DECEMBER 13, 2005

Dire Straits

If nothing else, the hanging of Nguyen Tuong Van has shown up the Singapore government for its hypocrisy and barbarism

Thou shalt not kill - The Sixth Commandment, God to Moses on Mount Sinai

AT 6.30AM LAST FRIDAY, as Singapore’s state killers still had drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van almost-lifeless body strung up on the Changi gallows, Hamish and Yasmin, the cheery morning DJs of Singapore’s state-owned Gold 90.5 FM – “News You Can Use” – broke away from their classic hits for “Headline News”.

“And now,” Hamish intoned, “... a story we’ve all been following ... the winners of Harvey Norman’s All Systems Go electronics giveaway!”

After a month in which Singapore’s official barbarism, its lack of democracy, free speech and assembly had been exposed to Australians and the world in all its cold, clinical brutality, the city-state’s briefly discomforted leadership resumed their normal provision of bread and circuses to their prosperous but intimidated subjects. Business as usual in glossy Singapore.

Nguyen Tuong Van is dead, but the hypocrisy surrounding his case seems to be alive and kicking. In Canberra, Singapore’s High Commissioner Joseph Koh quibbled over the nuance of a newspaper headline while continuing to deny his country’s intimate business links with Burma – regarded by Washington, Canberra and most major world capitals (though clearly not Singapore) as a major heroin exporter. But the very morning Koh’s government killed Nguyen, the state-controlled Straits Times reported that one of Burma’s leading businessmen, Serge Pun, a man with close links to Rangoon’s generals, would list a company on Singapore’s state-controlled stock exchange.

In Berlin, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong gaffed while visiting Germany’s new Chancellor Angela Merkel by walking past the German flag during a welcoming ceremony, instead
of bowing to it as protocol requires. Still, his diplomatic faux pas didn’t seem to faze him as, with Merkel by his side, he castigated the “colourful” Australian media for describing Singapore as “barbaric” when it was actually Australia’s Attorney-General and Amnesty International member Philip Ruddock who said it most powerfully. Lee’s blunder wasn't reported in Singapore's state media for five days, and only after it did the rounds of the net blogs. Again in Canberra, Prime Minister John Howard argued that it was wrong to kill Nguyen but not Saddam Hussein or the Bali bombers.

But that didn’t wash with Nguyen’s Melbourne-based lawyer Lex Lasry, as he shepherded his client’s stricken mother – and her son’s body – onto a Qantas flight home a day after failing to save his life. “You can’t be half-pregnant,” he railed. “The taking of life is as wrong as it could be, regardless of who does it.”

Lasry has been transformed by this case into something more than a Queen’s Counsel defending a guilty client. He’s now the region’s most eloquent abolitionist advocate, urging Canberra to take a “moral lead” in the region to lobby governments from Beijing to Jakarta to cease their judicial slayings, a call Howard quickly rejected as unrealistic. But Lasry insists that “the end of Van’s life must not be the end of the campaign against the mandatory death penalty.

“There are difficult cases ahead that the Australian government will have to deal with.” Lasry suggests starting with Singapore: “a first-world country with third-world punishments” and one of the world’s most enthusiastic state killers.

“I’ve heard Prime Minister Lee saying that in the end, the rule of law is what was applied to this case,” Lasry says. “A clemency process determined by executive government behind closed doors is not the rule of law ... it is offensive to describe it as the rule of law; it’s the very thing that didn’t apply in this case.”

Snapshots of Nguyen Tuong Van’s last week of life will linger for a long time with those who shared some of it:

- The haunting appearances at Changi of Kim Nguyen scarfed in the Vietnamese white of mourning, as she fought, unsuccessfully, Singapore’s official bastardry for a mother’s right to hug her son for the last time.

- The sinister appearance of Singapore’s secret police in the Changi gloom an hour before Nguyen died, monitoring and photographing not the mostly oblivious media throng but the few Singaporeans who showed up to protest and brave the Lee government’s backlash that their experience suggests is bound to come.

- The journalist from Singapore’s state-controlled New Paper, always eager to help her masters with the right message, scowling, “oh, he’s just a human rights lawyer” when an Australian colleague asked no one in particular who the Singaporean handing out anti-death penalty screeds was.

- The horror movie poster put up at the bus shelter outside Changi’s main gate on the day before Singapore killed Nguyen: “Oh, Yes, There Will Be Blood.”

- The workers who filed daily into the factory of state-owned Singapore Technologies a few hundred metres up the road from Changi’s charnel house. SingTech is the government’s arms supplier which Australian intelligence analyst Andrew Selth says has helped prop up the corrupt military junta in Burma.

- Singapore’s 73 year-old executioner Darshan Singh demanding it be he who should kill Nguyen “properly” or else he’ll file a wrongful dismissal suit against his employers.

- “Tony”, an Australian expatriate six years in Singapore who, decked out like Lance Armstrong, rode for the first time to Changi before the dawn and quietly wept alone by the fence.

-  The Straits Times government cheerleader-columnist Andy Ho arguing, in the relatively rare times his paper weighed into the story, that “if a few innocent people are punished or a few guilty ones are over-punished”, Singapore will be just fine.

I asked Ho in an email the day his government killed Nguyen if he thought his city felt safer than it did yesterday. Ho didn’t respond.

Business as usual in glossy Singapore.