Once a Jolly Hangman (4 page)

When Darshan Singh innocently broke Singapore's very own Official Secrets Act by allowing me to interview him - a surprise interview that made waves around the world - the establishment no doubt became fearful that their own citizens might one day catch the abolitionist bug. Not a word of the interview was published in any of the government-controlled newspapers, including The Straits Times. Only The New Paper published a report on its front and inside pages - not about the gory details I elicited but an attack on me for allegedly 'tricking' Darshan Singh to spill the beans and embarrass Singapore. Those were not his words but the words of The New Paper diverting public attention from reality once again! I am told that the shock waves that went through the hallowed halls of the Presidential Palace when my interview was first published in The Australian, one of the country's biggest newspapers, were palpable. It was the kind of publicity Singapore dreads. To them it was a major loss of face and no doubt inspired anti-death penalty activists everywhere to stand up and protest. They
attacked and condemned Singapore - 'a nation with ice in its veins' - without mercy. It was the very stuff that so alarmed the British establishment back in the 1940s and 1950s when abolitionists, empowered by evidence that innocent men had been hanged, finally claimed the moral high ground. Singapore was now getting the same kind of treatment and they didn't like it one bit.

3

Looking For Mr Singh

Woodlands. It seemed an unlikely part of Singapore to find the home of the hangman. But there I was driving along Upper Bukit Timah Road hoping that the address I had found was the right one. Or more to the point the man who lived there really was Singapore's chief executioner, Darshan Singh. I wanted to meet this unknown but much-feared gentleman who was about to hang the Australian drug trafficker Nguyen Van Tuong on death row in Changi Prison. Named after the vast acres of rubber trees planted by the British during early colonial days when Singapore was a mosquito-infested mango swamp, Woodlands lies just across the border at the southernmost tip of the Malaysian peninsula. The name was on every signpost starting from my home near Bukit Timah Nature Reserve where monkeys leap from trees and sit on rails waiting for unwitting humans to give them food who risk being fined if they do or attacked if they don't.

When Sir Stamford Raffles 'discovered' the tiny island in the early 1800s for the East India Company it was, according to the records, populated by no more than 158 Malay fishermen and their families in tiny hamlets dotted along the coastline. Within a year or two of Raffles's arrival, immigrants had swelled the numbers by more than 5,000. Business was beginning to boom with the British presence and the East India Company moving cargo to China and back. But no one at that time would ever have predicted the population of the Little Red Dot - Singapore's nickname - would soar to almost five million in less than 200 years. The People's Action Party government hopes to push that total to 6.5 million before 2020 by encouraging couples to have more

babies and relaxing immigration rules, especially for highly qualified men and women in the fields of finance, medicine, science, technology and just good old entrepreneurship.

The government is following the tradition established during the days of empire when Singapore became one of the world's major trading crossroads. The population grew by leaps and bounds as Chinese, Malays and Indians were encouraged to migrate to provide skilled workers, enterprising businessmen and, of course, cheap labour. Since independence in 1965, Singapore has undergone a dramatic change from green to concrete. It is now packed to the gills with high- rise apartment blocks, factories and shopping malls, intricate road and rail systems all neatly interspersed with or camouflaged by remnants of the rain forest the island once was. All this is the direct consequence of the massive industrial modernisation programme initiated and driven by the pre-eminent political personality of the past six decades, Lee Kuan Yew. He also foresaw the need for good public housing, education and hospitals, to support and foster all this modernisation. Huge blocks of low-rent government flats and factory estates sprang up as fast as the rain forest disappeared or was depleted. Of course, all this progress was, arguably, helped by the British legacy: a basic infrastructure of legal,
governmental, educational and economic systems designed primarily, of course, to maintain its colonial and military power base and just as importantly the status of the colonial elites.

