Welcome to Hell
Page 15
They were thugs and murdering bastards. They hated prisoners and never missed an opportunity to dispense punishment. As in Chonburi, the blueshirts followed their lead. This resulted in prisoners having to face danger at every turn.
I recall one particular incident which happened shortly after I arrived there. At the time, I was still receiving medical treatment for my tuberculosis.
One of the guards told me that someone from the Irish embassy had come to visit. This was nothing unusual. I left my cell and headed towards the main gate which lay close to the visiting room.
As I strolled over, a blueshirt named Joe asked me where I was going.
‘Embassy visit,’ I said.
‘Which embassy?’ he asked.
He was standing there with the visit permission slip explaining who, what, where and when – all in Thai.
‘Can’t you read? It’s in your own language!’
He gave me a sullen look, and told me to go and sit down and wait for the official to arrive. When the time came, he called me.
We got to the gate leading out to the visit area, and he pushed me through.
‘When you come back I’m going to kick your ass!’ he hissed.
He was of a slight build. I was now feeling a lot better and decided that I wasn’t going to be intimidated any more.
I turned around and walked towards him.
‘Why wait?’ I said. ‘Do it now.’
He looked surprised, and I thought it must be because I was calling his bluff. He mumbled something and walked off ahead of me.
When we got to the visiting room, we came upon another blueshirt unlocking the door.
‘Put this prick in there,’ he said.
‘You’re the prick, Joe, not me,’ I replied.
I thought nothing more of the incident. I had a good meeting with the embassy clerk and didn’t give any more thought to the matter. I considered Joe to be just an arrogant arsehole.
My trouble started once the visit ended. When I got back to the prison gate, I was met by 20 or more blueshirts.
At first I didn’t even think about them. They had a lot of freedom and would often congregate in groups like that. They just told me to sit on the bench and wait. Then Joe turned up and, quick as a flash, I was surrounded.
He accused me of insulting him and demanded that I apologise in front of his friends. Joe took a few steps forward and started pounding his palm menacingly with his baton.
‘If you were a man, you’d apologise,’ he said.
‘I’m more man than you’ll ever be,’ I snapped. ‘And I’m not fucking apologising!’
He kicked me in the ribs.
I tried to get up off the bench but the other blueshirts held me back. This wasn’t hard; I was still pretty lean because of the TB. In fact, most people who met me took me for a junkie.
Joe knew I was weak and kept barking at me like a dog.
‘You have to apologise! You have to say you’re sorry!’
I refused.
‘Say you’re sorry? What is this schoolboy shite?’
I told Joe again that I wasn’t going to apologise for anything, and tried to get up. He kicked me again, but this time I was ready.
I caught his leg and flipped him over and as soon as he hit the ground I hit him.
That was my mistake. The other 20 blueshirts jumped on me at once. It was a real free-for-all, and they hit and kicked me willy-nilly.
When it was over, I scrambled to my feet. I saw a commando sitting about 20 yards away. I can still see him sitting there, just smiling.
‘You’re supposed to stop this shit, you bastard, not just fucking sit there!’ I cried.
He laughed dryly.
‘Go away, foreigner,’ he replied. ‘Go back to your building.’
The blueshirts hadn’t really beaten me that badly; they’d given me mostly cuts and bruises. I felt lucky, in fact, because they hadn’t used their batons.
But before setting up to lynch me they had obviously asked the commando for permission. My guess is that he told them they could kick me around a little, but not hit me with their batons. After all, he wouldn’t want too much blood on his nice clean floor.
I complained to the embassy – not because I was hurt, but because I’d have to go through that same gate each day to go to the hospital. I said that I didn’t want to have to fight the blueshirts every day. They in turn sent a letter to the prison.
I don’t know what they said, but it worked.
Days later, the Assistant Director called me to his office. He explained that the commando in charge on the day was new and didn’t know all the regulations yet. If I filed my complaint his career as a commando would be finished. He asked if I would let the matter drop and accept his word that it would never happen again.
I had no choice. I could have made a formal complaint, but it would probably have got me killed. So I told him that if he removed Joe from the gate, I’d let it go.
You might think I was the loser but I had won that battle; I’d stood up to the prison authorities and more or less got away with it.
* * *
That same month, the commandos beat to death eight prisoners in Bombat Prison, which adjoins Lard Yao.
The eight prisoners had tried to escape. They had smashed a commando over the head while he was sleeping and made a run for the wall. Once the alarm was raised, the blueshirts went after them.
While the other prisoners were counted and locked inside the factories, the blueshirts caught the escapees and dragged them over to the waiting commandos.
The commandos picked one at a time, and beat and kicked them until each was unconscious. While one was being beaten, they made the rest stand and watch until it was their turn.
