Missing the Target

This months saw the re-launch in English of the 2004 Autobiography of Chavoret Jaruboon, Bangkwangs official executioner from 1984 until execution by shooting was phased out and replaced with the supposedly more humane method of lethal injection in 2002. For 18 years of his continuing career as a prison officer Chavoret became the face of death for the hundreds of inmates who have passed through the gate of Bangkwangs death row.

Indeed Chavoret’s illustrious career could be said by some to have reached a pinnacle when he surpassed a previous executioner’s headcount of 48 persons (Mooey Joyjalern 1960 – 1974). Chavorets personal headcount reached 55 souls, including two women, although over a time period which was 5 years longer.

Chavoret originally published a Thai version of his memoirs entitled ‘The Last Executioner’ in 2004 but in a much cruder format aimed at sales to the gore loving Thai public. This earlier version was filled with many extra blood chilling accounts and details of cases that led to his own eventual pulling of the trigger on the sub-machine gun that ended the lives of so many people.

Many extra photographs are displayed, though of poor quality, and details of the mechanism of execution are discussed in minutiae. Even the cover displays a photo of Chavoret, arms folded in a no nonsense stance super imposed over a blood spattered target. The bulls eye is replaced by a original black and white photo of a freshly executed body hanging from the shooting ’cross’. Blood gushing from the bullet wounds and head hanging back, blind folded and limp.

Overkill? Probably not for a public who enjoy reading publications such as the very popular magazines ‘Kao Aishiagram’ (Crime News) and ‘Katagon 191 (Murder 191) Available on bookshelves and in newsagents across the country. These magazines contain detailed descriptions coupled with the most graphic forensic photographs imaginable of victims of violent deaths including accident, rape and murder victims, suicides, dismembered and decaying bodies and those that have died at the hands of the police. Sometimes the dead are children.

In other countries these publications would be considered obscene but not in Thailand where their purchase is no more restricted than is buying a daily newspaper, yet scenes of couples kissing or a  cigarette being smoked on Thai TV are given the ‘pixlated box’ treatment to protect young minds. Thai double standards at their worst.

The English version of Chavorets story, also ‘The Last Executioner’. Ghost written by one Nicola Pierce and published by Maverick House (S.E. Asia) has been toned down considerably in an effort to appeal to a much broader international readership whilst avoiding offence to foreign sensibilities. The cover design has done away with the previous target and blood backdrop and instead features a stern but calm looking   Chavoret in working uniform. The same eyes that have guided so many bullets to their human targets looking back through the camera lense into those of the reader in a cleverly composed ‘Stare Down’.

Inside there has been a dramatic reduction in the amount of photographs published, taken from Chavorets private collection. In his original Thai publication there are over 70 photographs while the English version only contains 16 though it must be said that the quality of some of those in the first book are very poor and may have been rejected by the publishers of the English version as too poor for publication. Even so it is noteworthy that the majority of the Thai book’s most gruesome images including the clearest prints are missing from the second publication.

Many of the original versions inclusions and finer details are excluded from the ‘Mass Market’ English paperback. The publishers of this second version, Maverick House, whose core profit is derived from publication of ‘Pulp Faction’ titles such as this one were obviously aiming sales at the easy read, morbid curiosity and mild titillation end of the market leaving scholars, researchers and readers who appreciate an explanation of the full facts and figures disappointed. For example, Chavorets original version describes the history of executions in Thailand in great detail whereas the English publication skims over this in barely a page. Likewise the original version gives useful information such as names of previous officers assigned the post of ‘Executioner’ and describes the political climate surrounding certain decisions to execute during their day. This kind of information is completely  omitted from the ‘Farrang’ version which steers clear of these more mundane though equally important facts and instead stays firmly with the shock, horror and revulsion formula that make books of this genre so popular amongst today’s instant gratification culture.

And so, Chavorets story. The thing that should be upper most in the minds of the readers when they pick up this book is that although Chavoret no longer executes prisoners he is still a working prison officer and remains at Bangkwang. Furthermore, the death penalty remains very much part of the Thai justice system and Bangkwang today houses approximately 800 prisoners on its two death rows, albeit that they are now waiting to be despatched by the administration of lethal injection instead of a stream of bullets from silenced HK MP5 sub-machine gun. It seems incredible that an active officer still carrying out his duties at Bangkwang be allowed to publish his memoirs in this way. Dozens of copies of both publications of his story have found their way back into the hands of prisoners held within Bangkwang’s many buildings including death row, unbelievably some even autographed by the great man himself. Moreover, his Thai version of the book is endorsed in the opening pages by the Director General, Department of Corrections, and his ultimate boss.

The Thai people, in time honoured fashion, will let nothing stand in the way of making money and Chavoret is no exception. He himself admits in his book that his original motive for accepting the unenviable post as Bangkwangs official executioner, aside from pleasing his superiors, was extra money the job offered. He explains that the money was used to pay for his children’s education but one cannot help but think that there are more honourable ways to pay for your kids schooling than collecting a bonus on every man you kill. What kind of message does that teach the kids anyway?

