Pubdate: Wed, 21 Feb 2001
Source: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Copyright: 2001 The Sydney Morning Herald
Contact:  GPO Box 3771, Sydney NSW 2001
Fax: 61-(0)2-9282 3492
Website: http://www.smh.com.au/
Forum: http://forums.fairfax.com.au/
Author: Mark Baker

LIFE IN A FOREIGN HELL

Lyle Doniger still has 45 years of his sentence for drug smuggling to 
serve. But, as Mark Baker writes, the pushers who arranged his 
ill-conceived journey to Thailand are out, courtesy of a more lenient 
Australian system.

The nights are the hardest to endure. From lock down at 4pm each day 
to release at 6.30 the next morning means 14 hours of close 
confinement. It's a long time to be left alone with your thoughts; 
too long for the gnawing loneliness that's only made worse by the 23 
other bodies squeezed shoulder to shoulder beside you in the squalid, 
stifling cell block.

Lying on a rough mat on the concrete floor while a single ceiling fan 
chops at the relentless tropical heat, Lyle Doniger clings to the 
worn and comforting strands of memory as he struggles to block out 
the inescapable nightmare that stretches out to the end of his days.

He thinks of family and friends, of the space and comforts of life 
back in Australia, and he tries to forget the 50-year sentence that 
may yet spell death in a Thai jail.

"If it wasn't for my kids and my family I would have checked out long 
ago," Doniger says. "There's no way I could have survived without 
them. They're the ones who keep telling me to hang in there, hang in 
there." Doniger is yelling from behind the steel mesh cage in the 
visitors' section of Bangkok's maximum-security Bang Kwang prison. 
"I've been through so much pain already, to check out now would be 
doing the wrong thing by them. But some days you get very low, you 
wonder how you can go on."

In early 1996 Doniger and two Sydney women, Jane McKenzie and Deborah 
Spinner, were arrested at Bangkok airport as they prepared to board 
an Olympic Airways flight to Australia. Thai narcotics agents, 
working in collaboration with Australian Federal Police, later 
discovered heroin-filled condoms hidden by the three in their bodies.

When the drugs were refined to establish their purity, the combined 
quantities totalled 115.4 grams. On the streets of Melbourne or 
Sydney at the time, that amount of heroin would probably have fetched 
no more than $50,000. But under Thai law, conspiracy to export more 
than 100 grams of heroin carries a mandatory sentence of life 
imprisonment.

At the end of their trial, in March 1997, the three judges "halved" 
the life sentences to 50 years, in return for pleas of guilty. 
Doniger was led away in chains to Bang Kwang; the women were sent to 
Klong Prem - the infamous "Bangkok Hilton".

During the court hearings, Doniger, McKenzie and Spinner told a tale 
all too familiar in the world of petty drug trafficking. All three 
were long-time addicts in methadone programs in Sydney who had never 
been out of Australia. All three were independently recruited as 
"mules" by a small-time drug syndicate that lured their naive targets 
with promises of all-expenses-paid holidays in Thailand and a share 
of the drugs smuggled home.

The mad adventure was doomed from the outset. It appears Australian 
police were aware of the operation before the party even left 
Australia. A deal between Australian and Thai police saw them 
arrested in Bangkok while the mastermind of the operation, John 
Charles Dodd, and his Australian Thai accomplice, Prachaya 
Kavinmethavee, were allowed to fly back to Sydney before they were 
apprehended.

Five years on, in the cruellest of ironies, Dodd and Prachaya are 
free again while their hapless conscripts still face the prospect of 
a lifetime behind bars. That grim reality, and five hard years in 
Thai jails, has taken a heavy toll on Doniger, McKenzie and Spinner.

Their days in the crowded, squalid prisons crawl by in a never-ending 
struggle against hunger, illness and boredom. The pain of separation 
and isolation is constant, compounded by the fact that they all left 
young families behind in Australia.

McKenzie's ordeal has been made even tougher by the death of her 
husband, in an apparent drug overdose, a few months after she was 
sentenced.

Now the three Australians clutch at two straws of hope to preserve 
their sanity and survive: the possibility that they will eventually 
be released under a Thai royal pardon, or that Thailand will ratify a 
treaty with Australia that would at least allow them to be 
transferred to jails back in Australia. Either way, none of them 
believes they are likely to win their freedom for years yet.

Doniger lodged his application for a pardon 14 months ago. But in a 
measure of how slowly the wheels of clemency turn in Thailand, his 
file was only recently passed from the Corrections Department to the 
Department of the Interior where processing will begin. It may be 
years more before the case reaches the palace.

