| How would alienating Singapore help Nguyen Tuong Van? | ||||
| Australian November 28, 2005 Editorial: By Michael McKenna and Alan Shadrake ACCORDING to broadcaster Mike Carlton, the response of Australians to the imminent execution of Nguyen Tuong Van in Singapore should be to boycott Singapore Airlines and cancel their contracts with Optus, which is owned by Singaporean telecom SingTel. Most of Carlton's fellow shock-jocks have taken a similar line. But apart from adding economic misfortune to human tragedy, it is hard to see what such a course of action would achieve. Given that Singapore is apparently intent on hanging Van, as it does hundreds of its own citizens, boycotts and sanctions will neither save this foolish young man's life, nor occasion a dramatic rethink by Singapore of capital punishment. And are our economic relations with Singapore a mere bagatelle that we should be prepared to sacrifice on the altar of a feel-good moral gesture? Hardly. Singapore is our largest trading partner in the region, and the eighth-largest of all, with annual two-way trade of well over $10 billion. Around a quarter of a million Singaporeans visit here each year, and they are a huge market for our elite schools and universities. Perhaps not too many shock-jocks would lose their jobs if the Van case led to an escalating stand-off, but plenty of ordinary Australians would. That would not be the end of the damage. Our military, security and diplomatic ties with Singapore are as close as any we enjoy in the region. These interactions are even more important in the age of terror, with outfits such as Jemaah Islamiah keen to slaughter Australians wherever they can. It was co-operation and intelligence-sharing that foiled a plot by JI to blow up our embassy in Singapore in 2001. And the diplomatic fallout from Australia's grandstanding over Van would ripple out across the region, where other nations do not share our views on capital punishment. Indeed, it could well cruel our participation in the new East Asia summit -- into which our way was smoothed by, yes, Singapore. These are just some of the considerations those who argue John Howard should "muscle up" to Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong over the Van case are ignoring. When former prime minister Bob Hawke took that approach in the cases of Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers in 1986, it exerted a chilling effect that took more than 15 years to work itself out of the relationship between Australia and Malaysia. Singapore, one of the original "tiger economies", is a successful society, but an authoritarian one. A small sign of that authoritarianism is that the hands of judges are tied on drug-trafficking: for more than 15g of heroin -- and Van carried nearly 400g -- the mandatory sentence is death. Asian countries such as Singapore and China, it must be added, go very much against the international trend on capital punishment, which has seen more than 50 countries abolish the penalty since the 1980s. Capital punishment is a dreadful policy, in the first place because its deterrent effects are highly dubious, and in the second because it flirts constantly with the worst possible kind of injustice -- taking the life of a man or woman who is later proved innocent. But the road to reform is not via boycotts, sanctions or diplomatic standoffs, which are only likely to entrench existing positions. The road to reform is more globalisation: the deeper integration of economies that also nurtures a constant dialogue and exchange of values. The Van case is an impossibly sad one, but we can make the pain even worse by using it as a pretext to undermine one of our defining regional relationships. |
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