Apart from the books prologue describing the moments leading up to Chavorets first execution, the first 70 pages or so of this book are more than a little dull. Chavoret describes his childhood and early years as a young man playing in a band but he offers very little by way of explanation into the mindset of a man who is perfectly at home having the blood of 55 people on his hands. The reader finds himself searching for clues which aren’t there and quickly tires of Chavoret’s description of a very ordinary life up until his appointment as a prison officer in his 20’s. One could be forgiven for skipping over this ‘Padding’ for the real story which doesn’t really get going until around the books 74^th page.

Ultimately though, those pages help the reader to come to the realisation that it takes nothing more than a random set of circumstances to produce a man who could be at home doing this kind of job.

Chavoret’s tale of his very normal upbringing offer the reader no clues as to what would drive a man into earning a living by killing his fellow man, but this is simply because there are none and it is this realisation that is the most chilling. If a normal, everyday guy can be as cold as this when it comes to shooting the heart out of another man then what does it say about the rest of us?

But Chavoret doesn’t see himself as your average guy. At the close of the prologue he gives away his true appraisal of himself when he says “My name is Chavoret Jarboon and I am a legend”… perhaps the most revealing line in the book.

The bulk of the book is filled with chapters which detail the specific cases of the criminals which he himself had executed. He describes in detail the ‘Official’ version of events leading up to peoples convictions and eventual execution at his hands though he also describes how some of them went to their death still proclaiming their innocence, natural you would expect for someone making a last ditch effort to avoid their own extermination but if the reader were to learn the true extent of corruption that exists at all levels of Thai society, not least in its Police Force and Justice System. Then he would be left with no choice but to assume that a good proportion of those who died in Bangkwang’s execution chamber were almost certainly innocent.

Chavoret avoids tackling this most funemental of issues, playing it down and only once acknowledging the existence of Police corruption when he warns readers that the Police will “Falsify evidence to arrest you” and if that happens “you better have plenty of money to ‘Help’ the Police keep you out of jail”.

It is then, in perhaps a subliminal justification of his position, only the cases that drew the most frenzied of media attention at the time that he was chosen to discuss in the book. A public baying for blood has no time for niceties and only cares that the suspect has been found guilty, not that he may have been tortured, by attaching electrodes to his testicles to extract a confession or had evidence fabricated against him to secure a conviction. It is also worthy to note that only one of the cases he describes concerns an execution he carried out on a drugs trafficker and yet 80 % of Bangkwang’s death row inmates are there having been convicted of doing just that. Could it be that Chavoret’s belief in the system falters when it comes to executing an uneducated Hiltribesman who has been coerced into carrying drugs across an unmarked Jungle border for a few dollars so that his ‘Employers’, the Thai Police, can clock up another major bust and collect the cash reward offered by Western Governments for drug interdiction?

We shall never know but anyway perhaps it’s not entirely fair to lay these kind of arguments against death penalty at the feet of a minor Public Servant who was after all just obeying orders and it is unrealistic to imagine that a man who did not totally believe in the righteousness of his own Country’s system of Government. Including of course its justice system would go to work protecting its method’s. it is also foolish to assume that Chavoret has told the whole story. There are many aspects of life, and death within Bangkwang’s walls that Chavoret chooses to omit from his story, for example the terrible conditions of confinement and desperate overcrowding experienced on Death Row by permanently shackled prisoners condemned to die. He also makes scant mention of the way in which a condemned man would be collected from his cell on the day of his execution and what effect this would have on the other 400 or so men on the row.

The following is an extract taken from an interview with a foreign prisoner (Name withheld) who spent 5 ½ years on Death Row before having his sentence cut to ‘Life’ at the 2006 Royal Amnesty.

“Most time we did not know when they were coming. Sometimes they would lock us down early but would use an excuse like important visitors were coming into the building. They would tell us that we had nothing to fear and that we should remain calm.”

“They would always come at 4:30(pm) and the sound of the steel bars and chains being unlocked and removed from the door would strike fear and terror into the hearts of every man on the Row.”

“The trouble was that those men who had exhausted all possible avenues of reprieve and were on the ‘Blacklist’ were spread equally amongst each of the 20 or so cells. There were usually 3 – 4 blacklisted guys in each cell so of course when we would hear the block door being unlocked the entire block would fall into a fearful silence.”

“Even those guys who knew it wasn’t their time would be overwhelmed with fear because of the hysteria generated. Fear is infectious and each time was mental torture because we all knew that some day it would be our turn.”

“The group of five or six Special Officers would walk slowly up the aisle until they reached the cell that contained the guy whose god had finally called him.”

“There would be a kind of vacuum in the block where every condemned man had breathed in and failed to exhale again. We could all, every last one of us; hear our own hearts beating so loudly in our chests that it was deafening.”

