Prisoner Number 789/99

On September 11, the REVIEW's Kuala Lumpur Bureau Chief Murray Hiebert was imprisoned on contempt of court charges. He was released four weeks later. This is his story.

It's just after 7 a.m. and a new shift of guards has just opened the giant steel doors of the 98-year-old Seremban prison. Hundreds of prisoners in green shorts and white shirts begin pouring out of the three-storey, whitewashed cell blocks into a courtyard for the first roll call of the day. Leading the procession are dozens of inmates carrying black night-soil buckets into which prisoners have relieved themselves overnight. They dump the contents into a stinking open sewer in a corner of the prison grounds.

The twice-daily bucket-dumping ritual seems jarringly out of place in a country like Malaysia, which is racing toward developed status at a neck-snapping pace. The prison is located only a few dozen kilometres from where Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has spent billions of dollars to build a hi-tech Asian Silicon Valley, the glitzy new administrative capital of Putrajaya, and one of the world's most modern airports.

The buckets aren't an economic necessity. Instead, they seem designed to remind inmates of the harsh reality of prison life: Once you're inside, you are nobody and you have nothing. You have no house, no car, no job, no money, no dignity and no freedom. My only possessions consisted of a toothbrush with a broken-off handle so I couldn't whittle it down to a sharp point and use it as a weapon, a plastic cup, a tiny towel, a musty blanket, a few books and a prison number. Mine was NS 789/99 HL.

My time was divided between two prisons. The first was the modern maximum-security Sungai Buloh Prison, about 25 kilometres west of Kuala Lumpur, which houses about 3,400 prisoners, including Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy prime minister who was fired on September 2 last year by Mahathir. Anwar was subsequently arrested, tried on corruption charges and sentenced to six years in jail. He is currently on trial for sodomy. The second prison, in Seremban about 60 kilometres south of the capital, is an ageing minimum-security complex that holds roughly 940 inmates who are serving time mainly for trafficking and using illegal drugs.

Neither of these prisons resembles the dismal, disease-infested and overcrowded haunts common in many developing countries. Nor are they as violent as those are in many Western countries. Still, some shocking practices exist. One is the anal search by guards on the lookout for tobacco, money, illegal drugs and cigarette lighters, items that are banned in prison. Anal searches are common worldwide, but what distinguished those at Sungai Buloh is that a guard in a green surgical mask would probe dozens of new arrivals at a time using the same pair of latex gloves. Inmates feared this procedure because of the high risk of spreading Aids among a population that includes many intravenous drug users. The irony that Malaysia is one of the world's largest producers of latex gloves wasn't lost on my prison mates.

I had only been in Seremban a few days when I started to get thank-yous from prisoners who said that beatings and abuse had ended since I arrived--at least almost. One day I watched through a window as a guard beat a prisoner in the kitchen behind the hospital ward where I was housed. Other inmates said the victim, who worked as a cook, had been caught frying some pieces of chicken that he hoped to barter with another prisoner for tobacco.

On another occasion, I noticed a prisoner waddling by my window on his haunches. My cellmates called it "walking like a duck." They described it as a common punishment for such misdemeanours as talking back to a guard, even though the only punishment legally permitted for misbehaviour is putting a prisoner into an isolation block. Inmates said the punishment they feared most was being whacked on the bottom of their feet with a guard's nightstick. This, they say, causes blood to rush to a victim's head, precipitating a thundering headache and making it impossible to stand up for several days. "Because you are here, the beating has stopped," one victim told me shortly before I was released. He had scars on his head from two long gashes that he said he had received in a fight with a guard who withheld part of the medicine he had been prescribed.

I personally never faced any abuse. Because I was a foreign journalist, whose incarceration had been criticized by U.S. President Bill Clinton and had unleashed widespread editorial condemnation outside Malaysia, guards seemed to deal with me as politely as they could. "My bosses are afraid of what you'll write when you leave," a guard told me one day while taking me to meet some visitors. The chiefs of both prisons repeatedly told me I was their "uninvited guest," implying that neither they nor I had anything to do with my stay.

