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News (Media Awareness Project) - Australia: Life In A Foreign Hell
Title:Australia: Life In A Foreign Hell
Published On:2001-02-21
Source:Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Fetched On:2008-01-26 23:38:41
LIFE IN A FOREIGN HELL

Lyle Doniger still has 45 years of his sentence for drug smuggling to
serve. But, as Mark Baker writes, the pushers who arranged his
ill-conceived journey to Thailand are out, courtesy of a more lenient
Australian system.

The nights are the hardest to endure. From lock down at 4pm each day
to release at 6.30 the next morning means 14 hours of close
confinement. It's a long time to be left alone with your thoughts;
too long for the gnawing loneliness that's only made worse by the 23
other bodies squeezed shoulder to shoulder beside you in the squalid,
stifling cell block.

Lying on a rough mat on the concrete floor while a single ceiling fan
chops at the relentless tropical heat, Lyle Doniger clings to the
worn and comforting strands of memory as he struggles to block out
the inescapable nightmare that stretches out to the end of his days.

He thinks of family and friends, of the space and comforts of life
back in Australia, and he tries to forget the 50-year sentence that
may yet spell death in a Thai jail.

"If it wasn't for my kids and my family I would have checked out long
ago," Doniger says. "There's no way I could have survived without
them. They're the ones who keep telling me to hang in there, hang in
there." Doniger is yelling from behind the steel mesh cage in the
visitors' section of Bangkok's maximum-security Bang Kwang prison.
"I've been through so much pain already, to check out now would be
doing the wrong thing by them. But some days you get very low, you
wonder how you can go on."

In early 1996 Doniger and two Sydney women, Jane McKenzie and Deborah
Spinner, were arrested at Bangkok airport as they prepared to board
an Olympic Airways flight to Australia. Thai narcotics agents,
working in collaboration with Australian Federal Police, later
discovered heroin-filled condoms hidden by the three in their bodies.

When the drugs were refined to establish their purity, the combined
quantities totalled 115.4 grams. On the streets of Melbourne or
Sydney at the time, that amount of heroin would probably have fetched
no more than $50,000. But under Thai law, conspiracy to export more
than 100 grams of heroin carries a mandatory sentence of life
imprisonment.

At the end of their trial, in March 1997, the three judges "halved"
the life sentences to 50 years, in return for pleas of guilty.
Doniger was led away in chains to Bang Kwang; the women were sent to
Klong Prem - the infamous "Bangkok Hilton".

During the court hearings, Doniger, McKenzie and Spinner told a tale
all too familiar in the world of petty drug trafficking. All three
were long-time addicts in methadone programs in Sydney who had never
been out of Australia. All three were independently recruited as
"mules" by a small-time drug syndicate that lured their naive targets
with promises of all-expenses-paid holidays in Thailand and a share
of the drugs smuggled home.

The mad adventure was doomed from the outset. It appears Australian
police were aware of the operation before the party even left
Australia. A deal between Australian and Thai police saw them
arrested in Bangkok while the mastermind of the operation, John
Charles Dodd, and his Australian Thai accomplice, Prachaya
Kavinmethavee, were allowed to fly back to Sydney before they were
apprehended.

Five years on, in the cruellest of ironies, Dodd and Prachaya are
free again while their hapless conscripts still face the prospect of
a lifetime behind bars. That grim reality, and five hard years in
Thai jails, has taken a heavy toll on Doniger, McKenzie and Spinner.

Their days in the crowded, squalid prisons crawl by in a never-ending
struggle against hunger, illness and boredom. The pain of separation
and isolation is constant, compounded by the fact that they all left
young families behind in Australia.

McKenzie's ordeal has been made even tougher by the death of her
husband, in an apparent drug overdose, a few months after she was
sentenced.

Now the three Australians clutch at two straws of hope to preserve
their sanity and survive: the possibility that they will eventually
be released under a Thai royal pardon, or that Thailand will ratify a
treaty with Australia that would at least allow them to be
transferred to jails back in Australia. Either way, none of them
believes they are likely to win their freedom for years yet.

Doniger lodged his application for a pardon 14 months ago. But in a
measure of how slowly the wheels of clemency turn in Thailand, his
file was only recently passed from the Corrections Department to the
Department of the Interior where processing will begin. It may be
years more before the case reaches the palace.