Knowing what was coming next, some of the escapees made a desperate attempt to get away, and somehow managed to climb the wall that separated the prisons.
I saw the whole thing unfold from my cell. I watched two of them scurry around the trees that grow between the prisons.
One jumped down into Lard Yao, but he soon realised that one of our blueshirts had spotted him, and disappeared back over the wall.
Eventually, the blueshirts in Bombat got hold of them all and they were dragged off to be beaten.
The commandos weren’t content with just beating the shit out of them once, though. While they were lying there unconscious, the commandos threw water at their faces to revive them. One commando decided that water wouldn’t do the job, and urinated on the prisoners instead as they lay there, unconscious.
When the prisoners awoke, the commandos started attacking again. They beat them mercilessly, and this time they continued until all eight were dead.
Even though none of the commandos carried a gun, the news reports claimed the eight prisoners had been shot while trying to escape. They had got around this problem by shooting all eight after they died.
On the newsreel, all the bodies were covered, the bloodstains showing clearly against the white sheets. Most had injuries to the torso, but some had multiple bloodstains to the face and head area.
Unbelievably, the commandos still weren’t satisfied. After they had murdered the prisoners, they went and gathered all the prisoners who had been friends with the eight men, or had ever shared a room with them. Each of these men was handcuffed or tied up, and beaten.
In fact, they followed that practice in every Thai prison. If someone ever escaped or tried to flee, they beat and punished everyone that knew him.
Only two months after that incident, the commandos in Lard Yao beat a half-Thai, half-Chinese prisoner to death in Building Two.
The prisoner had stuck a nail in the wall to hang his coat or bag on. A commando told him to take it down, but he told the commando to fuck off. The commando hit
him, and immediately let his blueshirts loose on the inmate.
They were, as usual, a little over-zealous, and the prisoner had to be taken to the hospital for stitches and a broken arm. When they brought him back from the hospital, he was put into leg irons and dragged off to solitary. Soon he was paid a visit in solitary by the commando and his henchmen. They beat the poor bastard until he passed out.
About an hour or so later, the other men in solitary noticed that he was having trouble breathing, and called out to the guard on duty.
By the time the commando got off his arse and came to the cell, it was too late. The man had died.
This case was not unique.
Another time, during a routine search by the blueshirts, a Nigerian prisoner was caught with about 30 g of heroin, which he quickly swallowed. They should have taken him to the hospital and made him sick or used a stomach pump to retrieve the drugs. But the commandos had a better idea:
‘Let’s beat it out of him.’
Maybe they thought that if they kicked him hard enough, he’d throw up the heroin without wasting time by going to the hospital. It didn’t work that way though.
The beating they administered caused the bag of heroin to burst in his stomach. The man died, and it was explained away as a junkie overdosing.
Nobody really knows the total number of prisoners maimed or killed by the commandos, because nobody cares.
I saw prisoners left with brain damage or crippled for life. I lived with one man who was left paralysed down his left side because he had been beaten so badly.
Other men were left with permanent limps. Throughout the prison, and the Thai justice system as a whole, there were men who weren’t so lucky, and didn’t survive the beatings they received.
Life meant nothing to the commandos, and if you pissed them off or gave them enough reason, they’d kill you in a minute and then laugh about it. For all prisoners, violence or the threat of violence was never far away. It was just something we had to live with.
Anyone who visited me passed remarks when they saw the commandos and their bamboo batons and nightsticks. Most people thought the weapons were only for show, but they were not.
The commandos made sure that visitors saw very little. Thorough care was taken to make sure visitors never saw the real face of a Thai prison.
* * *
Despite the ever-present threat of violence in Lard Yao, my health continued to improve. I had exhausted virtually every avenue of legal appeal without any real success but I just got on with life. I suppose you could say that I had come to accept what had happened and that I would have to serve out my full sentence.
When I realised that there was no use in fighting the system I just adapted to it, though I managed never to become institutionalised.
Sure, I continued to campaign for my release with the help of John Mulcahy, but privately I accepted my fate and looked forward to the day when I would be freed.
I had no other choice.
When I regained my health, I decided to get fit. I had never been much of a sportsman but now I decided to train. If nothing else, it would take my mind off things.
My new found desire to become fit coincided with a decision by the Thai prison authorities to hold its own version of the 2002 World Cup.
Each prison was told to compile a team which represented a participating country.
I volunteered to join in to have some fun but it didn’t take me long to realise that the whole competition was a fraud.
When the idea was first suggested, the prison authorities sought sponsorship from large companies and the government. In order to attract investment, they invited representatives from various TV stations and journalists, a few embassy officials and some other VIPs.
