Singapore's sorry saga
Saturday, 3 December 2005
T HE AIR was thick and hot and filled with the sound of chanting prayer in an
apartment in a working-class area on the western side of Singapore.
It was
1am - five hours before Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van was due to be
hanged yesterday - and an old woman and two twin teenage boys understood all too
well the torturous feelings being experienced by the mother and twin brother of
Nguyen.
Just seven months earlier, another man was making the same walk
to the gallows in the Changi prison as Ngyuen did yesterday.
Shanmugam Murugesu, the son of the old woman, the single father
of the twin boys and a former soldier and Singaporean jet ski champion, was
hanged in Changi jail in May this year. He'd been convicted of smuggling more
than a kilo of cannabis into Singapore from Malaysia. Like Nguyen, all appeals
for clemency proved fruitless.
Now in this pre-dawn morning, a
photograph of Nguyen and Shanmugam are arranged in a shrine of incense,
chrysanthemums, jasmine and candles in this little apartment in a down-at-heel
area of Singapore that is more KFC and 7Eleven than Cartier and Louis Vuitton.
It's the home of Shanmugam's mother Letchumi and his twin sons Goparan
and Krishnan who are struggling financially and emotionally since the death of
their son and father.
Each half hour from midnight last night, human
rights lawyer M. Ravi, who represented Murugesu and was a vocal supporter of
Nguyen, chanted a prayer for the two men to help them in the afterlife following
their hanging as he knelt before the shrine in the old woman's apartment.
"It's an unnatural death so there's so much pain and struggle and
refusal to go, and all the struggle with the family, and the prayer is about
asking peace for them," he said.
But with five hours to go before Nguyen
was due to be hanged, M. Ravi was still hopeful of some divine assistance.
"This is our last-ditch attempt for the gods to come down and interfere
- we are pleading with God to stop this gruesome murder."
As it was
nothing could save Nguyen, the 25-year-old former Melbourne sales representative
who was put to death yesterday three years after being arrested at Changi
airport carrying almost 400 grams of heroin.
He was in transit in
Singapore between Cambodia and Melbourne and never left the island city-state
alive. Now Nguyen's last journey home to Melbourne is being made in a casket on
a Qantas flight tonight.
Daily life seemed not to skip a beat in
Singapore despite the human drama being played out at Changi prison. The Orchard
Road shopping strip pulsed with Christmas lights and shoulder-to-shoulder
shoppers. People seemed vaguely aware of the case but not overly concerned about
it. "Singapore: very strict laws" was a common refrain. Local media virtually
ignored the story until the 11th hour when it focused on the Government
justifying its reasons for Nguyen's execution.
While it would never
admit it, the Singapore Government must still feel decidedly uncomfortable with
the level of outside media attention the Nguyen case has attracted, not only in
Australia, but elsewhere around the world.
Singapore's Prime Minister
Lee Hsien Loong was seemingly unrepentant in the government-controlled newspaper
The Straits Times yesterday.
"The Government decided that the law has to
take its course and the law will have to take its course," he said.
"We
uphold the rule of law and the rule of law has to apply impartially to
Singaporeans and foreigners alike."
It's an opinion heard often on the
streets of Singapore, where up to 70 per cent of the population of four million
are said to be in support of the death penalty, which is mandatory in Singapore
for murder, drug and firearm offences.
A national poll this week showing
57 per cent of Australians believed that the death penalty should apply to drug
traffickers in Australia was displayed prominently on page three of The Straits
Times yesterday, the day of Nguyen's execution. But the fate of the young
Australian man had little impact on English couple Bob and Tina Leigh who were
holidaying in Singapore yesterday.
"Hang him, I say," Mr Leigh said.
"Anyone who's into pushing drugs and ruining people's lives, which is
basically what they're doing, should be hung. Great. Shame more countries don't
do it because a lot less countries would be smuggling drugs."
Others
living in Singapore are ambivalent about capital punishment but more than happy
that it produces low crime rates and safe streets.
People such as
Vincent, who did not want his full name used, a Singapore management consultant,
who was flying back home this week after a holiday in Australia with his wife
and children.
He was surprised by the level of media attention the
Nguyen case had attracted in Australia during their stay. His wife called it
"sensationalist and lop-sided".
"After all, he's a convicted criminal,"
Vincent said. "To even criticise John Howard for keeping his sporting
commitment? I mean, come on.
"I'm not for capital punishment in any
case. But that's the rule, that's the law. That's the rules of the country, you
have to play by them."
Vincent said living in Singapore was a trade-off
he was happy to accept for the sake of his children, aged five and eight.
