Cold Blooded Murders (37 page)

Terrible tempers can be quickly aroused.
Fortunately they cannot be long-sustained. At Pulau Senang, less than an hour
was needed to drain all the savagery from the
parang
-wielding gangsters. By then they had achieved their common purpose.
Dutton was dead. Pulau Senang was in ruins. Emotionally exhausted, drained of
fury, the mobsters waited docilely for the retribution which they must have
known would inevitably follow. Meekly, they marched away under armed escort to
meet their fate, leaving behind the unanswered question: why did they want to
destroy Pulau Senang?

Major James held the view that the riot was
organized so that the detainees could go free. First they would have to destroy
the settlement. Dutton had to be killed because he was the hated symbol of
government and also because he was the only man they knew to be capable of rebuilding
Pulau Senang. With Dutton dead and the place destroyed, everyone on the island
would have to be released. There was nowhere to put them. All the jails in
Singapore were crammed full. They would have to be freed.

This infantile reasoning might well be the
correct explanation—the common logical outcome—of the riot. This is what the
rioters might have believed, but there was no evidence at the trial to support
this theory. Witnesses spoke of a conspiracy to kill Dutton and other officials
and certain informers and alleged favourites of Dutton’s. There was talk of a
list of men to be murdered. But not a scrap of evidence was forthcoming to back
up Major James’ contention that the real purpose of the riot was to bring
freedom to all detained on the island.

When, in France in 1789, an angry, hungry
mob captured the Bastille (the French symbol of tyranny), they destroyed it.
They killed the governor and released all the prisoners held in this state
prison. They had an understandable reason for rioting: their common purpose was
to overthrow tyranny. Pulau Senang rioters seemed to lack any such obvious
motive. Counsel suggested the riot was a manifestation of what happens to
pent-up human emotion, when, tolerance exhausted, it boils over. Driven beyond
human endurance by overwork, short rations, and inhuman conditions, they could
restrain themselves no longer. They rose against then-oppressors, not caring
about the consequences. They could not suffer more.

I saw no evidence of this during my visit to
the island shortly before the riot. I saw half-naked, sun-tanned men working in
the blazing sun. I saw them in the canteen eating and laughing and talking. I
saw nobody being forced to work. All the detainees looked to me to be healthy
and fit. None appeared to be undernourished. One of the detainees came up to me
whilst I was taking photographs. In Malay, he asked me if I recognized him. I
said I did not. He said I should because he had been my golf caddy for many
months and had carried my clubs during lots of games with the Prime Minister
and other cabinet ministers. None of us at the time, of course, ever suspected
that my caddy was a secret society gangster. On the island I hardly recognized
my old caddy. He had filled out. Work in the open air had improved him physically.
He looked fitter, stronger. He laughed when I said that Pulau Senang had done
him good. He had no hard feelings. He said he had been a gang-leader’s personal
bodyguard until the PAP came into power and started their onslaught on the
gangs. We chatted about old times, and he reminded me of some of the bad
strokes I made and the Prime Minister’s tendency to chop the ball when driving.
Here was at least one detainee who did not find conditions on the island
inhuman. He was not suffering from overwork. He farmed and he liked the work.
Nobody pestered him, he said, and the grub was alright, ‘but not enough of it’.
I smiled and remarked that there never was, and he chuckled and nodded. We were
alone. With Dutton’s permission I had wandered off on my own. He said I could
take photographs so long as nobody objected. Nobody did. Most of them offered
to pose. I can say with all honesty that during my visit, which lasted several
hours, (I lunched with Dutton and James in the hut where Dutton was to meet his
death), none of the detainees gave me the slightest hint that they were working
in inhuman conditions, or that they were fast approaching the limit of their
endurance. On the contrary, they gave me the impression that this was a happy
island. There was certainly no visible evidence to support belief that the
detainees were being forced to do something they hated doing.

Could I have deceived myself? According to
evidence at the trial even while I was on the island men were plotting the
riot. Had I failed to detect their seething discontent? Had I been biased? I
was a friend of Dutton’s and James’ and willing to believe all they told me.
Was the riot, in fact, a sudden release of pent-up festering discontent, a
sudden surge of uncontrollable hatred and rage? Was the riot, after all, a
sudden impulse without common purpose, possessed of nothing more than the same
inner fire which motivates the senseless destructiveness of football fans on
the rampage? Recalling my visit to the island I asked myself these questions.

Were the rioters of Pulau Senang men with
bitter grievances, humiliated, tortured beyond control? Or were the men
suddenly inflamed with mob hysteria which knows no reasoning and is of itself a
self-generating, rapidly spreading flame? Nothing is more contagious than mob
hysteria. Is this what happened? Or were the rioters of Pulau Senang hungry,
oppressed men storming their Bastille? If they were not, what were they? Why
did they destroy Pulau Senang? Did they really believe that once Pulau Senang
was razed to the ground, Dutton murdered, they would be set free? Surely only
children could believe this sort of fantasy? But these rioters were not normal
persons: they were gangsters, outcasts: few of them were capable of much
logical thought: they lived in a world of their own, believing what they wanted
to believe.

When the signal was heard, they seized their
weapons and in a mob marched against authority. Did they believe then that they
were marching towards freedom? If not, what did they think they were doing? Did
they think at all about what would happen after they had killed and destroyed?
In certain circumstances, great concords of men can easily be led. History had
recorded many occasions of a single man arousing a huge murderous mob. That is
why the law says that any assembly of at least three persons can be a riot if
they have a common purpose which they intend to achieve by force and violence.
The ring-leaders at Pulau Senang knew their immediate objective. They might
even have expected certain consequences. Did most of the others? What I am
trying to fathom is whether this riot was a protest against the experiment as
such, or whether it was a protest against authority. In other words did the
experiment fail because it had an inherent flaw, or did it collapse because of
a riot against authority? Did the project ever stand a chance of success, or
was this an experiment which was bound to fail, sooner or later?