Pepsi then agreed to sponsor the event to the tune of five million baht. Once they were on board, other companies donated money for a chance to get free PR. When the sponsorship money was in place, the Minister for Justice agreed to open the event.
When I say the event was a fraud, I don’t mean to say we never played football. We did – but it wasn’t anything like most people were led to believe.
The prison authorities refused to buy the team kits and provide us with the football shoes that had been provided for by the sponsorship money.
The commandos pocketed the money instead and forced us to pay for everything ourselves. The prisoners were the ones who bought the team kits, the socks, boots and everything else. We even paid for the footballs.
The guards made a killing. They even charged the inmates who wanted to watch the competition and cheer their team on. The inmates were forced to pay 200 baht for this privilege.
The sponsorship money was stolen almost wholesale. All we got was a couple of free glasses of Pepsi, a towel and a couple of pairs of underpants. As usual, the prison and the commandos kept or stole the money for themselves.
They did the same thing six months later when they announced that they would start a Thai kick-boxing programme in the prison.
I became fascinated by the sport which the locals called muay Thai. This kind of boxing was a vigorous martial art that had developed over the past 2000 years. It used to be called pahuyuth a couple of hundred years ago, but had mutated into a modern sport.
Many Europeans, even in the martial arts world, did not know about muay Thai; very few people taught it, because it not only involves punching and kicking but the use of your elbows and knees.
The conditioning regimen used to prepare fighters was legendary for its intensity and rigour. Fighters became hardened to an incredible degree. Getting kicked in the shin by a muay Thai fighter is often likened to being hit by a baseball bat.
I couldn’t wait to get involved. But the guards were wary of the whole idea. I think they worried that we might start beating them up, or at least make the blueshirts think twice about assaulting us the way they did now. But their objections, thankfully, went unheeded by the authorities.
The prison chief told us that participants would be trained by a professional trainer, and those who made the grade would be allowed go and fight in one of the local stadiums. Naturally, all training equipment would be provided by the prison.
When I heard this I knew exactly what was going on: it was another money-making racket.
The prison had raised sponsorship money from some of the boxing stadiums outside, partly to help the prisoners, but also to promote the sport.
This didn’t deter me. As far as I was concerned, they could keep all the money as long as I got to train.
About 15 foreigners signed up to fight. On the first day a trainer did come to Lard Yao, watched a couple of us perform kicks and took the time to show us a few basic moves.
The Assistant Director and the commandos watched the training session.
But that was the last I ever saw of the trainer. I presume he lost interest when the Assistant Director refused to pay him for his time.
I was undeterred. I made some discreet enquiries about the sport. I heard that some of the Thai prisoners in my building used to be champions before being sent to prison. True enough, as it turned out, there were a few.
Rather than abandon my plans, I and two others asked these prisoners to train us. They agreed, and under their guidance we learned how to fight.
The training regime we followed was rigorous, exhausting and punishing. And I loved it.
I learned the basic techniques first. The training involved learning to use the hands, elbows, kicks and knees to punch and kick your opponent.
Though the high kicks looked spectacular during competitions, I quickly learned that the elbows and the knees were the most damaging weapons used by fighters. Sometimes they were even deadly.
Two muay Thai techniques became my favourites. These were the Thai low kick and the Thai roundhouse kick.
The Thai roundhouse kick was also unique as far as I was concerned. This kick is carried out with a straight leg and the entire body rotating from the hip.
I learned that almost all techniques in muay Thai used the entire body movement, rotating the hip with each kick, punch and block. As a result, most techniques are slower, but much more powerful than boxing or karate.
Although we had no proper equipment, all we could do really was run, skip and box a little, but it hardened us. I found the training exhilarating. It took my mind off my situation and gave me a purpose in prison.
The commandos watched me train from a distance. Other prisoners avoided getting into rows with the three of us because we looked muscular and fit. The change in my physical appearance was dramatic.
I went from being someone who could be mistaken for a heroin addict to someone who might just as easily pass for a bodybuilder. I became very muscular and flexible.
Eventually, we made our own kick-pad out of blankets and an old sack. We trained on this for months, but every time we kicked or punched it, we damaged it.
By this time, a number of Irish people living in Bangkok had become involved in the campaign to have me freed. I won’t name them because they wish to remain anonymous. They often came to the prison with parcels of food and medicines. These welcome visitors came every week. They brought fruit, drinks and food to the prison, which helped me keep mind, body and soul together.
They also acted as a point of contact between me and John Mulcahy at times when one of us needed to get an urgent message to the other.
I was reluctant to ask these people for anything, given everything that they were doing for me, but I eventually caved in. After many sore fists and bruised knees, I sent word to my benefactors asking if they would help me to buy some proper boxing equipment.