Inexplicably, the women have yet to lodge their applications for 
pardons. There was speculation that they could be included in a 
prisoner amnesty program to mark the 72nd birthday of King Bhumibol 
Adulyadej in December 1999, but those hopes were dashed when 
authorities excluded drug prisoners from the amnesty - a decision 
seen to reflect a toughening in Thailand's response to its worsening 
drug crisis.

After years of haggling between the Australian Government and the 
States and Territories, legislation is now in place to allow 
Australians serving sentences in foreign prisons to be transferred 
home, but a treaty that would enable the 12 Australians jailed in 
Thailand to be considered for transfer is still being negotiated. 
While Australian officials remain optimistic about reaching 
agreement, there has been little progress for months and the matter 
has been further complicated by the recent change of government in 
Thailand.

Doniger does not ask or look for sympathy. He openly concedes the 
stupidity and petty venality that have wrecked his life. His plea is 
only for fair treatment for the crime he committed. There's no doubt 
that had he, too, been allowed to fly back to Australia before being 
arrested, he would have completed his jail term months if not years 
ago.

"I'd never been in prison before. I had no drug convictions. I may 
not even have been sent to jail in Australia," he says.

"This was no master drug syndicate, just a bunch of stupid amateurs. 
I was carrying just 34 grams - that's about the size of your thumb. 
It's a standing joke among the other prisoners that I got done for so 
little. The next smallest case in here was 1.4 kilograms."

Doniger is a gaunt and greying shadow of the stocky 45-year-old 
arrested in 1996. He suffers from hepatitis C - the legacy of a 
20-year heroin addiction - kidney problems and back pains. His 
eyesight is also deteriorating.

His days are spent "scrounging" food, washing clothes and writing 
letters. An Australian prisoner loan allowance provides money for 
essentials and occasional food parcels from Australia supplement the 
inedible rice gruel supplied by the prison.

Life has got tougher for Doniger since he lost his two closest 
friends, one sent to solitary confinement and the other transferred 
out of Bang Kwang. The three had formed a "food group" to arrange 
daily meals, to share the cooking and to look out for each other 
against theft and assault. "I'm pretty much on my own now, which 
makes it very hard. I worry that if I get sick there'll be no-one to 
help and protect me.

"There's no-one I can really talk to or confide in any more. You've 
got to be very careful about opening up and showing your emotions. 
You don't want to show any weak points. Some of the people in here 
are not very nice people. There's a lot of junkies but some of the 
big dealers in here are real animals."

The long nights in the cramped five-metre by 10-metre cell are a 
battle of endurance. "You can sleep on your back, sort of, but you're 
shoulder to shoulder with all the others," Doniger says. "It's so 
crowded. We're like sardines. Every time someone rolls over or gets 
up to use the toilet, you're woken up. There's a fan, but it's very 
hot. At least we've fixed it up a bit.

"When I first arrived it was absolutely filthy in there, you wouldn't 
believe it. The toilet had a big hole in it and all sorts of critters 
used to come out of there."

Doniger and other prisoners scratched together some money to fit a 
new squat toilet and build a screen for privacy.

Apart from regular consular calls, it can be months between visitors. 
Once a year, prisoners are allowed a two-hour contact visit with 
their families. Each year Doniger's son Troy flies up from Sydney to 
see his father.

"When I see him my head goes blank. I just stare at him," Doniger 
says. "It's such an emotional time. The whole place is just a sea of 
red eyes and the hardest part is when he's walking away. I know I 
won't see him again for a year. It rips your heart out and it's not 
just me; all the foreigners are the same."

Doniger has not seen his two youngest children, Simon, 13, and 
Hayley, 12 - both of whom have serious medical conditions - since he 
left Sydney. The argument that he be allowed to go home and help care 
for them is the basis of his case for a pardon.

Failing that, he believes an eventual transfer to an Australian jail 
would make a huge difference to his life.

"I arrived here on April Fool's Day 1997 and it's been hell every day 
since then. If I could get back to Australia it wouldn't matter how 
many years I had to do. At least I could see my kids. My kids are my 
life. Without them, I have nothing."

His greatest fear is that neither option will materialise.

"I keep hoping that one day I'll get out of here, but my nightmare is 
that my pardon will be rejected. I don't think I could cope with 
that. I've seen how after eight to 10 years in here the foreigners 
hit the wall. Some become junkies, some start chasing the katoys 
[transvestites], some just go plain crazy. I've been in prison five 
years now and I can see the danger that lies ahead."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Kirk Bauer