Frozen Rights
Earlier this year, while undergoing treatment at a rehabilitation center, I discovered that despite the freezing winter weather, the heating system simply wasn’t working. The corridors felt no warmer than the outdoors. In fact, I caught a cold and fell ill during the first days of my stay.
I filed a complaint with the management of the Medical and Social Expertise Center. After hearing about it, the center’s chief physician came to my room and said, “Unfortunately, you’re right. But at the moment, there’s nothing I can do.”
It wasn’t the first time.
Two years earlier, during a previous course of treatment at the same facility, I had raised exactly the same issue with the same chief physician. He promised it would be resolved.
Two years passed.
Nothing changed.
Sometimes I find myself wondering whether this is more than simple negligence.
To be clear, this is only a hypothesis. I have no evidence to prove it. But I cannot shake the feeling that a rehabilitation center without functioning heating somehow serves the interests of its management—and perhaps, more broadly, of institutions responsible for disability policy.
Why?
Because behind it lies a disturbingly familiar logic.
Imagine dozens of disabled people receiving treatment in the same facility. Morning, afternoon and evening, they gather in the corridors, talk to one another, compare experiences and discuss the problems they all face. Among them, the more outspoken suggest, “Let’s all go to the chief physician’s office together and complain about the dog-food quality of the meals we’re being served.” Others might go even further, proposing a demonstration outside the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection, holding placards and demanding change.
Better, perhaps, that such “troublemakers” never have the chance to gather in the first place.
Why linger in freezing corridors?
Stay inside your warm rooms—rooms that feel more like prison cells than places of recovery. Be grateful you have been given accommodation at all. Be grateful you are here receiving what is called rehabilitation, even if little about it resembles genuine treatment.
Potential protesters cannot organize if they remain isolated behind closed doors.
From that perspective, keeping people apart is not merely convenient—it is politically useful.
After all, disabled people forming networks, organizing themselves and demanding their rights may appear “dangerous,” particularly when they belong to one of the country’s most marginalized and routinely ignored communities—a community whose members often feel they have little left to lose except their lives.
Such organization does more than create inconvenience for officials. It can encourage other vulnerable groups to discover their own collective voice.
Again, this is only my interpretation. I cannot prove it.
But understanding how power operates sometimes requires less paperwork than common sense.
Because the greatest problem disabled people face in this country is not only poverty, inaccessible infrastructure or poor public services.
The deeper problem is that they are not supposed to be visible.
A disabled person should not be seen on the streets.
Should not be seen on public transport.
Should not be seen in theatres, cinemas or universities.
Above all, disabled people should not be seen together.
That is why, in a country with well over half a million disabled citizens, encountering them in public spaces remains surprisingly rare.
The issue is never one disabled person.
Ten disabled people standing together may already raise uncomfortable questions.
A hundred cease to be statistics.
They become a social force.
That is why society’s attitude toward disabled people so often resembles control rather than care.
You may receive assistance—but not a voice.
You may be given food—but not the right to ask why it is unfit to eat.
You may be offered rehabilitation—but not the freedom to question the conditions under which it takes place.
One of the most revealing characteristics of authoritarian thinking is its ability to transform even compassion into an instrument of control.
In such systems, citizens are not treated as rights-bearing individuals. They are expected to be grateful beneficiaries.
That is why one phrase echoes above all others:
“Be grateful.”
On the surface, it sounds moral, even spiritual.
In reality, it often carries a political message.
When people are told to “be grateful,” what they are really being told is: don’t demand your rights.
When I speak about the cold inside that rehabilitation center, I am not really talking about broken radiators.
The issue is not the heating system.
The issue is that people can endure the same failures year after year while nothing changes.
The corridors were cold two years ago.
They are still cold today.
At some point, one inevitably begins to wonder: if a problem remains unresolved for years, perhaps it is no longer a problem.
Perhaps it has become a choice.
Corruption is not confined to stolen money.
Often, it hides inside problems that are deliberately left unsolved.
Every unresolved problem protects someone’s comfort, someone’s convenience, someone’s position.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that disabled people have spent decades being taught to discuss their fate instead of their rights.
Yes—taught.
And eventually conditioned to believe it.
As though the hardships they face were acts of destiny rather than the consequences of political and administrative decisions.
Disability, in many cases, is indeed fate.
But inaccessible buildings are not.
A spinal cord injury may be fate.
Unheated rehabilitation wards are not.
Physical impairment may be fate.
Being treated without dignity is not.
These are choices made—or tolerated—by people with the authority to act differently.
If this sounds idealistic, so be it.
The greatest rehabilitation is not the rehabilitation of muscles.
It is the rehabilitation of consciousness.
Real change begins when a person no longer sees themselves as an object of charity but as a citizen with rights.
At that moment, cold corridors stop being merely cold corridors.
They become a measure of the value a state places on human dignity.
And perhaps that is precisely what some people fear most:
not the heating of buildings,
but the thawing of minds.
Because in the end, it is not only radiators that need repairing.
It is consciences.
And the way we think.
Orkhan Adigozal
