The Justice Game

by Geoffrey Robertson

  The cross-examination of Kuan Yew was lengthy and ill-tempered: we disappointed each other. I expected the historical figure I admired, and some residual evidence of his Cambridge double-first: instead, I found an evasive and truculent witness whose mind was set in the communist-infested fifties and whose main concern was to stop the publication of informed criticism (ill-informed criticism, curiously, he did not mind at all). He complained bitterly to the judge about my style of cross-examination:

  I see counsel, Queen’s Counsel at that, groping madly, wildly looking for nooks and corners to get me on some hook to turn me upside down. My Lord, I am not a child and he is not an inexperienced counsel. And we have wasted hours, he repeating the same question and getting the same answer from me. I am amazed, truly amazed, my Lord. I had prepared myself for this cross-examination. I had identified the main points. Those points which, if I met a cross-examiner like John Mortimer, he would have gone straight for, and I would be prepared for it. But here, I am vexed.

  Poor Lee Kuan Yew – he had even scripted his own trial. The problem was that when he did not get the questions he wanted he nonetheless gave the answers he had prepared, so we did not get on and neither did the proceedings. The Review’s case involved an assertion that the Roman Catholic Church had a traditional mission to relieve poverty and social injustice, even in Singapore where such things did not officially exist. It also involved an exploration of how this doughty fighter against British colonialism and then the menace of communism could come to despise human rights as forcefully as he did. The trite answer, I was forced to conclude, was that he despised everything that might interfere with his right to run Singapore as he thought best.

  Lee admitted that he had been frightened by what he saw in the Philippines before the fall of Marcos: ‘Catholic priests in clerical robes spouting forth . . . it was a united-front conglomeration with trade unions – they were in it; human rights – they were in it; professional associations – they were in it; lawyers – they were in it’. After the detainees were arrested, what he could not abide was how their families had been permitted to speak in the cathedral after mass. ‘Emotions were let loose. That is my concern. I am not interested in whether they spoke truth or untruth.’ The fact that more prayers had been said for the government than for the detainees cut no ice at all, because they were ‘prayers for truth and justice’, and that was ‘tendentious agit-prop’. That the Catholic Church – or any Church for that matter – should conceive itself to have a social justice mission was ‘totally unacceptable’:

  Q: You suggested to the Apostolic Nuncio that the Vatican should clip the wings of these four priests, and find out their source of inspiration?

  A: Yes. I mean by that, keep them out of the political arena and find out who in the Philippines or who else was giving them these ideas of justice, freedom, democracy and so on . . .

  Q: But you accept that it’s a matter for the Church to decide whether –

  A: I did not accept that. I accept that it is a matter for the Government to decide whether churchmen are in politics or out of politics but I leave it to the Church to decide what they do to ensure that their priests stay out of politics.

  Q: It is a matter for the Church to decide whether its mission and tradition requires priests to speak out on social policy issues, isn’t it?

  A: This is the first time any church, or anybody else, has put that proposition to me.

  Judge: Listen, Mr Lee. Look, Mr Robertson. I don’t think we need to go into that.

  So we didn’t, although it was the real issue in the case. This libel action was about what happened at a meeting between the Prime Minister and the Vatican diplomat. The Review had quoted a priest as suggesting that Lee had attacked the Church. Lee claimed that this was a false and defamatory suggestion, because he had merely asked for a change of archbishop:

  A: All I told the Vatican representative was, please can I have an archbishop who can keep his priests out of politics.

  Q: ‘Send me an archbishop who will keep his priests out of politics.’ Was that what you were saying?

  A: No. Yes. (Laughter)

  Judge: Look, would the people up in the gallery please contain yourselves. It’s not a theatre, it’s a court. These are serious proceedings.

  They were for the Far Eastern Economic Review. But the only safe place to laugh at Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore is in a courtroom when he’s suing for libel. If you write satirical plays, you can be locked up without trial indefinitely, and (so Lee told me) ‘no amount of human rights agitation will get the government to back off’. On the contrary, he boasted, human rights agitation and habeas corpus applications would be counter-productive, because his government believed that the more aggressively it responded to such ‘pressure’, the more cowed its opposition would become. It was, by this logic, keeping the detainees in prison not because of anything they might have done, but because people were still pressing for their release.