"I think most Australians know that Singapore is safe and one of the
reasons it is safe is because it's strict. And, yeah, Singapore is safe to the
extent of using very draconian laws," he said. "But, hey, you can go jogging in
the middle of the night in the botanical gardens and not be afraid of anything.
You win some, you lose some. It's not the freest country in the world.
"I wouldn't recommend you live there if you're the liberal type. But if
you've got kids like mine and you don't want them to grow up with a drug habit,
you accept it."
'Faye', a middle-aged Australian expatriate from
Melbourne, who did not want to give her full name, has been in Singapore for
seven months with her husband, who is a psychologist. (Many people in Singapore
seem not to want their name quoted in the media, as if they are expecting some
unnamed retribution for speaking their mind)
Faye says her friends in
Australia know more about the Nguyen case than she does.
"There it's a
very big issue and it's in all the media. Here it's not," she said.
"Personally, I don't agree with [the death penalty], I find it quite
abhorrent. But I also think if you break the law of a country you're in,
unfortunately, you have to deal with the consequences."
The Nguyen case
has also raised the broader question of whether Singapore can deserve to call
itself a true democracy.
It has long suffered the "nanny state" tag when
it bans everything from chewing gum to oral sex and imposes heavy fines on its
citizens such as $150 for dropping a cigarette butt.
Others say there
are much more sinister impositions on the populace, including restricting how
and when people can assemble, exercising control over the media and not
providing for legal system touchstones such as judicial discretion.
M.
Ravi says people accused of crime do not have the right to a lawyer until the
police have completed their investigation. People can be convicted on confession
alone, without any corroborating evidence.
Nguyen's lawyer Lex Lasry QC
decried the fact his client's plea for clemency was decided by Singapore's
president S.R. Nathan "behind closed doors" without an explanation for the
decision.
Similarly, local human rights organisation the Think Centre is
holding a forum today to consider making the mandatory death penalty an election
issue because it leaves judges no room to move to consider mitigating
circumstances.
Think Centre president Sinapan Samydorai wants to see the
death penalty abolished altogether, calling it inhumane, degrading and cruel.
But he is prepared to work in stages and believes Singaporeans would accept the
mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking being removed.
"We want it
abolished or removed and give back the discretion to the judges," he said.
"Now the judges cannot look at the full circumstances, so when a guy or
lady is arrested on the day with 15 grams of heroin, he or she is presumed to be
a trafficker. So we want the judges to have the discretion so a person should be
presumed innocent until the trial is over and the judgment is based on the full
circumstances."
Samydorai is sceptical about whether Singapore is so
immune from drugs. He believes young people are turning to drugs such as speed
and ecstasy when they find little meaning in a life ruled by the "four Cs": car,
credit card, condominium, club.
"The four Cs possess our Singaporean
mindset; it's a guiding factor for youth here. That what is important is your
credit card, your car, your condominium, your club. It is a material world
here," he said.
"Without your credit card or car you feel you are
nobody. Because for them the human values are reduced to a material existence."
And while poor Indians or Malays or Chinese might have once fallen
victim to drugs, Samydorai says the middle-class is now more often the victims.
"The middle-class youth feel alienated," he said. "It doesn't help that
we're are a society that values submissiveness. You're supposed to keep your
mouth shut. You're not allowed to assemble. You're not supposed to talk."
Marcus Tang, a 25-year-old businessman from Singapore, who went to
Changi prison yesterday to offer a prayer for Nguyen and his family, said there
should be a distinction between punishment for murder and drug trafficking, "If
you kill someone, the victim has no choice. He's walking down the street, gets
killed," he said.
"But if you're a drug trafficker, the victim, the
so-called victim has a choice. If he wants to take the drug, that's his own
choice. He's going to get killed, that he's own choice. So I always believed if
you're a drug trafficker you don't play that big a part into destroying
someone's life as a murderer. And yet the drug trafficker and the murderer, get
the same death penalty."
Mr Lasry said this week regarding the mandatory
nature of the death penalty: "I don't believe that I could disagree with anyone
more than I do than with a regime that promotes a mandatory death penalty and
imposes the penalty by hanging.
"Hanging is an antiquated, out-of-date
method of execution, and ultimately, despite what Prime Minister Lee says, this
will have to change," he said.
The Ministry of Home Affairs has
confirmed it will not consider another form of capital punishment such as lethal
injection.
"We had previously studied the different methods of execution
and found no reason to change from the current method used, i.e., by hanging," a
statement read.
New Zealand expatriate Kevin Hynds runs the Sleepy Sam's
coffee house in the Arab Street district of Singapore, a funky, slightly
bohemian quarter he equates to Sydney's Glebe.
After five years in
Singapore, the 35-year- old former consultant says he is more understanding of
the local way.
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