Lee Kuan Yew Explains Death Penalty For Drug Traffickers In Singapore

They have criticized the human rights record, the number of executions, for instance, haven't they?

They may believe that if you are kind to drug traffickers, you get a better society in America.

They're changing their minds and they're sending people back to the. To death row in Singapore. Before you land,

their hostess or the steward will announce that there are very heavy penalties if you are found with more than a stated number of grams of certain prohibited drugs and if you still come in with a few kilos of them, which will destroy hundreds, thousands of families.

One death is too kind because you are killing that family every day

for years and years and years that a daughter or a son is an addict. But the per capita rate of executions in Singapore is much higher than in the United States. Have you worked it out according to Amnesty International? Have they worked it out accurately? Per capita of what? Per capita of drug traffickers or per capita of population of Singapore capital? I am executing foreign drug traffickers. Let me tell you the people who have been executed. Nigerians, because Nigerians are the most unlikely of drug traffickers in Asian society. Dutch women traveling with African men, Dutchmen traveling with Chinese women.

How do you calculate per capita, per capita of Dutchman entering Singapore? Of the capital Singaporeans is against Dutchman. What's Amnesty talking about? Do they know what's happening? Do they ask themselves what would happen if we send them all to prison for 5, 10 years and we'll have to make more prisons because there'll be such an endless stream of them? And this is despite the death penalty. The rewards are so enormous that people are willing to risk it. And why not? Would you say that over the 31 years as you were prime Minister, that you were a ruthless man? Do I look to you a ruthless man? Here I am being pilloried,

excoriated. By who? Abused by you merely asked questions, I thought. But every one of them is barbed, loaded darts with a bit of arsenic in it. I'd like to think that you were given a chance to answer any question that was put to you. Oh, that's what I'm offering myself for, isn't it? But if I were a ruthless man,

I would get you into a corner and say, now let me ask you some question.

Why do you start with the assumption

that your interviewee is always dumb and that you are smarter than him? Why do you assume that Asians are somehow unable to understand Western ways of life and that they would be so much better if they will become. If they would become more like the West?