  The Review’s report of Lee’s dealings with the Church was true enough and fair enough to pass muster in any country which honoured the principles of free speech. In Singapore, however, it became expensive speech, published at the cost of S$230,000, the amount of damages awarded to the plaintiff. (There was some slight satisfaction in this, since Lee’s QC had told me before the trial that he would settle only for a grovelling apology and S$350,000). The judge had decided that the damages should be increased because of my cross-examination, which was ‘calculated to be offensive and to increase the hurt to the Prime Minister’s feelings’. The Malaysian Bar Association immediately commented that this was the first evidence that Lee Kuan Yew actually had any feelings.

  Kuan Yew now affects the role of an elder statesman promoting ‘Asian values’ against the Western fashion for human rights. To do him justice (and one would not wish to do him anything less), his chosen weapon has been the libel writ rather than the hammer to the head, and the interrogation techniques of his secret police may have left victims shaking with cold and flu but have always left them alive. Familiar criticisms of Singapore are misplaced: they focus on the laws against jaywalking in the streets and urinating in the lifts and dropping chewing-gum wrappers on the pavements, which only make me wish we had similar laws in Britain. This superficially clean image of the State serves to disguise the fact that Singapore functions as a base for dealing and running arms. Should that great secret begin to be exposed by local journalists and lawyers, I suspect that the air conditioners of the Whitely Road Detention Centre will be reactivated for a threat to the State of much greater moment than any that the ‘do-gooders’ from the Catholic student centre were ever capable of offering.

  Lee Kuan Yew finally stepped down from the Prime Minister-ship, bequeathing his second-generation leaders a country without habeas corpus. He laughed under cross-examination at the English language press ‘telling us benighted natives how to conduct our affairs’, but the real joke was that he had to use English law and English lawyers to muzzle his opposition. I do not blame him for cashing in – there are plenty of politicians in Britain who happily exploit its libel laws. But Lee’s strategy is catching: from Malaysia to Mauritius, from Ghana to Grenada, the common law of libel and contempt and official secrecy have all been employed to suppress dissent. It is instructive to observe how China, on regaining Hong Kong, announced that it would re-introduce a number of colonial ordinances providing for contempt and sedition and criminal libel prosecutions: by these devices, acceptable because they remain the law in the UK, any necessary suppression of speech will be effected. Britain no longer rules the waves, but throughout the Commonwealth it is the British rule book that tends to be waved to declare freedom of speech off-side.

  Hope for change comes, ironically, from the involvement in international human rights courts of judges recently liberated from communism. A few years ago I represented a young journalist named Bill Goodwin who refused to obey a court order to name the source for a news story. We lost unanimously in every court
in England, by nine Law Lords to love, but won by eleven votes to nine in the European Court of Human Rights. Our majority was largely secured by the verdict of judges from newly liberated Eastern Europe – the Czech Republic and Poland and Latvia and Estonia and Slovenia. They knew the importance of free speech, because they had lived without it for so long.

  Chapter 11

  Fantasy Island

  A large and lively crowd gathers at nightfall in the public square in a Bogotá suburb, to cheer the man whom all opinion polls predict will soon be President of Colombia. Dr Luis Carlos Galan walks to the front of the makeshift rostrum to acknowledge the applause, which is suddenly punctuated by the dull repetitive thuds from rifles firing. The candidate crumples, while through the frenzied, screaming citizens, his assassins make their escape, dropping a Galil assault rifle as they run.

  I have watched this news clip many times. The assassination happened on 18 August 1989 and I spent much of the following year studying the arms and money trail which made it possible and which also facilitated the murders of dozens of judges and journalists. It was an unusual job for an Old Bailey barrister, and it took me to the beaches of Antigua and the banks of Bermuda, to the cattle and cocaine valleys of Colombia and to the gun factories of Israel, ending in Washington with testimony to a Senate committee. I served as counsel to an inquiry set up by the Governor General of Antigua, after the discovery that Galan’s killers – the Medellin cartel – had been supplied with lethal weapons by the Antiguan defence force. The story is about sleazy adventurers and politicians with blind eyes, but it is told as a tribute to courageous lawyers – those judges in Colombia who did justice, although they knew they would lose their lives for doing it.

