October 9, 2005
Holly Deane-Johns is among more than 30 Australians who are in Asian jails on drug charges. In the wake of the Schapelle Corby case, there is hope of them coming home, Erin O'Dwyer reports.
HOLLY Deane-Johns was in Bangkok when the tsunami hit Thailand's southern beaches. But unlike most young Australian backpackers - who knew instantly via SMS, TV or email - it would be weeks before the news of the devastation filtered through to the young Perth woman.
For five years the 32-year-old convicted heroin trafficker has languished in Thailand's notorious prison system. Her cell is filthy, cramped and isolated from the outside world. "I went to see Holly in February and she knew nothing about the tsunami," says her closest friend, 72-year-old Perth retiree Brian Haffenden. "There are no newspapers, radio or internet and no access to telephone, so she has to reply on the people who visit her. It's overcrowded and it's horrific."
In recent years the Deane-Johns story has been all but forgotten, replaced by a spate of high-profile drug arrests that have turned alleged drug traffickers into minor celebrities and shifted the spotlight from the other 141 Australians still withering in overseas jails on drugs charges.
Deane-Johns (pictured), a former heroin addict and petty criminal, bears little resemblance to Gold Coast beauty student Schapelle Corby, who this weekend notched up a year in prison, and Sydney model Michelle Leslie. Deane-Johns has no high-profile backers. She has received no saturation news coverage, and her family has been offered no lucrative media deals.
But Corby and Leslie - and others like them - should be watching her case with interest. Before year's end, Deane-Johns is expected to become the first young Australian woman - and only fourth Australian - to return home under the 2002 Thai-Australian prisoner transfer treaty. If her transfer is seen as a success, it may be just the push Jakarta needs to sign off on a similar treaty and send Corby and Leslie home.
THE TRAGIC Deane-Johns story begins in Perth. Her heroin-addicted mother died from a drug overdose, prompting her father to dedicate his life to drug counselling. Meanwhile, young Holly was locked in her own heroin hell, which saw her spend six years in Western Australia's Bandyup Women's Prison.
By 2000, Deane-Johns was a small-time criminal with a big-time drug habit. She flew to Thailand on holidays and soon fell foul of Thailand's high-profile drug war. In August 2000 she was arrested in a Bangkok post office, trying to mail a small parcel of heroin to Australia. Another 15 grams of heroin was found in her Bangkok apartment, while a swoop on a friend's digs found 110 grams. The pair had been snared in a two-month surveillance operation by the Thai narcotics squad, sparked by a tip-off from the Australian Federal Police.
For three years Deane-Johns languished in Thailand's notorious Bangkok Hilton (Klong Prem Central Prison), awaiting a sentence that would almost certainly be death by lethal injection. But a Thai judge looked kindly on her guilty plea and commuted the sentence to 31 years in jail. In July 2003, sweltering in oppressive humidity, Deane-Johns told reporters that all her Christmases had come at once.
"I'm happy because it gets me home eventually," she said. "It's a relief."
Since then, she has passed her days sewing silk flowers and learning Thai in Lard Yao prison. She sleeps on a straw mat in a cell she shares with 30 other women. There are no walls - only bars - and the food is poor. Health care is exclusively for those who can pay.
Apart from regular visits from Haffenden and Australian consular officials, Deane-Johns has mostly gone it alone. She heard about the death of her father in much the same way she heard about the tsunami. She now speaks fluent Thai, is a mentor to new inmates and has beaten her drug addiction by sheer will. Haffenden believes jail has taught Deane-Johns the kind of discipline and self-respect lacking in every other Australian behind bars on drugs charges. A lay teacher at the Thamkrabok Buddhist Monastery and drug detox centre north of Bangkok, Haffenden learnt of Deane-Johns's story through a family friend. Since then he has visited her more than 40 times. She calls him Granddad.
"The young lady I first met five years ago was an arsehole," Haffenden recalls. "But she has emerged out of the experience of a Thai prison very well. Lots of the anger is gone. Had she got away with it, she would still be an arsehole."
ALTHOUGH the Deane-Johns story has slipped off the front page, her face and those of other young Australians are never forgotten. Each day they stare out from the Foreign Prisoners Support Service's website. But the service - spearheaded by former Laos prisoner Kay Danes - has become a comfort for parents whose children are in jail overseas. Danes, a Brisbane mother of three, and her husband Kerry spent 10 months in a Laos jail accused of sapphire smuggling in 2000. High-level government negotiations saw them released in October 2001. Since then they have devoted their time to people whose names never make it into ministerial briefs.
Among them is 24-year-old Melbourne man Nguyen Tuong Van - on death row in Singapore after being found guilty of trafficking 396 grams of heroin in 2002. Then there are Sydney teenagers Chris Vo, 15, and Rachel Ann Diaz, 17 - awaiting trial in Hong Kong accused of smuggling heroin valued at $1 million to Australia.
Meanwhile, Gordon Vuong, 17, is serving 13 years in Cambodia after being caught at the airport with 2.1 kilograms of heroin strapped to his stomach. And in Indonesia, former Adelaide school teacher Graham Clifford Payne, 20, has been in custody since August when he was arrested in Medan allegedly with a pouch full of amphetamines.
"We're flooded with emails from mums with children in jails all over the world," Danes says. "There are Australian prisoners out there who just don't have the access to support and advice that others do. They are ostracised, and their families are ostracised. They don't even have people to write to them."
LONELY Planet guru Tony Wheeler is in London en route from Iceland to Japan when Sunday Extra asks him to venture an opinion on why so many young Australians are continuing to fly into the web of Asian drug laws.
The patron saint of backpackers, Wheeler says Australians have long been finding themselves in sticky situations overseas. But he puts the recent jump down to the Asian drug blitz, and even goes as far as to group those who have been caught.
"Group one are the ones who've always been heading there," Wheeler says. "But with two subgroups - the really serious dealers who sometimes get caught and the no-hopers who are simply taking a huge and stupid risk.
"Group two are the party drugs type who would [get] a slap on the wrist if they were caught in Melbourne, Sydney or Ibiza and probably the same thing in Bali 12 months ago. [But] suddenly the rules have changed."
Wheeler says his heart goes out to young Australians whose lives are devastated by one mistake, but he offers sage advice to travellers to leave their laid-back approach to recreational drug use at home. "Stick to [party drugs] in places where the rules are cast in iron or the jails are not so bad," he says. "Don't think about it in Indonesia where rules are fluid and the jails are lousy."
The director of Melbourne's Asian Law Centre, Associate Professor Tim Lindsey, says the she'll-be-right-mate approach to drugs makes Australians prime suspects in Indonesia. But, he argues, it is wrong to suggest that Australians have been targeted.
In recent years Indonesia's drug use rates have soared, with addictions rising from 1 per cent to 4 per cent - nearly 10 million people. In Jakarta in April alone there were 150 arrests. While Australians continue to use recreational drugs in holiday destinations, and authorities remain hell-bent on winning the war on drugs, Lindsey says little will change. Indeed he expects the numbers will only rise as Indonesia's justice system improves and shakes off the Soeharto legacy.
"Australians have particular attitudes to certain drugs that are not held by countries in the Third World, so it's not a surprise that Australians are being caught in the huge crackdown," Lindsey says. "There is a sense that Australians should be immune from their legal systems. It's an unconscious thing that comes out when people are arrested.
"That the Indonesian legal system has deep problems of corruption and low levels of competence is not true, though. Soeharto stripped and dumbed down the courts and that takes a long time to fix it up.
"But Indonesia is making progress. The Indonesian legal system is improving and it is now starting to catch people."
So far, no Indonesian court has seen fit to deliver the death penalty. But NSW Council of Civil Liberties lawyer Kevin O'Rourke fears it may only be time. With news that all Bali nine are facing the firing squad, O'Rourke has stepped up his campaign to secure a prisoner transfer treaty between Indonesia and Australia. Such an agreement has existed between Thailand and Australia since 2002, but negotiations between Indonesia and France have delayed Jakarta's consideration of a draft treaty with Australia.
"We want a treaty and we want it fast," O'Rourke says. "But it is not a short process. With the best will in the world that treaty might well be 18 months away."
"[The Deane-Johns case] would be a successful outcome of the existing treaty. The treaty recognises that these people have done something wrong but the humanitarian element is that they are able to serve the sentence closer to their families, and in a culture that they are familiar with."
It is uncertain whether such a treaty would apply to prisoners sentenced to death. But, O'Rourke says, we need only remember the 1986 execution of Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers in Malaysia to imagine the effects that even one execution in Indonesia could have on the Australian psyche.
EVERY six weeks Haffenden arrives at the Lard Yao prison with a toasted bacon and egg sandwich. He leaves with Deane-Johns's wish list of beauty products and make-up. Although the prisoner repatriation scheme means Deane-Johns could be home by Christmas, this is not enough for Haffenden. He has written to the Thai king requesting a royal pardon, fearful that his clean young charge will be more vulnerable in a prison system rife with drugs than in the wider community. Royal pardons, however, are rare.
"There is no better teacher in the enormous dangers of drugs than a reformed drug addict," Thamkrabok's abbot Luangpaw Charoen wrote to the king in support.
Haffenden hopes it might just work. But he says that whether Deane-Johns is freed or transferred to an Australian prison, she will return home with nothing except her own self-respect.
"She has had to stand up and take care of herself," Haffenden says. "She does not want to walk down that [drugs] path again."
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