wrong man, wrong place, wrong time

Yesterday I did a quick review of the death penalty situation in China. Now this:

A British man is facing execution after being convicted of smuggling heroin into China. Akmal Shaikh, 53, from north London, was arrested after a suitcase he was carrying was allegedly found to contain 4kg of the drug, with a value of £250,000.

Shaikh, who is said to be severely mentally ill, will become the first British citizen to be executed in China; his lawyers warn that he could be killed imminently by a gunshot to the back of his head. Foreign Office officials said there were reports last week that his second appeal had failed, but had yet to receive "official confirmation" or any news from the Chinese authorities.

Emails seen by the Observer reveal that Shaikh was recruited in a sting operation involving criminal figures in Poland, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. His defence was that he was duped by the gang and had no knowledge of the drugs.

Shaikh, who is married to an Englishwoman and has five children, genuinely believed the gang were his friends and were grooming him for pop stardom. In fact, say lawyers and friends, he was, and is, suffering from delusional psychosis.

Being groomed for pop stardom would seem to be a common form of delusional psychosis. That aside, there’s a campaign underway, with the support of the Prime Minister, to get the sentence withdrawn. In normal times that would probably be enough to get the guy off death row, and maybe bootlegged quietly out of the country at some not too distant date.

However, Mr Shaikh is on death row right now in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, after apparently being inadvertently pushed into a drug distribution network. That makes things different for a number of reasons.

In China, popular prejudice has it that Uighurs are responsible for most of the country’s illegal drug distribution and sales. Uighurs are certainly involved in the trade: in Beijing, people used to go to the Xinjiang village to buy their dope until it was redeveloped a few years back. But of course, so are Hans and other minorities, including the saintly Tibetans.

Now there’s a kind of folk rumour in China that Uighurs are allowed to - at the very least –smoke dope, and at the very most take and deal in what drugs they like. This is supposed to be an outcome of the “two restraints and one leniency” policy pursued by the Chinese government. The restraints involved the application of the law to Uighurs and the leniency was over sentencing, including the application of the death penalty.

This policy was adopted in 1984, basically to make the application of Chinese rule in Xinjiang seem less onerous to the Uighurs. But the law also became a target of widespread popular complaint by Han Chinese across the PRC after this summer’s riots, which, according to backlash sentiment, were enabled by being too soft on the Uighurs. As a result, the rule was rescinded in Xinjiang in August, which is very bad timing for Mr Shaikh.

The actual proximate cause of the riots was a mass brawl between Han and Uighur workers in a factory in Guangdong, in which two Uihgur workers were lynched after rumours were spread that they had been involved in the rape of local women. Last week, one of the instigators of the riot was given the death sentence by a local court. Another was sentenced to life imprisonment.

This effectively increases pressure on the authorities in Urumqi to execute Mr Shaikh. He may be mad, may be a British national, and may have no connection at all to the wider Han/Uighur situation in China. Nonetheless, he’s up before the courts after being apprehended as part of a Xinjiang based heroin smuggling network. As far as Han sentiment is concerned, he’s one of theirs. And since they just sentenced one of ours to death, then what are they going to do about him?

It’s worth pointing out that in general Beijing has not responded to the riots by a Balkan-style mobilization of ethnic resentment. It largely prevented a wave of revenge masscres by the Han a few days after the original riots, for instance. But that seems to depend on an evolving policy of equality of severity, or rather perception of equality of severity. I’m not confident the government would do anything in Mr Shaikh’s case to alter that perception.

Comments

[Alex]

It's a horrible and modern story. Apparently he used to run a successful minicab business in Kentish Town before he went crazy and moved to Poland to start an airline.

(Entrepreneurship is a sort of delusion.)

[jalal aminazam]

Akmal Shaikh indeed ran a minicab firm in kentish town which was called TEKSI and is now called CONCORDE
He was prosecuted for sexual harrasement in the past and ran what by many regards was an illegal business.
However, he was granted a licence by the PCO (public carriage office) a part of TFL and the business is still running run by members of his family.
How the PCO gives people like this a licence is unbelieveable. Remember the convicted murderer recentl granted a licence?

[Alex]

Thanks for the local information; I'll bear it in mind.