Once a Jolly Hangman (20 page)

Purwanti was one of a string of Indonesian maids who had committed crimes that would ordinarily have attracted the death penalty in 2004. When these cases began coming to light and giving
Singapore such a bizarre image, some activists began asking why. And under their very noses they suddenly found a grim picture of a modern society of'slaves' being forced to work up to 18 hours a day for years without ever getting a day off. Depending on their knowledge of English they would be paid from $170 to $350 per month, a pittance by Singapore standards. And most of that would be sent home to support their poverty stricken families. Their duties included shopping, cooking, scrubbing, cleaning cars, washing, ironing and, more dangerously, cleaning the windows in their high rise apartments so they always sparkled inside and out!

Domestic workers often face poor working conditions known as the three Ds - dirty, dangerous, difficult - without legal recognition as workers. Maltreatment by their employers often includes violence, sexual abuse or even rape. Sometimes employers do not even pay them. They often work without safety equipment. Since 1999, more than 140 Indonesian domestic workers have died in workplace accidents, mostly as a result of falling from windows while cleaning them. But unlike other workers in Singapore their conditions are not governed by an Employment Act, points out human rights activist Alex Au. Only after the appalling stories of the so-called 'havoc maids' got everyone's attention did the government pass a law that every maid should get one day off per month! But this is not compulsory provided they are paid if they work on their official day off. On May Day 2008 all three local government-controlled newspapers, The Straits Times, The New Paper and My Paper, carried short articles which said that maids should get one day off a week by law like everyone else. But the suggestion was greeted with disdain from many citizens who responded that this would put an 'unfair burden' on them. If it has taken more than 40 years since independence to achieve the right to one day off a month for domestic workers, achieving the right to one day off a
week seems like an impossible dream. Adding to the pressure of having to work 18- hour days, many Singaporean households have installed webcams or CCTV cameras that follow their maids virtually wherever they go. This is to ensure the maids do not get up to any kind of mischief while their employers are at work or enjoying themselves away from home.

Alex Au notes: 'One cannot deny some need to protect their homes and children, but webcams are merely treating the symptoms'. He says

too many maids are still in their teens when they come to Singapore

from rural villages.

They have never been away from their families, and suddenly they are contracted here for two years without a vacation or even one single day off. It's an emotional shock, they can't get the food they are used to, they miss their friends and they get homesick very easily. They have had very little schooling and no awareness that cultures can be different. There can be an infinite number of ways for misunderstanding and friction to arise, leading to the feeling of victimisation on the maid's part making conflict inevitable. Trying hard to keep the lid on the maids by locking them in the house, perhaps even under constant surveillance, doesn't solve the problem, but more likely piles on the pressure.

Au then poses the question:

Has anyone made the connection between this state of affairs and the steady diet of news about maids murdering their employers and family members? In contrast, I can't recall a single instance of a foreign worker employed in the manufacturing, cleaning or construction industry - predominantly men from India, China, Bangladesh, Thailand and Burma - taking out their frustrations against their employers to the point of killing them! Does this have to do with the fact that cleaning and construction workers get days off? And that they have their own quarters to retire to, unlike domestic maids who have to live under their employers roof and are under CCTV watch all the time? How can we deny the worth of free time, privacy and socialisation to any person's psychological wellbeing? I am embarrassed that we have become a society so marked by inhumanity, I am embarrassed that we have a government that, far from providing moral leadership, has created a climate for inhumanity to metastasise like cancer. And it now seems maids have a licence to kill!

16

A Woman Named Angel

If the Lion City shows no conscience or fear hanging women for drug offences or murder - unless a major foreign power is twisting its economic tail - it does sometimes, just occasionally, show a glimmer of humanity. A rare, surprise gesture of 'kindness' as it was described at the time came shortly before the scheduled execution of Angel Mou Pui-Peng. Mou, a 25-year-old single mother from the then Portuguese province of Macau who lived in Hong Kong was due to hang on 22 December 1994. Because it was Christmas, she was granted a temporary stay of execution after a plea by her mother and nine year-old son. Mou was originally scheduled to hang simultaneously the same morning with two Singaporean drug traffickers who were not Christians. The authorities bent the rules and allowed her devout Christian family to visit her in Changi Prison every day during the entire religious season. They then deemed that the young woman's life should come to an end just as the sun rose on the twelth day of Christmas. It was Friday 6 January 1995 and Fridays at dawn are the traditional times for killing people in Singapore. They could not put it off any longer.

