In a statement, the rights group said Singapore leads the world in executions, exceeding countries like Saudi Arabia, China and Sierra Leone on a per capita basis.

Some 408 convicts were hanged between 1991 and October 2003, 70% of them for drug trafficking and the rest mostly for murder.

Describing it as “shockingly high” and “shrouded in secrecy”, Amnesty called on the government to abolish the death penalty, cancel all pending executions and commute them to prison terms.

Singapore doesn’t publicise such statistics.

Amnesty said that between 1994 and 1999, an average of 13.57 executions were carried out per one million of the population, three times higher than the next country on the list, Saudi Arabia.

Anyone caught with more than 15g of heroin or more than 500g of marijuana is presumed to be trafficking and faces a mandatory death sentence.

Being crowned the world’s top execution capital has come as a surprise to most Singaporeans. They are also unhappy that the revelation came from Amnesty rather than their own government.

Since it has a good reason, the government should not be apologetic about it but announce such statistics regularly, suggested a businessman.

Judging from the Internet discussions, the call to ban execution has not found much support, except among the most liberal-minded.

At least two surveys last year showed Singaporeans were largely in favour of the death penalty.

The perceived danger of drugs differs greatly between East and West, where some governments have even legalised the use of heroin and marijuana.

Jail terms in the West vary but, unless violence is used, traffickers often end up with only a few years in jail and emerge to resume their trade.

Singapore has good reasons for being tough. It is a small, international city, situated close to the world’s biggest heroin producing regions – the Golden Triangle and West Asia.

It is an air and shipping hub with seven million visitors a year from all over the world that offers easy shipment or transhipment. Besides, many youths here can afford to buy the stuff.

Singapore cannot afford to remove the deterrent. Even with it, trafficking has not been eliminated, although it has sharply declined. However, the use of soft drugs like amphetamines or “ice” has gone up.

Generally, Singaporeans are disturbed by the high number of executions but consider them necessary for a stable society.

A visit to a website for undergrads, Funkygrad, showed these comments:

YEN – “Death penalty is never evil in any way. It is merely an effective method of getting rid of certain types of people who are nothing more than a menace to other humans.”

IWJ – “Kill one, warn the rest. I think it works.”

INNUENDO – “There’s no ambiguity in the law. The harsh sentence is laid out clearly; if dying hurts you that much, don’t do it. Taking into account their socio-economic backgrounds doesn’t make the crime less wrong.”

DRUSCILLA – “For murder cases, it is doubtful that the death penalty achieves a much deterrent effect since most murders take place without much calculation on the part of the killer. They are mostly spur-of-the-moment events.”

INGERSOLL – “Why should poorer people be let off for the trafficking of drugs when their actions can only ruin innocent lives?”

Drugs are, of course, not the only hanging offence. Others include murder, use of firearms and kidnapping.

Amnesty suggests that violent crime is best tackled by taking a soft approach to criminals and greater efforts to change society. For non-civil Asia, this is largely misplaced and even dangerous.

The liberal bias towards crime rests on a perception that criminals are bad because of circumstances – deprivation, broken home or low intelligence.

It smacks of “victimhood”, which implies that if someone commits a crime, it is mostly the fault of the parents, society, poverty, or anything else except the person himself.

The soft approach often conflicts with the public demand for protection.

I was news editor of Hong Kong Standard in the 70s, at a time when the city was gripped by triad violence and teenage rape. It was so bad that many friends would not let their daughters go out alone at night.

Teenage gangs would grab young girls, force them to go up to the rooftops and rape them. When caught, the British-run courts would send the rapists to a juvenile home for a couple of years, equivalent to a slap on the wrist.

Capital punishment existed but Britain, which banned it, refused to let it be implemented in its colony, so Death Row was filling up and murders continued.

The British were dispensing their own “soft” laws in crime-ridden Hong Kong, which upset the citizenry who had been protesting for years to no avail.

Today, Singapore’s high prison population could be the other extreme and that may be just as bad.

It has proportionately more people in prison than other Asian countries despite its lower crime rate, prompting questions about its penal policies.

A British survey showed that for every 100,000 Singaporeans, 359 are in prison – about three times as many as in Malaysia and Australia, 7.5 times more than Japan, and more than 12 times of Indonesia’s 29.

Briton Gavin Staples wrote in Soc.Culture.Singapore: “I have been a bit concerned at calls for some Asian countries to abolish the death penalty. This is not a good idea.

“As I am a citizen of a country that abolished the death penalty nearly 40 years ago, my advice to you is not to do it and end up like Britain.

“Singapore and many other Asian countries are highly regarded by all visitors, including myself. If they abolish the death penalty, years later they would wish they hadn’t.”

Amnesty International has good intentions, but there isn’t such a thing as one global solution for all countries. Its US branch is kept even busier.

The death penalty in America exists in 38 states, 22 of them allow executions for crimes by juveniles of between 16 and 17 years of age.

o Seah Chiang Nee is a veteran journalist and editor of the information website littlespeck.com (e-mail: cnseah2000@ littlespeck.com )

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