Remember Michael Fay, the American teenager whose case
stirred up a storm in the Western media after a Singapore court sentenced him
to six strokes of the cane for vandalising 18 cars over a 10-day period in
September 1993?
Unlike my colleagues from the
Washington Post and the New York Times, who believed he would suffer some sort
of lifelong physical or emotional trauma, I felt little sympathy for an
18-year-old punk who had such little regard for other people's property.
Perhaps it also had something
to do with the fact that as a high school student, I was often caned for
various infractions. I'm sure the Singapore practitioner had a certain
expertise my teachers didn't, but apart from stinging like hell and leaving a
patchwork of red welts across my backside, "six of the best" didn't
ruin my life.
In the end, with American
president Bill Clinton pleading for leniency, Fay got four strokes instead of
six and went back to the US none the worse for his ordeal. He was later arrested
for beating up his father and, predictably, for drug possession.
Now we have been subjected to
the same sort of hand-wringing over the fate of a sturdily built 14-year-old
Australian, who has now flown home after serving two months in confinement for
possession of 3.6g of marijuana.
Didn't we have this media
circus with Australian beautician Schapelle Corby, jailed for 20 years in 2005
for cannabis possession? In her case, Australians were widely convinced she had
been framed. With the so-called Bali Boy, it is his tender age.
Granted, a kid barely out of
puberty doesn't belong in jail, but two retired US Drug Enforcement
Administration agents I know say his lawyers are talking nonsense in asserting
he is "addicted" to marijuana. Marijuana isn't heroin or cocaine. No
one gets "addicted" to what after all is a soft drug. If he is a
habitual user, as appears more likely, then why didn't the media spend more
time questioning the quality of his upbringing?
Where were his parents in all
this? They promised to send the boy to a drug rehabilitation centre. Perhaps
they need some counselling themselves, considering the boy had already twice
been cautioned by the New South Wales police for drug use over the previous 18
months.
After all, Australian medical researchers
in a report last year found that teenagers who use marijuana before the age of
17 are two to five times more likely to graduate to harder drugs or alcohol
abuse in later life.
Bali may be a tourist paradise,
but it isn't the mall down the street. It is part of a foreign country where
the laws are often draconian and buying drugs in the street is an invitation to
being caught up in a sting operation. It is the oldest police trick in the
book. Instead, we were subjected to reports that mum and dad had been
approached to sell their errant son's story to a television channel for
A$300,000 (US$298,000) - a purported deal that could have affected the outcome
of the trial.
If we have learnt anything, it
was Corby's heavy sentence was due in no small part to the court's annoyance at
the Australian media's contention that the daughter of a long-time drug dealer
could not possibly be guilty of anything - at least in Indonesia. Former
Australian officials warned that for all the commendably sensitive way the
Indonesians handled the boy's case, nothing offends them more than over-bearing
white foreigners telling them what to do.
Conspiracy theorists suspect
Indonesia may have also been sending Canberra a not-so-subtle message about the
fate of 40 to 50 Indonesian boys languishing in Australian jails on
people-smuggling charges. The uneducated offspring of dirt-poor families, with
some as young as 13, most were crewmen on small hired fishing boats intercepted
while carrying asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia.
Unlike the Australian boy, who
even had Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd
personally involved in his case, they have often been detained in adult
prisons, unable to communicate in English and with little or no consular help.
While it was Australian
journalists and lawyers who drew public attention to the hypocrisy that attends
their confinement, Indonesian diplomats had already been quietly talking to
Canberra about the issue. Since his appointment in 2009, Foreign Minister Marty
Natalegawa has noticeably spent a lot more time than his predecessors attending
to the welfare of the country's often-brutalised maids and other citizens in
trouble abroad.
Some of the boys in Australia
have been held for 14 months or more. In many cases, their families have little
idea what happened to them, resigned to believing they had been lost at sea.
For coastal communities such tragedies are not uncommon.
International experts have
largely discredited the Australian police use of controversial wrist X-rays to
determine the age of the youths, but officials claim that where the results are
inconclusive they should be given the benefit of doubt and returned home.
Perhaps now, some thought will
be given to the stark comparison between the behaviour of spoiled boys from
affluent families - and those from a developing country forced into work at
puberty and who end up in a foreign jail through no fault of their own.
John McBeth
The Straits Times
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