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A golf course in a detention centre

THE KAMUNTING DETENTION CENTRE, off Taiping, suffers from an official schizophrenia that begins with its name. The roadsigns to the camp refers to it as the Kamunting camp; but at the camp, the authorities cannot decide if it should be Taiping or Kamunting; it is referred to as one or the other in signboards within a few feet of the entrance. (Officially, it is the Tempat Perlindungan Tahanan Taiping or the Taiping Custodial Detention Centre). Nor if it is a detention centre or a resort. To a casual passerby, it gives no hint of what it is. The armed guards, at first glance, could have been guarding the entrance to the offices of a ministry.. The changes give an illusion of a human face to the nastiness that goes on inside, not to rehabilitate those detained within -- 113, at last count -- but for the pleasure of the guards, the officers and sundry residents of Taiping and Kamunting.

This includes a "challenging" nine-holf golf course. The old green-and-red Prisons Department signboard is discarded amongst the rubbish and can be seen through the high security link fence and replaced with a warm, inviting, welcoming entrance, housed in a command centre with blue tiled roof and terrazeod walls, and suggest a holiday resort or golf course than a place of purgatory where those the government deems anti-nationals are housed. A far cry from its drab austereness, and no-nonsense but humane management, as recent as a decade ago.

The town has caught up with the detention centre, once in the bondooks, in a small village far away from civilisation, but which now all but envelopes it. So euphemisms are employed to scrub from the public mind it houses the government's perceived enemies. The British administration in Malaya set it up in 1948, with several more elsewhere in the country, of which only Kamunting remains, to incarcerate those suspected of being communists and who could not be tried for a gamut of reasons, including lack of evidence that could stand in a court of law. The Emergency Regulations framed its relevance, but after the Emergency ended in 1960, and the Emergency Regulations replaced by the Internal Security Act, the tenor of the camp changed. Fewer communists and Chinese were detained, and more Malays and others detained for opposition to the government. The transformation is now complete. All but a handful are Malays, and most there are for allegedly being a cog in the Al Qaeda network and the five (the sixth, later convicted under the Official Secrets Act, is in Kajang jail). About a dozen of those now in detention are for currency forgery, bringing in illegal immigrants, and passport scams.

I HAD GONE TO THE CAMP to join about 30 reporters on the day the FBI had come, in mid-November, to interview a detainee, Yazid Sifat. He was detained after one man he employed in the United States, a French Morroccan, Zaccarias Moussaouvi, was arrested for complicity in the the terrorist attack on New York and Washington two years ago. The US team was there for less than two hours, and Yazid was flanked by teams from the National Security Council and the Attorney-General's Chambers and his lawyers. The FBI was on a fishing expedition, and caught little or no fish. They had neither the time nor the patience to have got more. But after the parties left two hours later, Yazid and his lawyer were together for another six hours. The FBI wanted to show it had walked the last mile and no doubt would blame Yazid for not getting what they wanted, enough in the madness that pervades the US government to "prove" with "certainty" Yazid's terrorist links. It was during this interminable wait outside the camp that I learnt of the golf course.

That there should be a golf course did not surprise me, although that it was in a detention course did. Golf courses sprout in the most unlikely places: in remote power stations and government centres, built for the officers and those who come visiting, often stand out like a sore thumb amidst poverty and stands an incongruent icon of Malaysia Boleh!. A fellow reporter and I took the bull by the horns, after the other reporters left, and asked the guard for an application form for the golf course. He did not have any. But, to our surprise, he then directed us, without any checks or even for our identity cards, to the golf course, deep in the bowels of the detention camp and a kilometre away. We drove unescorted, past the heavily fortified detention centre to our left within site of the guardhouse through the length of the camp a kilometre or so away, and found it.