One of my biggest adjustments to life in prison was the utter lack of privacy. I was never alone--even the toilets were doorless and located at the end of the room in both prison hospital wards where I was held. It's humiliating to come down with diarrhoea and have to relieve yourself repeatedly in full view of your cellmates. Because the lights were kept on all night, it was even hard to sleep. And guards were omnipresent, depriving me of even a sliver of independence: One guard was assigned to monitor and record in a notebook all of my activities during my waking hours.

Guards also wanted to talk. Their favourite topic was politics, particularly the political crisis that has engulfed Malaysia since Mahathir fired and imprisoned Anwar. Many guards did little to hide their support for Mahathir's former protégé. "It's time the old man steps down," one senior prison official said, summing up his views after an hour-long discussion. A few minutes later he came back and pleaded with me not to forget that our conversation had been off the record.

On another occasion, I was handcuffed to a guard who had been assigned to watch over Anwar when he was in the hospital a few days earlier. "Anwar's my favourite," the burly guard declared, holding his index finger over his mouth as if asking me not to share his secret with anyone. Guards at one of the prisons have put up a cartoon on an office wall depicting Augustine Paul, the judge who found Anwar guilty of corruption, in a British-style judge's wig. The caption reads "tidak relevan" (not relevant), the words Paul repeatedly used to shut down Anwar's defence team.

My time in Sungai Buloh never overlapped with Anwar's--he was transferred to a hospital in Kuala Lumpur for arsenic-poisoning tests the day before I arrived. But inmates in the prison hospital, where Anwar had been held in a private room on a separate floor, talked fondly about him. They said the irrepressible politician had come to visit them almost every evening. During these visits, he would ask about their health, bring them reading material and discuss the latest twists in the country's political life. They said Anwar was always cheerful and on the lookout for ways to help other inmates.

Once Anwar arranged for an imprisoned medical doctor to be moved to the hospital so he could help care for the sick. On another occasion, he helped a businessman get permission to go to the barber to get a shave. (Razor blades are banned in prison.) Anwar also tried to cheer up inmates by singing Hindi love songs with another prisoner.

I soon discovered that the toughest battle in prison is to maintain emotional equilibrium and not to lose hope. My fellow inmates provided much of the support and advice I needed. One stormy night when we had lost electricity in the small prison hospital where I was confined, Nazri, who was nearing the end of a 20-year term for growing marijuana in his backyard, told me a helpful parable about an exhausted clock. The clock went to God to complain that it was getting tired of its job of going around and around. "Don't think of your job as going around and around," Nazri quoted God as saying. "Just think of it as going 'tick, tock, tick, tock.'" Nazri's point? Don't think too much about the good life you had before or about how much time you have left in prison. Focus only on the present moment. "That keeps me from going masuk air," Nazri says, using the Malay words for "going into water," prison slang for going insane.

To survive, a prisoner has to join a "family," a group of inmates who look after each other. When one inmate had an ache or pain, others would give him a backrub. Those who had visitors who purchased food in the canteen shared their biscuits with others. Several prisoners at Sungai Buloh took turns helping a burly retired general suffering from heart disease into his wheelchair whenever he had to go to the bathroom. They helped him get dressed when he had an appearance in court, where he was on trial for allegedly using weapons to prevent his eviction from a house.

I was fortunate to be adopted by fellow prisoners in both prisons in which I was detained. Minutes after I arrived in Sungai Buloh, Singh, who was in jail for burglary, hobbled over on crutches, his leg in a cast, and offered me a small hand towel and a bar of soap to take a shower. (Once his leg is healed--the people whose house he burgled had chopped at his leg with a machete--Singh faces two strokes of a cane, a brutal punishment that will rip the skin off his buttocks and leave him permanently scarred.)

Prisoners have discovered ingenious ways to cope. One day when I had lost my appetite for the cold boiled vegetables and rice I was served as a vegetarian, Nazri made me some tom yam, Thai-style hot-and-sour soup. He got vegetables from the garden behind the hospital and sliced them with a razor blade he had borrowed from the prison barber shop. (Inmates aren't allowed to have knives.) He boiled water for the vegetables with the electric-heating coil that served to boil water in a plastic bucket used by inmates when they took baths. He spiced the soup with flavouring from a packet of instant noodles. The soup was the most delicious meal I had in prison.