Although the legal system was based on English law it was soon fine-tuned to ensure that Lee Kuan Yew and his People's Action Party remained in power in perpetuity by silencing all political opposition through fear of being jailed as 'communists' or financially ruined. Lee also adapted some other methods acquired from the former rulers. Ominously, one of these included the British way of hanging. If Singapore can boast one of the highest standards of living and growth rates in Southeast Asia there is another statistic that it prefers not to talk about except in the abstract. It has the highest execution rate proportionate to its population in the world - higher than Iran, China and Saudi Arabia. The fear of the gallows and the malevolent spectre of its mysterious, enigmatic hangman - so death penalty advocates maintain - has kept Singapore a relatively crime free and safe place to live, raise families and, just as importantly, do business.

An incomparable aficionado of the British way of hanging is Darshan Singh who joined the colonial service as a prison officer in 1957. Using the so-called Table of Drops devised by the nineteenth century cobbler-turned-hangman, William Marwood, Darshan Singh was taught by B. Seymour, the last British colonial hangman. The Table of Drops, advocates of the death penalty assured everyone, was the most 'humane' method in preventing slow strangulation or decapitation if the calculations - body weight and height determined the length of the drop - were correct.

The purpose of my hoped-for meeting with this gentleman was not only to talk about his long, secret career but in particular the imminent execution of Nguyen. It was an execution that was promising to create a storm of protests across Australia and many parts of the world. I was new to Singapore in 2003 and all this made me more and more curious about the man who was to hang Nguyen even though at that time the trial process had not been completed. It seemed a foregone conclusion, however. Nguyen had been caught with 4.2 kilograms of heroin - way above the 15 grams minimum that mandates the death penalty in Singapore. His days were obviously numbered.

My interest in the death penalty and all that it means was probably inspired by the fact that I grew up just a few miles from a notorious British execution spot - Gallows Corner in Essex - where, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, public hangings were a regular form of weekend entertainment just before the pubs opened. Of course, this was long before radio, movies, television and premier league football. There was a need to relax from back-breaking and boring jobs in the soul-destroying factories of industrial England. There was little else to do. This was fun to many Britons - a regular boozy weekend carnival of the most appalling kind. These condemned prisoners were not always vicious criminals or notorious masked and armed highwaymen such as Dick Turpin who also ended up on the gallows. Some were mere horse thieves, burglars or pick pockets, like 'Jenny Diver' of Mack the Knife notoriety who took advantage of spectators at these gory spectacles and robbed them as the condemned swung from the gallows.

Of course, the death penalty in Britain and more than two-thirds of the countries in the world has now been abolished in law or in practice.

Some countries retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes such as murder but can be considered abolitionist in practice in that they have not executed anyone during the past ten years and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not carrying out executions. The list also includes countries which have made an international commitment not to use the death penalty. Amnesty International figures show that during the past decade, an average of over three countries a year have abolished the death penalty in law or, having done so for ordinary offences, have gone on to abolish it for all offences.

The original idea of having public executions in Britain was to frighten people to death to ensure they obeyed the law, to always be good, hardworking, upright God-fearing citizens. It didn't seem to work, however. People still murdered, robbed, raped, burgled, stole sheep and horses, chopped down trees and picked pockets - all crimes which attracted the death penalty equally in those days. Much to the chagrin of many fans of the sport' public executions were banned in 1889 not only because they were suddenly deemed unseemly' or uncivilised' but also because the British establishment decided that putting people to death ought to be shrouded in mystery and something to fear rather than a gory spectacle to enjoy with the family. Hangmen were made to sign the Official Secrets Act forbidding them to talk or write about what they did and the horrors that inevitably took place during the execution ceremony. Until they became brave enough to defy it, newspaper editors came under the same Act and faced fines and even jail. But the postwar era saw a more vociferous and powerful revival of the anti-hanging lobby and emergence of human rights activists, who finally achieved their aim in 1965 just as Singapore gained its independence and Darshan Singh was well into his career executing people at the rate of about twelve a month.