“The man would be called to the cell door, handcuffed then led away to oblivion. You could cut the relief with a knife but what a terrible relief. Another of us had gone forever.”

“I saw 21 men go this way during my time on Death Row. Every last one of them walked calmly and silently to their fate. In their heads and hearts they were already dead.”

But Chavoret propensity for only telling part of the story cannot be more exemplified than when he relates the tale of his colleague and fellow Bangkwang Prison Officer, Prayuth Sanun’s momentous fall from grace at the hands of Thailand’s ‘Drugs Suppression Unit’.

Chavoret outlines the story by telling the reader how ‘Yoot Bangkwang’, as he is affectionately referred to by his fellow inmates, was moonlighting from his daytime job as a Prison Officer and making extra money on the side by setting up and carrying out drug deals with the backing of some powerful local underworld figures.

‘Yoot’ was brought to book when Police set up a ‘Sting’ operation involving 700.000 Methamphetamine tablets (commonly known as Ya-Ba) and he was arrested. An M16 and a huge pile of cash were also taken. ‘Yoot’ was convicted and sentenced to death and is now on Death Row in Bangkwang’s building 2.

Chavoret conveniently leaves out some startling details though. Details which would have almost certainly overshadowed any or all of his personal memoirs and which blows the debate on whether or not the Death Penalty acts as a real deterrent wide open.

‘Yoot’ had been up to no good for some time and formed part of a local but quite large drug distribution network. He wasn’t alone on the day of his arrest; four other people were rounded up by the Police including another Bangkwang Prison Officer and a woman. This woman was Yoot’s lover and involved in his illegal drug activities but she was also the wife of a Prisoner in Bangkwang, at that time serving a long sentence in building 4.

This Prisoner knew ‘Yoot’ and his fellow Officer were up to their necks in local Mafia dealings but did not blow the whistle until learning that ‘Yoot’ had taken his own wife as a mistress. Out of his mind with jealousy and rage that his wife was sleeping with one of his gaolers, the Prisoner arranged a meeting with Police Officers from ‘Por BorSor’ (D.S.U.) telling them he had information about a certain Prison Officers involvement in the local drugs trade and after giving them what he knew they gave orders for ‘Yoot’ to be put under surveillance.

The rest of the story is how  Chavoret tells it in his book but there is one absolutely vital and completely earth shattering piece of information that he leaves out. A piece of this astonishing story that you could not make up if you tried and one that would not be believed were it not for the fact that Chavoret himself documents it in the Thai version of his book.

Prayuth Sanun, Prison Officer and drug dealer, was a member of Bangkwang’s execution team and worked very closely with Chavoret. ‘Yoot’ himself executed 6 Prisoners in Bangkwang during 1999, at least one of which having received the Death Penalty for his crimes involving the same drug for which Yoot now languishes on Death Row himself.

If ever there was more compelling evidence to support the argument of anti-death penalty lobby groups, who say that the death penalty is not a deterrent, then this is it. Proponents of the notion of ‘Kharma’ may also draw their own conclusions.

Incredibly Chavoret laments the demise of his one time pal, calling him ‘unfortunate’ and commenting “Prayuth was a good guy, you could rely on him. When he had money he would spend it on his friends”

And yet earlier he passes personal comment on three men he executed in a single afternoon by saying “Each man was getting the punishment he had earned for his own actions.”

We are all human and Chavoret wavering judgement when it comes to the lives of three strangers against that of his one time friend demonstrates that he is no exception. It is this very point that is at the heart of the whole Death penalty debate but sadly Chavoret will not allow himself to be dragged into the argument Chavoret’s story shows us time and again throughout the book that it is the job that is extraordinary, not the man himself and it is with some relief that the reader is able to get to know this really rather ordinary family man and dutiful officer they were perhaps expecting a sadistic monster.

Since his final execution in 2002 Chavoret has remained at bangkwang and now heads the Foreign Affairs Section. Ever the professional he has assumed this rather more placid role with ease and aplomb. Foreign visitors to Bangkwang tell of the English speaking officer in the foreign section who’s gentlemanly, friendly and helpful approach help’s to put them at ease when they are here to visit their loved ones.

All things considered, Chavorets ‘The last executioner’ will probably do wellamongst the Backpacking and Traveller set. There has been a steady stream of ‘Life in Thai Prison’ style books over the years and Chavorets book offers a fresh look from a different perspective on this theme. Don’t be surprised if this rather tired story is re-told by a Foreign Embassy’s Prisoner Case Worker next time round. Those who are into this style of book will enjoy nothing more than an easy read such as this one to help while away a few hours on the Beach with a cold beer and a Joint.

Perhaps the royalties will even allow Chavoret to stump up the money for his grandchildren’s education? But for those readers who will be hoping to get inside the mind of one of the few men on this Planet to have judicially murdered 55 men and woman there will only be disappointment because there are few, if any surprises in store.

If Chavorets intensions was to inform, educate and aim this book at a wider more mainstream audience then for the first time in his ‘Legendary’ career he has missed the target.