The main preoccupation of most prisoners each day centres on getting tobacco, a banned commodity since smoking was outlawed in 1990. I discovered the importance of tobacco in the prison system within minutes of my detention. During the high-speed ride to the prison in a police truck, a detainee asked me for a piece of paper almost as soon as we moved. He fashioned a long, thin stogy by rolling loose tobacco into a piece of typing paper. The next task was getting a light. The police had confiscated all lighters and matches from prisoners. The prisoner asked the policeman sitting in the back of the truck for a light, but he was rebuffed. In the end, the "market economy" sputtered to life. A lighter mysteriously appeared when the prisoner passed two one-ringgit coins--about 50 U.S. cents--to the policeman.

Inside the prison, groups of three or four prisoners would suddenly gather around a bed or in the bathroom to share clandestine puffs on a stogy. Actually, getting the tobacco is a more difficult task than sneaking a smoke. Because prisoners are carefully searched on arrival, the only way they can sneak in tobacco is by swallowing small balls of it covered with thin sheets of plastic. This method is called "the rocket," because prisoners deliver their cargo by giving themselves a soapy water enema. Sometimes this can be dangerous. While I was in Sungai Buloh, 14 tobacco balls got stuck in one prisoner, forcing doctors to operate to remove the blockage.

The second delivery method is via prison guards themselves. The price is extortionate. At Sungai Buloh, seven five-gram packages cost a hefty 50 ringgit, 17 times higher than the street price of 2.80 ringgit for the same quantity. But smokers think it's worth it. "Tobacco is worth more than a prisoner's life," Singh told me. Prisoners can be put in an isolation cell if they're caught smoking, but I never witnessed this punishment. Guards seem to try to ignore the billows of smoke in the air as long as prisoners make an effort to puff their cigarettes discreetly.

A second preoccupation of the prisoners centres on what they'll do when they get out. Long-term inmates asked about things such as where the main bus station in Kuala Lumpur was located these days, how to invest in the stockmarket and about what is inside the Petronas Towers, the planet's tallest buildings. Some wondered if they might be able to parlay their skills working in the prison wood-working shop or shoe workshop into a job in the real world. One drug addict, who was in for his seventh time, wondered how long he would survive freedom next time around. He's due out in 2002.

He and my other cellmates have a right to feel anxious. Being released is more traumatic than it might seem. I still feel disoriented by my return to freedom even though I dreamed of it every day of my incarceration. Even after only a month in prison, I faced culture shock after getting out. I found it strange at first to be free to make even the simplest decisions; even ordinary tasks like packing my bags to leave Malaysia were a challenge. It was almost as though I had to relearn many basic life skills. Even now, sitting in my new office in Washington overlooking a bustling city street, I still feel bewildered by mundane things like being able to order a pizza, pick up a telephone, read mail that hasn't been censored, and not needing to be handcuffed before I go outside.

As the prison gates clanked open on October 11, I uttered a prayer of thanksgiving that my prison term had been short. I reflected on just how precious freedom of the press and freedom of speech are, and saluted the courage of our forefathers who had struggled to make it possible for so many people to take these rights for granted. I also marvelled at the extraordinary sacrifices that the Nelson Mandelas and Mahatma Gandhis had endured in prison to win freedom for their people.

I had decided early on that if I had to go to prison, I might as well make the most of it, and in the end I found that the experience had many benefits. I rediscovered the preciousness of having family, colleagues and friends who care. Without their support, it would have been significantly harder to survive prison with my spirits intact. Prison also gave me time to stop and think about what's really important in life. I had a chance to be still, and in the stillness find new strength and hope. Prison provided me with an opportunity to rediscover myself and renew my religious faith.

There were also surprising light moments. As I left prison and stepped into the waiting car, one of the lawyers telephoned my family in Washington. "You're out--that's great," my 15-year-old son Jonathan enthused, as I choked back tears of relief that the ordeal was over. But I didn't have much time to relish my new-found freedom before I was shocked back into reality. "Dad, I need a car," my son said.