  These men and women, who refused to become party to the corruption that cocaine spawned, were assassinated by a small army commanded by Rodriguez Gacha, the militant partner of Pablo Escobar. Gacha’s force was remarkable for the efficiency of its killings and its kidnappings, its bombings (especially of newspapers opposed to the cartel) and its major barbarities, such as the destruction of a commercial airliner with the loss of 111 lives. The secret of Gacha’s success was two-fold. Firstly, his force had been taught by mercenaries from Israeli anti-terrorist units and the British SAS, at training camps on Colombia’s La Isle de la Fantasia. Secondly, they had somehow managed to acquire the most modern and most effective weapons. That much was clear from examination of the gun which killed Dr Galan – a state-of-the-art Galil assault rifle, recently manufactured by Israeli Military Industries (IMI), a section of the Israeli defence ministry. The production number on its barrel identified it as having been shipped from Israel as recently as March 1989, in a large consignment of arms ordered on behalf of the Antiguan Government and delivered to the Quartermaster-General of the island’s defence force.

  Antigua is a different kind of fantasy island. Only fifty-four miles square in the eastern Caribbean, it has 365 palm-fringed beaches (‘one for every day of the year’) and cricket and calypsos. It echoes with English gentility, from Peter de Savery’s yachtclub near Nelson’s dockyard to the bewigged barristers in its courts and the unarmed policemen patrolling streets where rusty coronation arches still stand in memory of Queen Elizabeth’s last visit. Thrice-weekly, BA jumbos disgorge middle-class tourists from the shires, who take their tea and cake promptly at 4 p.m. in the shade of its luxury hotels. It is that place in the world where author Ken Follet, paragon of political correctness, tells readers of the Guardian he would most like to live. When I remind Ken of the reality – that his fantasy island is the most corrupt country in the Commonwealth Caribbean – he is genuinely surprised. ‘But I thought Antigua was a parliamentary democracy.’

  That is the problem. Antigua is a nation of fewer than seventy thousand people, with a vote at the United Nations and an overdraft at the World Bank. It has been dominated for thirty years by one family, the Birds, whose supporters, retainers, hangers-on, beneficiaries, dependants, and political cronies, together with those too frightened or too depressed to vote against it, have ensured its electoral hegemony. Papa Bird, now in his eighties, was the trade union leader who emerged before independence to become the first Prime Minister, a post he still occupied in 1989 with the assistance of his two sons, Lester, the Foreign Minister, and Vere C Bird Jnr, the Minister for National Security, Public Works, and anything else which his father thought appropriate. According to the Israeli government, in its explanation to Colombia, it was as Minister for National Security that Vere Jnr ordered 400 Galil assault rifles, 1,000 Uzi sub-machine-guns and 200,000 rounds of ammunition, at a cost of US$350,000, for delivery to the Quartermaster-General of the Antiguan defence force. This force has no ‘Quartermaster-General’: it comprises ninety-four soldiers, whose weapons and ammunition are supplied free by the United States. The guns, including the one dropped by Galan’s killers, were destined for the Medellin cartel.

  On receipt of the Israeli explanation, the Colombian government issued a formal but ferocious protest note to the government of Antigua. It was received by the Foreign Minister, Lester Bird, who immediately called his brother’s office, demanding to speak to Vere ‘on a matter of life or death’. Vere ambled outside, to take this private call in his ministerial limousine, without bothering to remove one of his ‘special advisers’ dozing in the back seat. The layabout was woken by the Foreign Minister’s voice booming through the car-phone speaker: ‘We’s in deep shit now’.

