukrainian Citizens’ Rights. “I have pieces of information from banks and collectors. I am sure that among thousands of missing people a third ‘got lost’ for similar reasons. People either have debts as heads or owners of businesses or have purchased very expensive property on borrowed money and are now unable to pay on the loan, so they run away from financial problems. At the same time, [relatives] launch a search for them as being missing, because if a person has disappeared, it is possible to stop the payment of interest on a loan through court.”

Children and curiosities

Nadia Yushchenko and Tonai Kulchytska, both from Kyiv, would probably study in college or even have families now. However, on 10 May 2002, when they were 12, they went for a bike ride and have been on the national list as missing ever since.

“The problem of missing children is always very acute. The disappearance of a child is a catastrophe in itself,” says Olena Pysmenna, a psychologist with the Children Search Service.

Little Ukrainians disappear intentionally. “The reasons why children run away from home vary,” says Ms Pysmenna. “This can be a conflict with the parents, teachers, or classmates; the parents’ divorce; their excessive care or indifference; a search for the meaning of life; the arrival of a younger child in the family, etc. — the reasons are purely individual, and there are a multitude of them.” The dangerous age starts at 13.

“Last year a woman came to us whose daughter left home after having a conflict with her. The daughter decided that no one loved her,” says Ms Pysmenna. “After a while the girl saw her mother’s address in our TV program and realized that her close ones are waiting for her to come home and love her. Somehow this was a revelation for her.”

Ms Pysmenna believes that the greatest obstacle in finding missing children are late reports to the police, parents’ reluctance to wash their dirty linen (what will people say?), and their indifference to their own children.

It happens that the missing children are themselves parents. “We recently focused on finding a 16-year-old girl,” says Ms Pysmenna. “When we called her parents in order to make a program about her, it turned out that she has a common-law husband and a three-month-old son. After a few days this poor mother returned home. We don’t know what caused her to leave. This may have been post-delivery depression or something else.”

Adult men are most likely to disappear (up to 70 percent of all cases). Many are claimed as missing during holiday seasons. After drinking a few, people lose control of themselves. Many disappearances occur in early summer, when water bodies just start getting warm. “People get into water immediately after drinking [alcohol],” explains Mr Hez. “This often leads to fatal accidents.”

Fishermen became the source of curious stories in wintertime, says Mr Hez. For example, a woman is searching for her husband, who, instead of the promised three days, has been gone for an entire week. She calls the police. In nearly half of the cases, after divers have searched the entire bottom near his fishing place, he is found at some other woman’s place, drinking happily.

“Nothing terrible will happen if the signal [about a missing person] proves to be false,” says Arkadii Bushchenko, who heads the board of directors of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. “In my opinion, the efficiency of efforts along this line is undermined by the fact that the police wait for three days, which are critically important for successful search. The longer they wait, the fewer chances they have to find the missing person.”

Law enforcement officers admit: if a unit of the Ministry of Internal Affairs refuses to accept your statement about a missing relative or an acquaintance and suggests bringing it in three, or even ten, days, this is a violation of the law.

“This point [about waiting for a few days] is contained in U.S. legislation,” says Mr Hez with a smile. “Some policemen are simply fond of Hollywood films.” He adds that if your application is not accepted, you should contact higher officials with a request for consideration. Under the law, policemen have to accept a statement about a missing person immediately and start searching for him/her. If they fail to find this person within 10 days, the Ministry of Internal Affairs opens a special investigation case.

A statement of this kind can be written even if a person has gone out to buy bread and has not returned within three hours and cannot be reached at his/her cell phone number. If a person disappears on the way from work, Mr Hez recommends applying to the police department in the district where his/her office is located to possibly speed up the search. Finally, you should not be afraid of ending up in an embarrassing situation. Going to a mortuary to identify a close person is a much more terrifying thing to do.

The illustration uses photos of people who went missing last year.