It was the Ramadhan fasting month, and none there but two Chinese prison officers ready to tee off, and who provided the details. The entrance fee is RM200 for government servants and RM400 for others, with a monthly subscription of RM20. The others were allowed in when the collection could not sustain it. A number joined for no reason than the two golf and country clubs, on either side of the camp, cost more than RM10,000 in entrance fees and a monthly subscription of a few hundred ringgit. The usual restrictions apply. Those with a security record or otherwise deemed unsuitable, like opposition MPs, social activists, and others of that ilk, cannot. Nor could the detainees. There are, for those who cannot afford the fees, two football fields. The 500 of so who live and work there are housed in barrack-like quarters. Once you enter the camp, the fortified camp within is all but ignored, although one cannot with the high security walls and triple-fortified barbed wire fencing around it. The detainees were once why the camp is there, today they are an excuse.

With these changes, the detainees are left to their own devices, those guarding them there so they do not "naikkan semangat" (raise their hopes). So anything that would or could, in the eyes of the guards, is disallowed. No newspapers, no books, no visits that could give them hope. No contact with foreigners. One letter per month per detainee. Newspapers are delivered to them full of holes -- the censors painstakingly gouge out any news that give them hope. One detainee, according to his lawyer, refuses it, on principle. The only rehabilitation they get seems to be to raise, every morning, the Malaysian flag and sing the national anthem, "Negara Ku". The Reformasi 5 refuse to. There is no other attempt at rehabilitation. Recently, when the two-year detention of the Al Maunah detainees was up, they were told they would be released. There were overjoyed and had a special prayer that evening. The next morning, when they were all ready to leave, they were told they detentions were extended for another two years. There is only one woman in the camp, there for her involvement in a currency forgery ring. She is divorced, and frightened sick her ex-husband would sell their daughters to white slavery. But her pleas fall on deaf ears.

There is no firm rule on what is allowed. The guards are capricious and out for a quick buck. When relatives bring food and cakes and other goodies, the guards allow only one week's supply; unless it is bought, at double or more what it cost, from the stall run by the prison guards on a lean-to outside the camp. Only one kg of kurma is allowed per month, and more if bought from the camp shop. Everything in this shop is three or four times more than it costs elsewhere. One detainee was not allowed a T-shirt unless another is bought at the camp shop. The water at the camp is often undrinkable, with one inmate recently finding a dead bird in the tank. But familes cannot bring in bottled water unless bought from the camp shop. There is no list of do's and dont's, and what is allowed depends on the capricious whims of the guards on duty.

That a golf course exists in a detention camp is a sign of permanence and that preventive detention is not about to end. When once, especially under the British, the aim was to rehabiliate, and care taken not to destroy the individual. But for the Grace of God go I was how they were treated, and if the roles were reversed, they expected to be treated likewise. The late J.J. Puthucheary told me, once, how when he was detained in the 1950s in Singapore, the Colonial Secretary of the day came to see him. He knocked on the cell bars, and asked if he had a moment for a chat. Brusquely, Puthucheary said no. The man went away and returned a few days later, when they met. When he talked of his desire to write what evenually became a seminal book: "Ownership and Control of the Malayan Economy", the man arranged for books to be sent to him from the University of Singapore library, and directed the economist and future Singapore deputy prime minister, Dr Goh Keng Swee, Prof. T.H. Silcock, Prof. Lim Tay Boh and others to visit and assist him in what way they could. And they did.

Ten years on, in self-governing Singapore, with Puthucheary detained afresh, this time for falling foul of the ruling People's Action Party, the privileges were gone, the regimen harsh, and the aim, not rehabiliation but punishment. Shortly after, Malaysia was formed with Singapore in it, but the island left to be independent two years later. Forty years on, Malaysia and Singapore continue to have the same extra-legal preventive detention laws, more frightening today in Singapore than it ever could be in Malaysia. In Singapore, the vestige of one's dignity is taken away with a scientific precision that all but strips one of one's dignity and sanity if one holds on to one's belief, but in Malaysia, by bureaucratic pettiness, the price gouging, the capriciousness of the guards. For those who live and work there, they can play golf, no doubt echoing Marie Antoinette's famouse words when Parisians rioted, in the late 1770s, for bread: "If they do not have bread, why don't they eat cake!" She was guillotined; in Kamunting, the guards get to rip the detainees off. With the same bad taste in the mouth.

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[This is my column in the Seruan Keadilan, the organ of Parti Keadilan Nasional, and appears in its second issue of December 2002]

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M.G.G. Pillai
pillai@mgg.pc.my