And now I was in Singapore. It was the first time since capital punishment was abolished in Britain that I had lived in a country where the death penalty seemed to be universally accepted as a matter of fact save for a handful of brave human rights activists. I happened to switch on the television one afternoon in late September 2003.1 was suddenly jolted from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. The then Singapore prime minister, Goh Chok Tong (now senior minister) was being asked by BBC interviewer Tim Sebastian how many people
had been executed so far that year. He looked surprised and said he 'believed' it was in the region of 'about 70 to 80'. Asked why he did not know the precise number he replied curtly: 'I've got more important things to worry about'. Two days later his office issued a statement revising the figure down to ten. Singapore does not normally release statistics on the people it hangs. Amnesty International estimates that more than 400 were hanged from 1991 to 2001, mostly for drug trafficking and murder. At the time of publication of this book - 2010 - the figure is estimated to verge on 550. But since Darshan Singh got the job back in 1959 the grand total is actually closer to 1,000 or even more, although six years of that time was during British rule. Only the government's well-guarded archives could reveal the actual figure and frequent requests by me and other interested parties remain ignored.

Most executions are carried out in complete secrecy and only occasionally acknowledged in the government-controlled media - or when pressured to do so when a foreigner is involved. Only those in the know are aware that on any given Friday, someone could be on their way to the gallows. But no one, except the hangman, the prison governor, a doctor, a priest, and a team of hopeful organ transplant surgeons standing by, knows for sure. So I knew I was treading on dangerous ground when I embarked on an attempt to extract some of Singapore's most carefully guarded secrets. If my information were correct, I was about to meet the most secretive hangman in history in one of the most secretive nations on earth where the topic of hanging people is as obsessively guarded as all those gold bars at Fort Knox. Was I on the verge of obtaining yet another major scoop in my long career as an investigative journalist? Or would I be arrested for attempting to suborn a public servant to break the Official Secrets Act? It would be a major, if dangerous, coup that would make worldwide headlines. I also knew I could end up in jail, a news item myself!

             
             
4

At Home with the Hangman

I had no idea what to expect when I rang the doorbell. I was just hoping that this was the home of Singapore's unknown but much-feared hangman, Darshan Singh. Not just hoping I was at the right address but musing humorously that he would kindly invite me in for a cup of tea and a chat - and tell me some secrets of the gallows he'd been in charge of for close on half a century. More important, I wanted to talk to him about his next 'job' as he was to call it later: the execution of the Australian citizen Nguyen Van Tuong was only weeks or days away. Australia was slowly waking up to the fact that yet another of its citizens was about to be hanged in another Asian country for trafficking drugs. It was promising to be yet another controversial execution in Singapore that brought down the wrath of many foreign countries and abolitionists - including those of Dutchman Johannes van Damme, Filipina maid Flor Contemplacion, Nigerian Amara Tochi, and Singaporean Shanmugam Murugesu and Malaysian Vignes Mourthi. It would also put the spotlight again on the German citizen Julia Suzanne Bohl, a high profile drug trafficker, and Briton Michael McCrea, a double killer, who miraculously escaped a grisly, ignominious end on the gallows by circumstance or political machinations and economic power. I was taking pot luck that I was at the right place and also that he would be at home.

I was on the tenth floor - or tenth drawer as a wag once described Singapore's maze of uniform apartment blocks as being more like giant filing cabinets. I pressed the doorbell. It was 11.30 a.m. There was no sound from within. Ten, twenty seconds or so passed. I pressed
again, this time a little more firmly. Then rustling sounds and muffled footsteps and the jangle of a bunch of keys came from within. I waited anxiously holding my breath, wondering what kind of reception I would get if, indeed, this was the man who bore the ominous title: chief executioner. I was accompanied by a young Singaporean photographer, Kian Yan Law, and I had prepared a little speech of introduction. Of course, I've never taken for granted what to expect in such situations. The worst experience during my long career as an investigative journalist was having a bucket of water thrown over my head from an upstairs window by a person of interest who did not want to talk to me.