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The accused

Political prisoners seek justice for brutality they allegedly suffered at the hands of Chamber of Deputies representative

September 26th, 2007 issue

Update

Since The Prague Post first published this story, Sept. 26, the Chamber of Deputies stripped Josef Vondruška of his immunity. The Czech News
Agency reported Sept. 26 that 151 out of 154 deputies voted to release him
for prosecution on suspicion of maltreating prisoners while a prison warden under the communist regime.

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
Josef Vondruška, nicknamed "the Pig" by some inmates, says the timing of the allegations smacks of political maneuvering.
Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
Petr Cibulka says the guards at Minkovice prison, and the facility itself, were the roughest of their kind.
On Christmas Eve 1982, Jiří Gruntorád, a political prisoner serving a four-year sentence for publishing forbidden literature, arrived at the supervisors’ office at a north Bohemian correctional facility wearing pajamas under his clothes to keep warm. Josef Vondruška, a warden, condemned him to 20 days in a solitary cell as punishment for violating the prison dress code.
“Vondruška made sure I had a wonderful Christmas,” Gruntorád recalls. “The window wouldn’t shut and I woke up each morning covered in snow. There was a hole in the ground instead of a toilet, which froze over in the winter, and would have rats coming out of it in the summer. I slept on a cement block covered with wood — there was no mattress.”
Twenty-four years later, former political prisoners like Gruntorád are seeking justice for the brutality they allegedly suffered at the hands of Vondruška, who has since become a representative in the Chamber of Deputies.
Spurred by an unprecedented police request, the Chamber of Deputies mandate and immunity committee issued a recommendation Sept. 13 to strip Vondruška of his immunity.
If approved by the Chamber, the committee’s decision could lead to Vondruška’s prosecution for abusing inmates when he worked as a warden in the Minkovice correctional facility in north Bohemia between 1972 and 1990.
Vondruška, a lower house deputy from Liberec, north Bohemia, has worn many hats during his lifetime. A former prison guard at a now-defunct prison near his hometown, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) member entered local politics shortly after the 1989 revolution, when he worked as a locksmith at a workshop in the Liberec region.
“We nicknamed him ‘the Pig,’ ” former political prisoner Jiří Wolf writes in a letter he delivered to Parliament last August. “He liked to attend boxing practice in the ‘disciplinary punishment department.’ … The prisoners’ faces served as punching bags.”
Calling the affair a ploy to discredit his leftist party, Vondruška vehemently denies the former prisoners’ claims.
“It’s possible that I came across Mr. Wolf while in Minkovice, but I do not remember him,” he says. “It’s likely that he was placed in a section that I was not responsible for, and therefore did not have access to.”
Vondruška also doubts the allegations of former political prisoner Vladimír Hučín, who was an inmate in Minkovice from 1984 to 1986. “While Mr. Hučín was in Minkovice, I was studying at the [Police College] in Prague,” he says. “It is therefore impossible that he and I ever came into contact.”
Another former Minkovice inmate, Petr Cibulka, says “I spent several months in Minkovice correction — it was a cement bunker where a grown man didn’t even have enough room to stand up straight.”
“It was in this department that Josef Vondruška — whom we called ‘Huckleberry Hound’ — and his thuggish commando went on their worst rampages,” Cibulka says.
Sketchy evidence
Prompted by Cibulka’s allegations, the Liberec district attorney’s office filed a request with the mandate and immunity committee this August to strip Vondruška of his immunity. Although the committee has twice delayed deliberations regarding Vondruška because of the inaccuracies in the evidence against him, the committee does not want to block the district attorney’s request.
“We’re not judging whether he’s guilty or innocent,” committee Chairman Miroslav Kala told the Czech News Agency Aug. 15. “We’re only evaluating if there are sufficient circumstances for his extradition.” The committee will likely decide within a month.
Faced with criticism from right-leaning politicians including Green Party Chairman and Deputy Prime Minister Martin Bursík, who recently said he believed Wolf’s statement that Vondruška abused him, the KSČM stands behind its deputy.
“Vondruška’s accusers have had plenty of opportunities to press charges against him,” says KSČM spokeswoman Monika Hoření. “The fact that they haven’t done so points to a purposeful political intent to discredit the KSČM.”
Dangerous discipline
Despite the accusations of former dissidents, who vividly describe scenes of maltreatment, Vondruška maintains his innocence. “The only way I would lose this case is if the law was bent, broken or even raped,” he says.
While he says the removal of his deputy immunity is “probably inevitable,” Vondruška feels confident the prosecution will drop his case for lack of evidence. The fact that his accusers waited 18 years to speak out is enough to discredit them, he argues.
“Why now?” he asks. “Shortly after 1989, when everything was fresh in everyone’s memory and alive in their emotions, when I was active in community politics, no one was feeling the pain of those punches I supposedly threw. The name Vondruška did not interest anyone, and now, suddenly, there’s turmoil.”
Vondruška also points out that physically abusing prisoners was illegal during his tenure at Minkovice, but, according to Former Political Prisoners Association (SBPV) Chairman Stanislav Stránský, it’s possible Vondruška used violence against his wards without breaking prison protocol.
“Beating up prisoners was a daily routine,” he says. “If they punched or kicked you, they weren’t doing anything illegal — they were simply disciplining.”
A former officer in the Czechoslovak Army, Stránský was imprisoned between 1948 and 1960, when the treatment of political prisoners was far more barbaric.
“What these dissidents were subjected to is nothing compared to [Stalinist-era] prison,” Stránský says. “We old [political prisoners] referred to what they had in the 1970s as hotels.”
Regardless of the validity of the allegations against Vondruška, Stránský says it is unlikely he will ever face prosecution. “The only files documenting what happened in the prison were filled out by the wardens themselves,” he says. “Today, how will anyone prove whether or not someone beat them up?”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com


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