The late Professor Tom Elliott, a member of
the sub-committee which conceived the Pulau Senang concept told me, long after
the trial, (I made a note at the time), that he had come to the conclusion that
the very success of the project had defeated its objectives. He said that the
basic idea had been to lead men back to decent society by proving to them that
creative work was more satisfactory, more worthwhile, than gangsterism. At
Pulau Senang the creative work had almost ended: work had become routine. “To
be successful there must be continuous pioneering effort. Men who did work hard
and had proved to themselves and to authority that the basic ideas of Pulau
Senang were right, had returned to normal society. They left Pulau Senang,
leaving the bad stuff behind,” said Elliott sadly. “These incorrigibles
influenced the newcomers. Ideally, there should have been several islands to be
worked. Once Pulau Senang has passed the pioneering stage, the settlement
should have been institutionalized. Pulau Senang had stopped being a pioneering
effort. It had become an accomplished fact, with roads and rules. Detainees
were demanding regular hours of work, more leisure facilities. There was ample
time for discontent, complaints and conspiracy. In this atmosphere, intrigue
led to plotting.” That, in his view, was why the experiment failed. Yet to the
end, Professor Elliott continued to believe in the principle of the experiment.
He was convinced gangsters could be, and should be, helped to become decent
citizens. This was not an opinion shared entirely by Major James. James thought
that most gangsters had a serious character flaw, otherwise they would not
become members of a secret society. Most of them were beyond redemption and
should be kept away from the rest of society.

We will probably never know why Pulau Senang
exploded that sunny afternoon. The truth lies buried somewhere in the ruins. We
shall never know for sure why the experiment failed. There is Major James’
explanation. There are other theories. Why did they kill and destroy?
Reflecting upon the, to me, utter senselessness of the riot, (for the rioters must
have realised there was no escape from inevitable punishment, though a few
hoped to swim to freedom, or of getting to Indonesia by boat), I am inclined to
favour the belief that the forty-minute murder and destruction was not a
violent effort to free everyone on the island, but a deliberate attempt by the
secret society leaders to prove publicly that they, not Dutton or the
government he represented, controlled their members. The government could order
gangsters to build, to create. They did. Pulau Senang became a showpiece. But
the gang-leaders could order them to destroy and they would be obeyed. In this
way, the gang-leaders could prove that their hold over them was absolute, even
when they were all under detention. That was why the gang-leaders ordered
Dutton and the others to be killed, Pulau Senang to be destroyed. That was why
they ordered their men to smash and burn what they had sweated to create. Like
automatons, the secret society gangsters, sworn to obey, raised their weapons
and attacked. Less than an hour was needed: Dutton’s mutilated body lay amid
the debris. A blood stained shirt fluttered from a pole, an emblem of victory.
Still clutching their weapons, they strutted like prize cockerels. Others sang
and danced in celebration.

Those who organized the riot (and
undoubtedly it was organized: it was not an impulsive gesture), might have
argued that the punishment which would follow could not be much worse than what
they were already suffering. What could the authorities do to them? Not much, except
to throw them back into jail. The Government could not hang them all for
Dutton’s death. No one need suffer if they all stuck together, as obedient
secret society members, remembering their oaths, were supposed to behave. No
government, they might have muttered during their whispered conspiracy, would
dare to hang them all. If they thought along these lines, they were wrong on
two points. Faced with death, strong men wilted: secret society discipline
faltered and crumbled. For various personal reasons some of the mob talked to
save their skins. Others followed. That was one point. The other was that they
completely misunderstood the mood of the Government. This was a government
fully prepared to use the due process of the law to hang them all, every single
one of them, providing an impartial judge and jury were satisfied that they
were members of that illegal assembly.

Soon after election to office, this new,
inexperienced, fearless government had announced its determination to stamp out
secret societies. The Government said they were prepared to meet the challenge
head on. They knew there was no alternative if they, and not the mobs, were to
govern Singapore. The full weight of the law would be used to crush them. If
the law demanded that all 300-odd detainees must die for the murder of Dutton
and his colleagues: they would die. Nobody doubted the Government’s firm
resolve when, in due course, 71 suspects stood before the magistrate, charged
with murder.

What did the government believe caused the
experiment to fail? No formal statement was ever issued. Soon after the riot,
the government announced that a high court judge would hold an inquiry. Wiser
counsel prevailed: plans to hold an inquiry were abandoned when it was decided
to bring charges against those detainees believed to be implicated in the
affair. No attempt was made to resuscitate Pulau Senang. Eventually the
Government decided to make the ‘Isle of Ease’ a target for the bombs of the
airforce and the shells of the army. Devious minds wondered if this decision
was a deliberate reflection of the attitude of a wiser, more experienced,
government towards the experiment that failed: an expression which said that in
certain circumstances, efforts to rehabilitate can be wasteful if not useless,
that some things, some people, can never be changed, and realism in the world
in which we have to live, demands that when society is challenged by gangsters,
domestic or international, the government of the day must be prepared, if
necessary, to meet force with force.

My own view is that while this might well
have been the belief of a realistic government, by now much learned in the ways
of secret societies, it had nothing to do with their decision to turn Pulau
Senang into a bombing and firing range. That was not meant to be a sign that
the Government had forever abandoned attempts to restore gangsters to normal
lives. This goes on all the time in different ways. True, Pulau Senang failed,
but not all had been lost in that hour of destruction. For those concerned with
the problem of rehabilitating gangsters, the island experiment must have
provided much useful, if tragically costly, information, (not all of it of
negative value), which need not be wasted. There will be other experiments. I
refuse to believe that Daniel Dutton died in vain.