Pubdate: Tue, 22 Nov 2005
Source: Australian, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2005sThe Australian
Contact: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/files/aus-letters.htm
Website: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/35
Author: Phillip Adams

TURN OUR BACKS ON THE ISLAND OF DEATH

SINGAPORE is a serial killer. In recent years, hundreds of its 
citizens and quite a few foreigners have been executed. When it comes 
to state murder, on a per capita basis, the sterile, claustrophobic 
Singapore exceeds the dubious records of China, Russia and governor 
George W. Bush's Texas.

Recently China has started to rein in regional magistrates, bringing 
the decision-making on the death penalty back to Beijing. Those 
accounts of instant executions - of prisoners being dragged from the 
dock to be shot behind the ear and their families being charged for 
the bullets - have become too embarrassing.

The US is also losing enthusiasm for the death penalty. Too many 
cases have displayed the gross inequities of the system. Too often 
DNA evidence has belatedly proven the verdicts unsafe. How many 
victims have been proven innocent after the switch has been thrown, 
the pellets dropped, the needles shoved in the veins?

But despite the sales pitch that it's the Switzerland of Asia, 
Singapore keeps its hangman very busy. The incumbent holds the world 
record for executions; he is proud to have killed more than 500 of 
his fellow human beings. His portrait on the front page of this 
newspaper last month (see inset) was unforgettable: so gross, so 
boastful, so cheerful of grin and philosophy. "I send them to a better place."

He may be right about that. For all its glitz, Singapore is a harsh, 
authoritarian society. Yet of all our near neighbours, Singapore is 
the least criticised. Malaysia is recalcitrant, Indonesia corrupt. 
But we like Harry Lee's airline, the airport, the duty-free shopping. 
(Better than Dubai, say the frequent fliers.) Few Australians look 
behind the glamour of Singapore's airport at the grim realities of 
neighbouring Changi prison, to the fact that sophisticated, 
squeaky-clean Singapore is a parody of democracy. As in Mahathir 
Mohamad's Malaysia, it takes bravery to express dissent, while formal 
political opposition can lead to prison.

To a very crowded prison, for Singapore has among the highest levels 
of incarceration on earth. Yet my last column on this city-state, 
with its overworked hangman, provoked a flurry of letters to the 
editor defending the place, saying we must respect Singapore's system of laws.

No thanks, and to hell with Harry Lee's line on Asian values.

Singapore's death penalty is overwhelmingly applied to drug couriers 
and is clearly a total failure, as it is wherever the penalty is used 
as a strategy in that lost cause called the war on drugs. Nothing 
stops the trafficking. Singapore could hang thousands - it probably 
will in due course - and there will be just as many poor fools ready 
to risk their lives for big money or a pittance. Despite all the 
publicity about Indonesia's firing squads, you can still recruit 
Australian teenagers for $500 and a free holiday.

In this form of capitalism, capital punishment doesn't count. Thanks 
to free market forces, it just ups the ante and the price.

But let's be fair; Singapore is rethinking the death penalty. It's 
going to abandon the noose and trapdoor, replacing them with the 
needle and gurney. That's progress.

For just as it matters little how many drug couriers you kill, it 
hardly matters how much heroin you intercept. Seize 100 tonnes 
instead of 100g and there'd be little more than a hiccup in the 
distribution system. The street price would rise and the warlords 
we've returned to power in Afghanistan would simply increase the 
poppy crop to protect their 80per cent world market share. Drug 
seizures are like dipping buckets in the ocean.

Australian Federal Police chief Mick Keelty's appalling contribution 
to the death penalty debate has been to talk of thousands of young 
Australians who'd have died had the Bali nine smuggled all that 
heroin into Australia. This is specious. Keelty should admit that, 
were heroin legally available to addicts, there'd be a hope of 
controlling quantity and quality. That would save lives. And if he 
were really worried about young Australians dying of drugs, we'd hear 
him attack what's responsible for more than 90per cent of 
drug-related deaths: grog and tobacco. Far more Australian lives are 
destroyed by petrol sniffing than heroin.

I despise drugs and, jazz notwithstanding, have little enthusiasm for 
the drug culture so enthusiastically marketed by everyone from those 
nice Beatles to the thugs of hip-hop. (Half the pop songs in the past 
30 years have been advertising jingles for the drug de jour, from LSD 
to crack cocaine.) But equally I despise the hypocrisy of this war on 
drugs. Add the moral horror of the death penalty or the monstrous 
nonsense of an Australian girl arrested in Denpasar for possessing 
two ecstasy tablets and we're living in a world gone mad.

Not so along ago, the French saved one of their citizens from the 
noose - that other version of the Singapore sling - by threatening to 
break off diplomatic relations. Yet Canberra doesn't dare to 
criticise Singapore. It's too important to our economy. Singapore's a 
big shareholder in companies such as Optus. And the PM wants our 
airlines to merge. And we love the shopping.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman