A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton (15 page)

None of my siblings objected to the marriage either. My sisters teased me that I must have found the right one because I had vowed before never to get married.

Both of us have come a long way. Jacomo used to be very frustrated by the situation and angry that the Thai authorities had made a scapegoat of him. Now he says he understands why he was sent to Bang Kwang. He said to me: ‘I thank God. I thank the death sentence and those who put me in this place because they led me to you…but I also want God to help me get out of here. Being in a German prison is not a problem but without you I don’t think I can make it through.’

I will move to Germany to be with him after the transfer. He has many plans to get his life back. I’ve prepared everything for this transition. I completed the basic certificate of German language, which is one of the requirements when applying for an immigrant visa. I have had all the necessary documents translated. With the help of his mother, I believe I will be able to find a job and a house while he is still in jail.

After 10 years as a full-time volunteer, I work freelance now too. I usually spend my afternoons at a studio doing voiceovers and the evenings on translation jobs. Two days a week, I visit the prison. At the weekend, I relax with friends or spend time with inmates’ families who are visiting Thailand.

I don’t want to call my volunteer work a job because no one pays me to do it. I do it because I have deep sympathy for the prisoners. My ‘wages’ are the thanks and the happiness I get from helping out.

When people hear I visit prisoners on death row, they usually look puzzled and ask me why I do it. I explain to them that not all inmates are evil and some have been made scapegoats. They are shackled 24 hours a day unless their sentences are commuted to life in prison or less.

They suffer from bruises caused by friction between the heavy iron and their flesh. Those who are lucky enough to have the shackles removed while they are alive must deal with long-term back pain because of the extra weight they were forced to carry around for years. The less fortunate ones have their shackles removed only after death.

This goes against the United Nations’ Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, which does not allow the use of restraints as punishment. The prison dismisses this by saying inmates on death row are considered high-risk so, under the Thai Corrections Act, they have to be shackled to prevent them from escaping or harming others. The prison also justifies this practice by pointing out that it does not have enough staff to provide control and security.

To brand the inmates on death row as high-risk is punitive. They aren’t allowed contact visits, even though they are the ones who need it the most since their relatives don’t know when they will be executed. When they are ill, they are rarely sent outside for treatment, for fear they will try to escape.

A lot could be done to improve the system. The real reform has to begin at every police station where brutality is still the norm. Thailand is a Buddhist country yet it imposes the death penalty. Buddhists know that killing is against the very first precept laid down by Buddha for laymen. Some officers who work in Bang Kwang oppose the death penalty and several past wardens didn’t want any executions to take place during their tenure.

I think life imprisonment is scarier than death, especially if you have to be in a Thai prison.

I know there are people who intentionally hurt others and they should be dealt with accordingly. But the authorities should recognise that inmates, even those on death row, are human beings too.

In May 2010, Jacomo was transferred back to Lübeck in Germany and Narisa was preparing to join him.

Chapter 9

Bang Kwang Temple

It is a Buddhist belief that when you do good to another being, the amount of merit you earn depends on how spiritually pure that being is. In short, you earn more merit helping a monk than a layman.

For Thai Buddhists, there will be many occasions throughout life when they need the services of the monks. Expectant parents or those with newborns consult monks before naming their children so as to give them an auspicious start in life. Sons show gratitude towards their parents by becoming monks for a period and, ideally, before they get married as it makes a man more desirable as a husband. Buddhists also call on monks in their later years and when they feel unlucky.

For a fee, they can go to temples that offer a symbolic death and rebirth. By getting into and out of a coffin, while monks chant to safeguard the transition, they can be absolved of bad karma incurred through wrongdoing. It stays with the former selves they left in the coffins. How convenient.

After death, monks chant while mourners come to pay their respects at funerals, which can take up to five days. Some unorthodox monks have held mass ordinations of former drug addicts to help them to rehabilitate themselves and prepare to return to society. To say that monks are integral and influential members of Thai society is no overstatement.

Temple affairs are a lifelong interest of mine. I have contributed articles about notorious crimes in recent Thai history to Buddhist magazines, where they have run alongside advertisements for amulets, invitations to the consecration of new
stupas
, profiles of monks and stories of personal miracles. I am fortunate to have met several renowned monks who were eager to give me their take on how I became an executioner in my current life. They also impressed me with how they can fill their abodes with earthly possessions and expensive electronics their followers have bestowed upon them.

Some years ago, when a once highly revered monk was sentenced to 160 years in Bang Kwang for sexual offences against nine underage girls, I got the chance to observe an interesting phenomenon I would like to call Bang Kwang Temple. The former abbot maintained his following, despite his conviction, and turned the prison into a temple of sorts. Better known among Thais by his monastic name, Bhavana Buddho, he is called Chamlong Khonsue in prison, though his followers still address him as their ‘venerable’. He is unique and is the most influential inmate in the Bangkok Hilton at present.

At the pinnacle of his popularity, Bhavana Buddho was the abbot of a temple called Sam Phran in Nakhon Pathom province. He was renowned for making pilgrimages into the wilder parts of the country, teaching meditation and doing charity work. This attracted streams of Buddhists from across the nation to his temple to make merit, practise meditation and pay him their respects. Like any other famous temple, his offered auspicious items for sale. One in particular was a sticker with a picture of Bhavana Buddho assuming a seated cross-legged meditation posture called lotus under a sunshade. The stickers were very popular among truck- and taxi-drivers, who placed them on their vehicles to ward off road accidents.

Bhavana Buddho was also honorary chairman of a foundation set up in his honour that took care of hill tribe children from remote areas. It was said that during a pilgrimage into the north of Thailand, he met with hill tribe children from Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son provinces, which border Myanmar. The children were uneducated and at high risk of entering prostitution and the drug trade later as teenagers. This inspired him to establish a foundation to help them.

His adopted dek chao khao (hill tribe children) lived beside his temple and they were educated in a bid to prevent them, especially the girls, from being sold into prostitution by their parents. This practice is called dtok kieow, which when literally translated means a transaction between a moneylender and a farmer in which the farmer who has unripe rice paddies is given a loan on condition that he repay the moneylender with the produce.

The term is also used to describe a different kind of business deal whereby the parents borrow from a moneylender when their daughter is very young (as green as young rice) on condition that, when she becomes a teenager (ripe), she will leave school prematurely and work as a prostitute to repay the moneylender.

The unexpected fall from grace of Bhavana Buddho began in August 1995 when Kriengsak Bhumirungroj, a male nurse and former follower of the abbot, and Surat, a monk from another temple, brought letters by six hill tribe girls claiming they had been raped by the abbot to the attention of the Religious Affairs Department, the Crime Suppression Division and a child welfare protection unit under the Public Welfare Department. Surat was a relative of one of the victims and he had asked her to write down what had happened.

The accusations were considered outrageous because the abbot presented himself as a protector of children. The news spread rapidly and the media covered the case extensively. The story shook the Buddhist nation to its core. His followers were steadfast and expressed their disapproval of the negative news coverage and sensational headlines. They believed it was a plot to discredit Bhavana Buddho.

Before these allegations came to light, the nation’s faith in Buddhism had already been put to the test by a scandal involving a popular monk called Yantra, who was praised widely for his goodness and noble conduct. He was accused of having sexual intercourse with his Thai and foreign female followers while he was a monk in 1994. He was also accused of fathering a daughter and the mother of this child challenged him to a paternity test. At first, Yantra was defended by a prominent religious agency, which believed that a group of American and Thai people was out to destroy Thai Buddhism and had chosen Yantra, then the religion’s golden boy, as their prime target.

Eventually, however, Yantra was expelled on the orders of the Sangha Supreme Council. Unwilling to give up completely, he started to wear a dark green robe instead of saffron. When a lawsuit was instigated against him on charges of impersonating a monk, he fled to America. Reportedly he has lived there since and he retains a following.

At the peak of Yantra’s popularity, his followers took lotuses to him to bless. They then boiled the flowers in water and drank it to cure illnesses. Some asked him to step on white cloth and then took the dust from his feet home to worship. The Ministry of Education said later that one of his followers was so traumatised by the accusations against Yantra, he had to be hospitalised.

That scandal dealt quite a blow to Thai Buddhism, so it is understandable that the authorities seemed to be slow to instigate a case against Bhavana Buddho. The abbot was a highly respected figure and the police would lose face if they didn’t have enough evidence to make charges stick in the court of justice and court of public opinion. Police Major General Kamnueng Thamkasem, then commandant of the Crime Suppression Division, entrusted Police Colonel Nukul Sompat, his deputy, to lead an investigation into the allegations. The reputation of the national religion was at stake.

In the meantime, a report surfaced about a high-ranking state officer’s attempt to pull strings with the police to get the abbot out of this difficulty. The abbot disappeared from the public eye and was rumoured to have fled the country.

Police Colonel Nukul said his investigation team contacted the Department of Religion for information about the rape claims before a team was dispatched to Chiang Mai province and Mae Song Son province to gather more details. There they met six girls who said they had been raped by the abbot in his quarters. They were all under 15.

In an interview, Nukul said it took time to persuade
the girls’ parents to allow their children to give statements. This is what the police were told eventually, he said: ‘Under pretence of a request to clean the room, the girls were lured in. Then Bhavana Buddho would ask the girls to give him a massage. He told them that touching him wouldn’t bring bad karma onto them (because Buddhism forbids physical contact between monks and females). In the middle of the massage, he forced himself on them. Should a girl resist, he would remind her of the favours he had done for her.’

To avoid being seen entering his room, the girls were instructed to go through a secret door, which could be accessed by ladder only.

Eventually a joint force of 60 from the Crime Suppression Division and the provincial police of Nakhon Pathom went to Sam Phran Temple to conduct an investigation. They discovered girls’ hair in the air-conditioner. They didn’t find the secret door but found traces of a ladder, which led them to conclude that the place had been changed before their arrival to rid it of evidence that might incriminate the abbot. Medical examinations confirmed that the girls had been sexually violated. A warrant for the abbot was issued.

As if that were not shocking enough, seven Buddhist nuns living at his temple were accused of procuring young girls for him. The idea that these nuns, who were aged between 18 and 27, were acting as
mamasans
sent another shock wave across the nation.

A second, more sordid version of the story was used in subsequent court hearings. The nuns were said to lead the girls one by one to the abbot’s residence through an adjoining toilet to clean the room. Once inside, the girls said they were told by the nuns to pay their respects to a Buddha figure as the abbot walked down from upstairs. The abbot then told the girls to bow at his lap as he stroked their hair. He then asked them to either make his bed or give him a massage; again in the court hearings they said he assured them they would not bring bad karma on themselves by touching him. Then he forced himself on the girls.

First, he embraced them from behind as the nuns took hold of their arms and legs before he caressed their breasts and penetrated them. After he finished, the girls were told to take contraceptive pills and wash their private parts thoroughly before the nuns led them away. If a girl refused to have sexual intercourse with the abbot, she would be punished by being forced to walk slowly on a path covered with sharp pebbles under the glaring sun.

Bhavana Buddho eventually turned himself in to the Crime Suppression Division accompanied by a few followers. The seven nuns were accused of procuring nine girls for the abbot. The nuns became defendants number two to eight while Bhavana Buddho was defendant number one.

During the long-running legal case, Bhavana Buddho and the nuns were granted bail and continued to live at Sam Phran Temple. The trial took an unusually long time because of the many people concerned with the case and the numerous requests for deferment from both the defence and the prosecution. There were also several witnesses who lived in the north of Thailand and it was difficult for them to come to the police to give their statements. After the police found out that the witnesses who testified for the victims had been threatened, Bhavana Buddho was forced to give up his position as a monk and fight the case as a layman under his own name, Chamlong Khonsue.

On June 21, 2004, nine years after the allegations hit the headlines, the Criminal Court found the former abbot guilty and sentenced him to 160 years in jail for raping nine underage girls while he was a monk. The attacks were believed to have taken place between August 1988 and January 1995, though there were no exact dates. His sentence was commuted to 50 years. As he was 55 years old at the time, only if he is gifted with great longevity will he serve the full term. He appeared throughout the trial in a brown robe instead of the saffron worn by monks.

Six of the seven former nuns were found guilty and sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to 31 years. Charges against the last defendant were dropped. Defendant number five, who was given three years, didn’t seek leave to appeal.

After the trial, Chamlong and five of the female convicts said they planned to appeal and requested bail with 22 million baht worth of land deeds for property in Nakhon Pathom province. He was later sent to Bang Kwang.

That is when Bang Kwang first played host to groups of monks, nuns and lay people dressed in white coming to visit the former abbot. It is a strange sight for a place like this. They address Chamlong with reverence, pay their respects and generously donate money into his prisoner account. Their presence serves as a silent protest against the court’s verdict.

Some say these devotees are blinded by their faith and that it is a cult of personality. The followers certainly regard Chamlong as their abbot. They sit on the bare concrete floor before him because, even dressed in his brown prison uniform, they believe he is holier than they are. Chamlong keeps his monastic appearance as much as he can by shaving his head and eyebrows and always greeting his visitors with a smile.

On one occasion, I heard him instructing his followers to comply with the prison rules and not to argue with the guards after he had learned that there had been heated disagreements between them. He told them, ‘Living here makes me realise there are many inmates who suffer much more than I do. If you, my advocates, are interested in giving them some relief please donate 108 baht and I will see to it personally that they receive your kindness.’ In his ‘sermons’, Chamlong told his visitors to pray, abide by Buddha’s precepts and frequent temples. The sermons were followed by inquiries from the visitors about his wellbeing, to which he always replied, ‘
Sabaidee
. Don’t worry about me.’

Each time, before the session ended, he blessed them as if he were still wearing the sacred saffron robe, while they bowed their heads to him with their hands joined in prayer. To ask for a blessing from a convict is incomprehensible to most Thais, but not these followers. Elated by the meeting, each of them seemed to glow with an internal light or to have tears in their eyes.

Not everybody saw goodness, however, and a nasty rumour circulated in prison that Chamlong had deflowered the hill tribe girls in his efforts to attain the highest level in his pursuit of supernatural power.

One anonymous male follower said in an interview, ‘I’m saddened that he has to go through this ordeal even though he has done nothing wrong. He told us he doesn’t want to protest his innocence, saying he cannot achieve baramee (virtue prestige) without the challenge of evil. I believe this ordeal serves as a test for him to gain enlightenment (which could lead one to being free from the cycle of rebirth—the highest goal in Buddhism). It’s like he is now in jail to preach to hellish creatures.’