Australian-Indonesian
relations threatened by executions
 |
| Jokowi and VP Jusuf Kalla; Not such a jolly image in reality |
Australians could die cruelly so Indonesia’s new president
looks macho.
Barring a political somersault our northern neighbour is
heading for major diplomatic confrontations with Australia and other Western
nations as it enforces the death penalty for drug trafficking.
New President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has categorically refused
to intervene in cases where the courts have ordered executions. Speaking at a university forum
in Central Java in December he said: “I guarantee that there will be no clemency for convicts who commit narcotics-related
crimes.”
Consequently five are expected to face the
firing squad this year and 20 in 2015. The
first batch is reportedly all Indonesians, but the next group could include
Australians Andrew Chan, 30, and Myuran Sukumaran, 33. The two men, members of the Bali Nine drug
syndicate caught in 2005 and sentenced in 2006, have exhausted all appeals.
Australia is a world leader in opposing capital
punishment and would be duty bound to protest strenuously against the execution
of its nationals.
In a final bid to keep their lives, Chan and
Sukumaran sought clemency from former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY). He ducked the issue and retired in October.
To the dismay of human rights activists who expected Jokowi to
be more sensitive to moral matters, the new president seems determined to look
as hairy-chested as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
During a brutal election campaign the civilian Jokowi was
labelled weak against his rival, former army hard man Prabowo Subianto. Although SBY was a general before entering
politics he dithered on decisions concerning religious conflict and drug
penalties, leading the electorate to start baying for firmness in its new
leader.
During his two five-year terms SBY commuted some death
penalties and imposed a four-year moratorium on executions. Law reformers thought this marked the end of
the death penalty and the start of a more nuanced approach to punishment.
It was a false dawn. The firing squads’ M16s were cocked
five times in 2013 as SBY reacted to claims he was soft on criminals. Even his former vice president Jusuf Kalla
(now holding the same position under Jokowi) allegedly said SBY “was loved by drug traffickers for his
leniency.”
Paroling so-called ‘Ganja Queen’ Schapelle Corby in February
2014 cheered her Australian supporters but won SBY no applause in his homeland.
Druggies aren’t the only ones to take the brunt of Jokowi’s
determination to prove he’s really Rambo in batik. Foreign fishing boats dropping their lines in
Indonesian waters have also been in the President’s sights; literally, as the
offending vessels have been used as target practice by the navy.
Curiously terrorism doesn’t get the same brutal treatment. Jokowi has spoken publicly about
taking “softer religious and cultural
approaches” as these were better tools in eradicating terrorism than the
“security approach”. He declined to
elaborate.
There’s no sophisticated debate on the death penalty in
Muslim-majority Indonesia where State-sanctioned killings don’t arouse the
abhorrence felt in Europe and Australasia. Even concerns about the innocent
dying through flaws in a notoriously corrupt judicial system are muted. Capital
punishment is accepted as a just and effective deterrent though the facts say
otherwise.
SBY’s moratorium ended in 2013 with five well-publicised executions. That year British grandma Lindsay Sandiford,
58, was caught carrying almost five kilos of cocaine. She is also on death row in Bali.
Despite the prominently advertised penalties drug arrests continue
to be commonplace with the alleged criminals pictured before cakes of
contraband while cops in balaclavas look on.
One of the latest is Kiwi pensioner Antony de Malmanche, 53,
caught in Bali in early December allegedly carrying 1.7 kilos of
methamphetamine. He too could be torn apart by fragmenting bullets if
convicted.
Indonesian executions are horrific. In 2008 Catholic priest Charlie Burrows
supported two Nigerians facing a midnight firing squad in Central Java. He later told a Constitutional Court
challenge to the death penalty that the men bled and moaned for seven minutes
after being shot from a metre away by a dozen policemen armed with assault
rifles.
The hooded drug traffickers had been tied to crucifixes with
car inner tubes. A target had been put over their hearts by a doctor (presumably
breaking the Hippocratic Oath) who did not pronounce them dead till ten minutes
after the gunfire ceased.
A Sydney Morning
Herald report of Father Burrows’ testimony quoted the priest saying: “I think it is cruel, the torture.”
Death for druggies is a simplistically attractive solution
to a social evil that’s well entrenched in Indonesia, but President Jokowi may
soon face the dilemma that so troubled his gun-happy predecessors. Indonesia has more than four million workers
overseas, with 280 on death rows in countries like Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.
Some of these people are young maids accused of murdering
their bosses. Their defence of
responding to employer rape has little impact in Arab states. Indonesian
diplomats pleading a stay of the sword on behalf of their citizens find the
going tough when reminded that their own country also lacks compassion.
Despite defeating the colonial Dutch for independence in a
bloody four-year conflict, and running the world’s third largest democracy, Indonesians
retain a strange sense of international inferiority: Banging the nationalist
drum always rouses a parade.
Shelling a Vietnamese fishing boat for TV news, or shredding
the torsos of Australian drug runners will go down a treat with Indonesian voters,
particularly if the folk next door are enraged. Snubbing mercy pleas by Tony
Abbott will damage relations between the neighbours but do Jokowi’s image at
home no harm at all.
(First published in On Line Opinion, 22 December 2014. For comments see: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=16961 )
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