Mou was arrested at Singapore's Changi airport on 29 August 1991 with a suitcase containing 20 packets containing 4.1 kilograms of heroin, according to the Central Narcotics Bureau. She had flown to Singapore from Bangkok. At her trial she claimed she did not know the false-bottomed suitcase contained heroin. She thought she was carrying contraband watches instead given her by a couple she met by chance. There was no evidence that the syndicate involved in the run had been traced and arrested, nor if there had been any attempts to
track them down using intelligence she might well have provided. And, as usual in Singapore, her appeals were rejected out of hand. No one in its conveyer belt execution system was prepared to consider that she might well have been hoodwinked and was telling the truth. There was no evidence to suggest she was or wasn't innocent of trafficking drugs. Having them in her possession was all the system wanted to know. Hangings are normally carried out simultaneously in groups of three if there are that many waiting on death row. It is all done in strict secrecy and little is known about exactly what happens. But having interviewed Singapore's chief executioner, Darshan Singh, I gained a much better insight into the whole gory business - an insight that the average citizen would never dream or even care about knowing.

In Mou's case, at about 5.50 a.m., Darshan Singh entered this slender young woman's cell to prepare her for her execution. After talking gently to her, he pinioned her arms behind her back and secured them with handcuffs. Then he walked her into the death chamber less than a minute before 6 a.m., made her stand on the twin trapdoors and swiftly strapped her legs together. This was to prevent her struggling and kicking out in panic at the last moment. But Mou was calm and resigned to her fate, her lawyer said later. Darshan Singh checked his watch. Mou was literally seconds
away from death. The noose was quickly positioned around her slender neck. Then, like a magician, he produced a white linen cap as if from the air and placed it gently over her head in one deft movement. Mou was a slim woman barely 5 feet tall. Darshan Singh had already calculated a drop just enough to break her neck causing her to die instantly and painlessly. Before he pulled the lever he uttered the now memorable words he first revealed to me for the first time in that dramatic interview in October 2005. 'I am sending you to a better place than this'. Mou was gone. To a better place? Only she knows and, being a Christian, had a good idea where she would be going. After the execution her body was returned to relatives to be cremated that evening at Mount Vernon crematorium. There was a short service for family and friends. 'Our sister Mou has now been taken to heaven - a place we will go and we shall hope to see her there one day', an elderly pastor, speaking in Cantonese, told the congregation of some 25 people. 'When are you coming back to Hong Kong', a young distressed woman cried, unable to comprehend
what had happened. Mous sister Cecilia and a few others dared watch the coffin, covered in black velvet, disappear into the furnace. Her father, reportedly reconciled with his daughter during her brief stay of execution, broke down uncontrollably after the cremation.

In Lisbon, President Mario Soares and the Portuguese government had also appealed for clemency on the grounds of Mou's youth and the fact that she was only a low level carrier. But according to officials in Portugal, Singapore responded that they could not differentiate between foreigners and its own people. The Governor of Macau, Rocha Viera Vasco, said he was supported by the people of the Portuguese province in expressing deep sorrow over Mou's execution and criticised Singapore's judicial system. 'For someone like me who is a citizen of a country that takes pride as one of the first to abolish capital punishment, her loss by execution is incomprehensible and even revolting'. Chris Patten, who was Hong Kong's Governor at the time, said the British colony had supported a plea for clemency put forward by Britain and the European Union. Of course, Singapore was determined not to lose face. The sad story of Mou is all too common, a teenage girl who gets pregnant at 16 is forced to leave her neighborhood out of shame and inevitably drifts into poverty and petty crime to survive. She becomes an easy target for exploitation by more sophisticated people who make a fortune from drugs and do not care who suffers along the way.

Mou's lawyer, Peter Yap, told a Hong Kong newspaper she was 'normal and calm' when he last saw her. He said she 'was emotionally stable and prepared to die. Spiritually she is very strong'. He also said Mou was comforted by the settlement of guardianship for her son. A human rights activist in Hong Kong wrote at the time:

Sadly she was sent as a carrier to one of the few countries in the world where they have no compunction about executing young women. Whilst I accept that she was guilty, I doubt somehow that she was evil but rather think her motive was purely the small sum she hoped to make had she got away with it. However, many people may feel that death is an extreme penalty for merely carrying the drugs for which the 'mules' usually receive very little reward whilst the 'Mr. Bigs' make millions from the safety of their mansions. Equally there are many who admire Singapore's tough and unbending stance on crime which has helped to make it a safe and prosperous country.
Interestingly
most Singaporeans support their tough laws and executions rate just a paragraph or two in the press, if mentioned at all. Why is it that even in countries like Singapore and Malaysia people are still not deterred from crime by the death penalty? Are they stupid, desperate for money or do they think that somehow they won't be caught? Mou may or may not have known what she was carrying, but even if you believe her story, she knew she was smuggling which, no doubt, would have carried a heavy prison sentence in Singapore.

What puzzled me while carrying out research for this book was that nothing is ever heard about the syndicates who entice these mules into their orbit, often by trickery, then warned of the dire consequences if they tried to back out. The only way out, they are told, is feet first! If the Singapore authorities can so coldly send a silly young single mother like Mou to her death on the gallows why not use her instead as bait - whether she knows it or not - to trace and hook her handlers at both ends of the drug run? It does not take rocket science to work out the potential for such an operation. Instead of being hanged so barbarically, she could have become a useful tool in the fight against the big time traffickers, help catch the Mr Bigs and become a heroine. When I raised this question with an expert in the field he simply replied that the murky world of drug cartels is murkier than anyone could possibly imagine.

The year 1995 was one of the busiest on the gallows in Singapore. The hangman sent mother of two, Thai national Navarat Maykha, to a 'better place' at dawn on 28 September. A devoutly religious woman, she sat praying in her jail cell, nervously awaiting her execution. She was to be hanged for her crime: trafficking heroin into Singapore. Up to the very moment of her death, she swore she had been unaware of the heroin hidden in the lining of a suitcase given to her by a friend. An impoverished and uneducated woman, she swore she had no idea that heroin that was hidden in the lining of a suitcase given to her by a Nigerian friend. 'It was heartbreaking', her lawyer Peter Fernando was quoted as saying after her execution. 'If you are an addict, and you are simply sitting at home with more than 15 grams of heroin and you cannot prove with scientific accuracy that a portion of the drugs are for personal use, you will hang'. On 27 September 1996, six people were hanged in one morning, three at a time. Four more had been hanged
the previous Friday, all for drug trafficking. According to Amnesty International more than fifty people were hanged in 1995, the majority for drug offences.

Hong Kong born, Cheuk Mei-mei, aged 29, was executed on 3 March 1994. A fellow countrywoman, Tsang Kai Mong Elke, was hanged on 16 December 1994. Poon Yuen-chung, a shop assistant from Hong Kong, was 18 years-old when she and her 17 year-old friend, Lam Hoi-ka, were arrested at Changi airport, after arriving from Bangkok. The two girls had gone on holiday to Bangkok after telling their parents they were going on a local camping trip, airport officials found heroin hidden in a secret compartment in their luggage. Both denied any prior knowledge of the drugs and said they had been befriended by a Chinese couple in Bangkok who had taken them out to dinner and on sightseeing tours, and later bought suitcases for them. 'My sister is a simple and naive girl who can do foolish things sometimes', Poon's sister later told The Sunday Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper. Despite appeals for clemency, Poon
Yuen-chung was executed in April 1995. Her friend Lam Hoi-ka was sentenced to life imprisonment because she was under 18 at the time of the offence, airport officials found heroin hidden in a secret compartment in their luggage. They never found the Chinese couple in Bangkok. Perhaps they were the same people who also lured Mou to her death.