  The traditional way for a government to emerge from the state known in Antigua as ‘deep shit’ and in Britain as ‘presentational difficulties’ is by setting up a judicial inquiry, which takes so long to get under way that those responsible have time to cover their tracks and so long to report that public fury will have abated when it does. So Papa Bird asked his Governor General to appoint a Royal Commissioner to find out why arms purchased in the name of his government had ended up in the arsenal of a Colombian drugs cartel. To placate Colombia and Israel, and allay US concern, the British Foreign Office was asked to recommend a suitable Commissioner, and suggested Louis Blom-Cooper QC, whose appointment was announced by the Governor General before Papa Bird realised that a Blom-Cooper inquiry had led to the dismissal of a corrupt government in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Bird Snr immediately asked the Governor General to revoke the appointment, but he refused. Cyclone Louis was about to hit Antigua, and the Birds could only try to limit the damage. To do so, they hired at enormous expense Lord Michael Havers, the former Lord Chancellor, and two more Queen’s Counsel. Vere Bird Jnr, the minister who had apparently ordered the weapons, was separately represented by no fewer than six counsel, three of them QCs. Louis Blom-Cooper asked me to act as counsel for the Commission, which had to piece together a jigsaw of contemporary international villainy. The story that follows is found in the Commission’s Report.

  It began on the luxury ranches of the Middle Magdelena Valley in Colombia, with their white fences and private airstrips and advanced communication systems in contact with the light aircraft which transported heavy bags of cocaine across the Caribbean to the United States. In 1988 Rodriguez Gacha was the king of the Medellin cartel, his fabulous wealth attracting mercenaries from Britain and Israel to train his troops on intensive ten-day courses held on La Isle de la Fantasia. There were twelve soldiers of fortune imported from England – a motley collection of old Angola hands and recent dishonourable discharges from the army and the SAS – but the team from Israel was altogether more professional. It was led by Colonel Yair Klein, a retired parachute regiment commander, now the director of Spearhead Ltd, a company offering what its brochures euphemistically described as ‘survival schools’ and ‘VIP and executive protection training’ by instructors culled from elite commando units. Gacha’s son Freddy was among the first graduates of Klein’s ‘survival school’; he made a video showing untrained killers from the streets of Medellin being turned into trained killers by the latest Israeli army methods. All they needed were modern Israeli weapons and here, t
oo, Klein was useful – through his contacts with a network of ex-army officers based in Miami, which dealt arms to most of the dictatorships of Central and South America as agents for Israel Military Industries. One was a retired brigadier-general named Pinchas Schahar, who lived in Miami’s exclusive Turnberry Island, where he was the friend and neighbour of a man named Maurice Sarfati.

  Sarfati had first visited Antigua in 1983, a penniless adventurer until he nestled with the Birds. They made him a director of Antigua and Barbuda Airways, and formally appointed him as a ‘special envoy’ of the Antiguan government. Thus armed with free air tickets and government backing, he embarked upon a project to siphon millions of dollars in American aid money into and out of his own pocket. Taking advantage of Antigua’s status as a third-world country, and of the fashion for funding ‘sustainable development’, he persuaded a Washington bank to provide millions of dollars in interest-free loans to finance a melon farm on the island. Much of this aid money he used to acquire his Miami condominium, replete with Mercedes and swimming pool, and to put his two sons through finishing school in Switzerland. To keep the Antiguan government sweet he opened a credit arrangement at the farm, whereby certain VIPs might draw $1,000 in cash at any time. Vere Jnr had a more flexible credit limit, according to Sarfati’s secretary, who was to claim that she was directed to make $5,000 payments to the minister’s wife, who lived in New York. The aid millions were quickly dissipated and by 1988 the farm had amassed debts of about US$7 million. But Sarfati had not finished making monkeys out of the Antiguans. He provided $9,000 to one minister, who subsequently issued him with promissory notes backed by the government to the tune of $4 million. Sarfati immediately discounted them, through ‘junk bond’ dealers Drexel Burnham, in return for cash to maintain his lavish lifestyle. The notes were counter-signed by an official who was building a new home. Maurice Sarfati helped him import, duty-free, some fixtures from Miami: a jacuzzi, five ivory toilet seats, and six pairs of gold taps.