Inexplicably, the women have yet to lodge their applications for
pardons. There was speculation that they could be included in a
prisoner amnesty program to mark the 72nd birthday of King Bhumibol
Adulyadej in December 1999, but those hopes were dashed when
authorities excluded drug prisoners from the amnesty - a decision
seen to reflect a toughening in Thailand's response to its worsening
drug crisis.

After years of haggling between the Australian Government and the
States and Territories, legislation is now in place to allow
Australians serving sentences in foreign prisons to be transferred
home, but a treaty that would enable the 12 Australians jailed in
Thailand to be considered for transfer is still being negotiated.
While Australian officials remain optimistic about reaching
agreement, there has been little progress for months and the matter
has been further complicated by the recent change of government in
Thailand.

Doniger does not ask or look for sympathy. He openly concedes the
stupidity and petty venality that have wrecked his life. His plea is
only for fair treatment for the crime he committed. There's no doubt
that had he, too, been allowed to fly back to Australia before being
arrested, he would have completed his jail term months if not years
ago.

"I'd never been in prison before. I had no drug convictions. I may
not even have been sent to jail in Australia," he says.

"This was no master drug syndicate, just a bunch of stupid amateurs.
I was carrying just 34 grams - that's about the size of your thumb.
It's a standing joke among the other prisoners that I got done for so
little. The next smallest case in here was 1.4 kilograms."

Doniger is a gaunt and greying shadow of the stocky 45-year-old
arrested in 1996. He suffers from hepatitis C - the legacy of a
20-year heroin addiction - kidney problems and back pains. His
eyesight is also deteriorating.

His days are spent "scrounging" food, washing clothes and writing
letters. An Australian prisoner loan allowance provides money for
essentials and occasional food parcels from Australia supplement the
inedible rice gruel supplied by the prison.

Life has got tougher for Doniger since he lost his two closest
friends, one sent to solitary confinement and the other transferred
out of Bang Kwang. The three had formed a "food group" to arrange
daily meals, to share the cooking and to look out for each other
against theft and assault. "I'm pretty much on my own now, which
makes it very hard. I worry that if I get sick there'll be no-one to
help and protect me.

"There's no-one I can really talk to or confide in any more. You've
got to be very careful about opening up and showing your emotions.
You don't want to show any weak points. Some of the people in here
are not very nice people. There's a lot of junkies but some of the
big dealers in here are real animals."

The long nights in the cramped five-metre by 10-metre cell are a
battle of endurance. "You can sleep on your back, sort of, but you're
shoulder to shoulder with all the others," Doniger says. "It's so
crowded. We're like sardines. Every time someone rolls over or gets
up to use the toilet, you're woken up. There's a fan, but it's very
hot. At least we've fixed it up a bit.

"When I first arrived it was absolutely filthy in there, you wouldn't
believe it. The toilet had a big hole in it and all sorts of critters
used to come out of there."

Doniger and other prisoners scratched together some money to fit a
new squat toilet and build a screen for privacy.

Apart from regular consular calls, it can be months between visitors.
Once a year, prisoners are allowed a two-hour contact visit with
their families. Each year Doniger's son Troy flies up from Sydney to
see his father.

"When I see him my head goes blank. I just stare at him," Doniger
says. "It's such an emotional time. The whole place is just a sea of
red eyes and the hardest part is when he's walking away. I know I
won't see him again for a year. It rips your heart out and it's not
just me; all the foreigners are the same."

Doniger has not seen his two youngest children, Simon, 13, and
Hayley, 12 - both of whom have serious medical conditions - since he
left Sydney. The argument that he be allowed to go home and help care
for them is the basis of his case for a pardon.

Failing that, he believes an eventual transfer to an Australian jail
would make a huge difference to his life.

"I arrived here on April Fool's Day 1997 and it's been hell every day
since then. If I could get back to Australia it wouldn't matter how
many years I had to do. At least I could see my kids. My kids are my
life. Without them, I have nothing."

His greatest fear is that neither option will materialise.

"I keep hoping that one day I'll get out of here, but my nightmare is
that my pardon will be rejected. I don't think I could cope with
that. I've seen how after eight to 10 years in here the foreigners
hit the wall. Some become junkies, some start chasing the katoys
[transvestites], some just go plain crazy. I've been in prison five
years now and I can see the danger that lies ahead."
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