Armine Sahakyan: The dehumanizing effect of corruption

I have the greatest respect for such groups, who rightfully point out that corruption is not a victimless crime because it robs billions of common folk around the world of better livelihoods. When a small group of people illegally expropriates a huge share of a country’s wealth, a much smaller amount is left for the rest of society to divide.

Most of the publicity material that anti-graft groups issue deals with numbers — which country ranks Number 1 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, for example.

Another way to dramatize graft is to tell stories about people who have suffered from the epidemic. Let me give you a few stories from the former Soviet Union, the region I am from. A word of warning: The stories may shock and outrage you.

Almost every friend in my native Armenia has paid education-related bribes for themselves or their children. It starts with university administrators demanding bribes to admit a student or to put them in an elite program — like medical school.

The more prestigious the institution, the larger the bribe demand.

When students hit class, they face bribe demands from professors to pass a class or get a top grade. The higher the grade, the more that is demanded.

Although some bribe demands are small — $20 or so — they add up. “It is really hard for me to pay hundreds of dollars a semester in bribes,” a top student who is from a poor family told me. “It is not right.”

I know of some students who have obtained degrees after rarely or never attending classes.

Paying educational bribes is so ingrained in Armenia and other former-Soviet countries that students shrug it off. To shake them from their torpor, a Western professor in the region asks his students: “Would you want a doctor who bribed his way through medical school to operate on you, or a lawyer who bought his degree to handle a big case for you?”

The light goes on in their eyes momentarily, until they realize they do not have a prayer of changing the system. Then it is back to attitude as usual.

A bigger source of bribes than education is government-issued licenses, documents and approvals. The name of this game is: To get the sign-off you need, grease my palm.

A Kazakh friend told me that the staff at the driver’s-license agency in one of Kazakhstan’s biggest cities demands a bribe of hundreds to thousands of dollars for a license. The demand is higher if the car is expensive or if the driver needs the license in a hurry.

Another lucrative repository of bribe demands in the former Soviet Union is health care. I am not talking about doctors who are in private practice. There are some, and they can charge what the market will bear. I am talking about government-salaried doctors.

As in the educational system, there is a bribe pecking order in public health. If a patient needs an operation fast, the bribe demand is higher. If the operation is complicated, higher still. If a patient wants a top-rated doctor, even higher.

If you are from a Western country, you may be thinking, “Come on, you are not telling me that if a patient cannot afford a bride, he will not be operated on, are you?”

I am telling you exactly that. A friend in Ukraine whose father needed a cancer operation said that when she told the surgeon she could not come up with the “gift” he was asking, he walked out of the room. She asked several friends to chip in on the bribe. It took her a year to repay them.

Denying someone life-saving health care because they cannot pay a bribe is an outrage, but let me tell you a couple of stories with outrage factors just as high.

One involves bribe demands from the staff of a public housing agency in Kazakhstan. This office handles applications for government-provided housing for society’s neediest — single mothers, the elderly, the disabled.

The demand for the housing always far outweighs the supply, and the agency supposedly uses a formula to determine who gets the next apartment that is available.

You can move your name up the waiting list by paying a bribe, however.

Think about how outrageous this is: Here is an agency that is not asking rich or middle-class folk for a bribe, but people who are among the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Every one of the staff involved ought to be fired.

Even paying the bribe is no guarantee you will get a flat. A European friend told me about a 19-year-old widow with a 4-year-old son and no job skills. Because she could not make it on her waitress salary, she was desperate for public housing. She asked my friend to pay a $3,000 bribe to housing agency staff to move her to the top of the apartment waiting list.

He did not want to pay, because he feared the staff would take the money without moving her to the top of the list — but she pleaded, and he relented. The result was what he had dreaded. The staff moved her up the list, but nowhere near the top.

And his friend could do nothing. If she complained, the staff could drop her way down the list — or knock her off of it altogether.

What made my European pal angriest was seeing the hope wrung out of his friend. She was crushed.

This situation not only shows how cruel bribery can be, but also that the bribe takers may not deliver on their promise. In almost every case, the bribe givers have no leverage to ensure they get what they paid for.

A final story about how cruel bribery can be: An American friend who had visited an orphanage in Ukraine organized a relief effort back in the States to improve the poor conditions the children were suffering from.

At first, his church group sent money to the orphanage administrator to buy clothes and other necessities for the children.

She pocketed the money.

To prevent this from happening again, the group bought clothes in the States and shipped them to the children. The administrator and other orphanage staff sold the clothes in a bazaar.

Next the church group hand-delivered clothes to the orphanage, putting some in every child’s hands. But clothes have to be washed, and when the children turned them over to the orphanage washing staff, they were “lost.”

Orphans are among any society’s most vulnerable and powerless. For fear of retaliation, these orphans did not dare make an issue of the clothes that had been stolen from them.

As the stories I have shared with you suggest, there are millions of variations on corruption. All rob society of resources that could make common people’s lives better.

Some are relatively benign — like the $10 bribe that police in Armenia and many other countries in the former Soviet Union demand to make a traffic ticket go away.

But some inflict great hurt on the most vulnerable people in society, including widowed young mothers and orphans.

When you see these cases firsthand, or hear about them from friends, you cannot help but react with a mixture of anger, sadness and hopelessness.

The bottom line is that corruption is a scourge on society, and no country will achieve true equality, and take the best care of its most vulnerable, until it is eliminated.

Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia.