Nov. 26
SINGAPORE:
Singapore sacks its hangman
Darshan Singh ... No longer Singapore's hangman.
Singapore has sacked its long-serving hangman on the eve of the execution
of Australian drug courier Nguyen Tuong Van.
A new executioner is expected to be flown into Singapore this week to
carry out Nguyen's death sentence as scheduled on Friday despite pleas for
mercy from Australia. It is believed the new hangman will be flown in from
another Asian country, possibly Malaysia, with which Singapore has a close
relationship.
The 25-year old from Melbourne will become the 1st prisoner in Singapore
in 46 years not to be sent to his death by Darshan Singh. The 74-year-old
grandfather was dumped after his identity and picture was revealed by The
Australian newspaper.
Mr Singh said he was in big trouble and was out of a job.
"It has been very, very difficult for me," he told The Sunday Telegraph.
"I am not the hangman anymore."
Mr Singh said he would miss the $400 fee for each execution but was
relieved he would not be placing the noose around Nguyen's neck. "In a way
I am happy," he said.
Nguyen's lawyer Lex Lasry said the prospect of an inexperienced hangman
was disturbing because mistakes could cause extended suffering. "If this
must happen it must be done as humanely as possible. It just shows the
high level of inhumanity of it."
A spokesman for Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the Government was
continuing to plead to Singapore to stop the execution.
Australia's Catholic bishops yesterday wrote to Singapore's Prime Minister
Lee Hsien Loong urging him to reconsider clemency for the condemned man.
Nguyen was caught with 396.2 grams of heroin at Singapore's Changi Airport
in December 2002 while in transit from Cambodia to Sydney. He claimed he
was trying to pay off his heroin-addicted twin brother's legal debts.
Nguyen's mother Kim and brother Khoa have been in Singapore for a week
visiting Nguyen at Changi each day until yesterday when the prison was
closed.
Singapore human rights lawyer M. Ravi has led the local campaign to save
the Australian because it was the final wish of his previous death row
client.
38-year-old Shanmugam Murugesu, who became Nguyen's best friend and
confidant in jail, was executed in May for bringing one kilogram of
marijuana into the country.
"When I saw Shanmugam on his last day he said to me 'let my death not be
in vain, please help this young man next to me'," Mr Ravi said.
It was his last wish that on his birthday, eight days before Nguyen's
execution date, his family hold a vigil to pray for the condemned. They
fulfilled it last week. "We are not just fighting for my father,"
Murugesu's 15-year-old son Gopal said at the candle-lit Indian ritual.
"We are fighting for everyone. No one should have to go through this pain,
it is not the pain of missing a girlfriend or a friend, the pain of seeing
your father's body is very difficult to handle.
"I do not want his mother to have to feel this pain."
Gopal and his twin brother Krishnan, now work alongside Mr Ravi with their
grandmother Madame Letchumi Ammah as the only family of a condemned
prisoner to speak out publicly against the government. It is a battle
largely waged in secret as the lobbyists dodge the government's strict
laws. Of the 10 activists who formed the Singapore Anti Death Penalty
Committee (SADPC), nine will not divulge their identity.
"But we are slowly making a difference," said one activist.
"Van has made an impact. He has struck a chord. But this will be a long
and slow fight."
(source: News.com au)
*******************
The quality of mercy----Europe views taking life as a punishment for crime
as a barbaric practice akin to torture ... not everyone agrees
So what's your international image gonna be, fair Singapore? Changi
Airport or Changi Prison? Singapore Girl or Singapore Gallows?
The quality of mercy a country shows for its own and others is not
unrelated to its image in the world. The US is a prime example of this.
The compelling human rights rhetoric regularly issued by the US
government, stridently questioning the arrest of this or that person in
such and such a country is under-mined by the stateside practice of
capital punishment, a brutal, anachronistic practice banned in Europe and
other progressive states. Ditto for torture. The US is up there in the
rogues' hall of fame with Saudi Arabia, Iran and China when it comes to
making people pay for certain crimes with their lives.
Singapore, that clean tidy city state on the southern tip of the Malay
peninsula has quietly executed hundreds of people, citizens and foreign
visitors alike for a variety of crimes, but noteworthy is the seeming
obsession with drugs, which would not necessarily be a capital offense
elsewhere. Every once in a while, a media storm rises, reminding newspaper
readers around the world why Singapore once earned the sobriquet
"Disneyland with the death penalty".
Transporting heroin is indeed a serious charge, but it pales in comparison
with the calculated, cold-blooded act of executing a living, breathing
human being. Is state-mandated murder not murder all the same?
Students of psychology might suggest that the vigour and glee with which
George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, presided over a record number of
executions revealed a fundamental lack of empathy, compassion and concern
for mitigating circumstances, psychological shortcomings that dog his
deadly political adventure in Iraq. An abnormal willingness to preside
over killing may yet prove to be George W's fatal flaw as he skids to
record lows in popularity and wrecks the US empire from within.
The problem is, acting tough is a high-wire act in which a single mis-step
may lead to disastrous consequences. It's an act, an attitude, not a
coherent policy. Just look at George Bush Jnr. Want to take a tough stand
against terror? Kill them with shock and awe and a bit of white
phosphorous thrown in. You become the world's biggest hypocrite, guilty of
that which you find unacceptable in others.
Amazing Singapore, a predominantly Chinese city-state in a Malay dominated
sea, has long been the envy of the region for its cleanliness, high levels
of education, courtesy and an airport with few peers. But attitudes shift
with the times and given the inadvertent publicity generated by the
decision to execute a young Australian man, Singapore is well on its way
to becoming known as the hangman's capital of the world. According to
Amnesty International, the city-state of some 4 million strung up and
hanged 408 human beings between 1991 and 2003 alone, arguably the highest
rate anywhere of state-authorised murder as a percentage of population.
With the accession to power of Lee Hsien Loong, a seemingly moderate,
likeable man of considerable intellectual acuity, who just happens to be
the son of a formidable former leader, one might have hoped he had the
savoir-faire to rid Singapore of an anachronistic law mandating executions
for drug offences, a brutal but ineffective law judging from the continued
executions and the continued movement of drugs in the region. That lengthy
prison sentences are a superior tool of law enforcement than capital
punishment is something broadly understood in Europe, which has repudiated
and continues to repudiate the Fascist antecedents and Nazi-style
arrogance that once bestowed upon leaders the "right" to kill as a means
of implementing state policy.
Singapore and other former Japanese-occupied states, including China and
Korea, seem unable to fully shake off the legacy of Japanese war-time
justice which found its highest expression in the sword. North Korea, the
most hopeless of the lot continues to suffer from a warped continuation of
Japanese militarism, in which death is the price of dissent, in which
worship of the divine emperor has been replaced by indigenous dynasts Kim
Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
Inasmuch as Texas tops the list of state executions, China is the Texas of
the world. But even China, a country still coming to terms with what it
means to be unshackled from the cult of Mao, capital punishment is under
attack for being an unfair punishment unfairly implemented. Considerable
soul-searching has taken place in China both behind closed doors and on
television and in the newspapers; interest stirred in part by
heart-breaking tales of injustice that make one ache for a better way.
The dubious "right" of the state to kill its own citizens can be countered
in both moral and pragmatic terms at every level for every crime. This is
not to say that there are not heinous crimes, or that in a certain sense
the perpetrators don't deserve harsh punishment, but to say that the state
best stay out of the business of playing dice with human life. If the
state reduces itself to the level of criminals, it gets hard to tell who's
who after a while.
This is certainly the core problem in the South of Thailand, a cruel,
unjustified insurgency that wins new inflamed recruits with every cruel,
unjustifiable act of the state. In order to be a force for good, the state
must set a good example. If one of the most important messages a state
wants its populace to observe is do not kill, the state should not kill to
enforce that message.
In the case of non-violent crimes such as trafficking illicit substances,
the arguments in favour of capital punishment become all the more
spurious. It's an open question whether or not having a package of
non-explosive, banned chemical substance strapped to one's waist, as was
apparently the case with the convicted Australian Nguyen Tuong Van, is a
victimless crime or not. Some would argue, as has Singapore's Foreign
Minister George Yeo, that Mr Nguyen was carrying enough heroin to supply
26,000 doses to drug addicts.
That's a hefty hypothetical argument, but even a compelling argument
should not be used as a comforting rationalisation for the snuffing out of
a man's life. For one, the figure of 26,000 is a mathematical calculation;
hypothetical, unlikely and unproven to be the case; secondly addicts seek
fixes more from physical necessity than desire to commit a crime. That's
why heroin is legally provided for addicts in Scotland and other drug
problem zones; it's not the heroin but the criminality necessitated by its
illegality that accounts for much of the crime, somewhat akin to the 1920s
boom times for gangsters during the US's failed experiment with
prohibiting alcohol.
Finally, Singapore, like Hong Kong, as a former British entrepot lying
between the poppy fields of India and self-sufficient cities of China
which had no need for British goods (unless you could get them hooked on
something), is no stranger to the transshipment of opium and opium-derived
drugs, though blame for that falls initially on the British. While some
defenders of Mr Nguyen have gone as far to say that Singapore, with its
tolerant foreign policy, enables Burma to go on serving as the main
drug-producing country of the region, it is unfair to blame Singapore for
this. Rather the admirable tolerance with which Singapore's astute
diplomatic corps handles problem countries with unusual mitigating
circumstances might fruitfully be applied to increased tolerance for
problem humans like Mr Nguyen who did something very stupid and wants to
make amends.
The drug trade is almost pure capitalism in the sense that it is
market-driven, and because it disguises itself so effectively within the
folds of capitalist society, it is devilishly hard to root out. Consider
the vast police power and political intent to curb drugs in the US,
expressed in vociferous anti-drug campaigns by every president in memory.
The drugs are still out there for those who seek them. It has been argued
in Mr Nguyen's defence that he was a first time offender, helping a
brother in debt and in any case not distributing in Singapore but merely
in transit, thus highly unlikely that his hypothetical crime would have
any bearing on Singapore's citizens.
The vision of 26,000 potential doses is built on sturdier logic than the
hypothetical yellow cake and mushroom cloud arguments that were recently
used by certain US public figures to sell a war, but such connect-the-dots
thinking is still too weak an argument to convict and kill a man.
Nguyen Tuong Van is now exchanging final goodbyes with family and friends
on the other side of the security glass in Changi prison, getting ready,
inasmuch as it's humanly possible to get ready for such an outcome, for
his Dec 2 execution.
Barring eleventh hour humanitarian intervention, Mr Nguyen stands little
chance of reprieve. But if Singapore stubbornly refuses to update its
judicial practices with the best practices of today's world (as
represented by Europe, certainly not the US or China) it too might find
itself in the dock, with scant chance of reprieve in the court of
international public opinion.
(source: Bangkok Post - Philip J. Cunningham is a freelance writer and
commentator)
SAUDI ARABIA/CANADA:
Home from hell, with a tale of horrors
Confessions of an Innocent Man Torture and Survival in a Saudi Prison By
William Sampson -- McClelland & Stewart, $35
In his new book, William Sampson pulls no punches in his descriptions of
the violence to which he was subjected, leaving the reader with an almost
visceral response.
The Canadian man, now 46, was working in Saudi Arabia in 2001 when he was
snatched off the street by Saudi agents. After repeated brutal beatings at
the hands of a handful of "investigators," Sampson confessed under duress
to planting 2 car bombs, one of which killed Christopher Rodway, a Briton
working in the kingdom. In doing so, he falsely implicated his friends.
Sampson's description of himself after almost two weeks of captivity --
which stretched ultimately to 963 days -- gives an idea of what he endured
at the hands of the investigators, "The Three Stooges," as he calls them.
"A substantial part of my body had turned into a virtual rainbow of
colour," he writes. "From about my kidneys to the backs of my knees was a
mixture of colours ranging from black through to blue and red. My lower
abdomen and pelvic area was a mixture of black and purple. My swollen
penis looked like an overcooked sausage. My testicles had swollen to the
size of oranges and their tenderness made walking difficult."
The beatings continued for much of his imprisonment. And then he was
raped.
"I felt so violated and degraded in a way the other brutality could not
achieve," he writes.
Sampson suffered a heart attack and his initial entreaties for medical
help were ignored.
He was also subject to secret trials with a Saudi lawyer he did not want,
but one he says Canadian consular officials believed he should retain.
For his alleged crimes, he faced the death penalty.
"I hoped that the executioner's blade would be sharp, his arm strong, and
his aim sure," he writes. "Beyond that, the prospect of death offered not
fear but relief."
As for the Canadian officials, some of whom told him he was guilty, he has
nothing but scorn. One, he calls simply a "Muppet." He writes that they
were more interested in Canadian-Saudi relations than the welfare of a
Canadian citizen.
In the face of their "behaviour and crass stupidity," he renounced his
citizenship at one point.
Toward the end of his confinement, Sampson even received a visit from
veteran Liberal MP Don Boudria, who told him what a fine lawyer he had.
"The initial part of his speech sounded more like an election address than
what I considered germane to the matters at hand," Sampson writes, "and I
wondered who he was trying to impress."
Sampson is disarmingly dispassionate about his tormentors, seemingly
having compartmentalized his horrendous torments as a survival mechanism.
As a result, the tale of his detention is not one that asks for sympathy
from the reader. Rather, it comes across as the tale of another man told
by a stoic intimately informed of the tale.
Despite this detachment, though, the horror cannot be downplayed. Sampson,
to his credit -- and possibly catharsis -- does not whitewash the horror
he endured.
(source: London Free Press)
