It’s no exaggeration to say that there’s growing public revulsion in Australia at Indonesia’s plan to execute Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
Petitions asking for mercy have garnered the signatures of tens of thousands of people, all to be sent to Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo. Vigils have been held in various cities and the feeling at all of them has been one of profound sadness. After all, who hasn’t made a mistake?
But in Indonesia the trafficking of drugs is not a forgivable crime. And mercy is sparingly dispensed, especially by a President who won office promising to deal harshly with traffickers and is seemingly more concerned with political considerations than the morality of the death penalty.
Sukumaran and Chan’s lives now hang on an appeal to Indonesia’s Administrative Court and the remote possibility that the Indonesian government might discover a politically face saving reason to abort its plan to kill them.
The men’s lawyers argue that the President denied the two men “natural justice” when he declared that regardless of individual circumstance, all drug traffickers condemned to death will be executed. This, they say, is a breach of the Indonesian constitution, which gives those condemned to death the right to have clemency pleas individually considered by the only person who can grant that mercy.
The transfer of Sukumaran and Chan to the island where they will be executed has been delayed, the Indonesians say to allow their families to spend more time with them and because the island prison isn’t ready to accept them.
But given the 11th hour timing of the announcement and that their families have been in Bali for weeks, it’s not unreasonable to question if Jakarta is feeling the heat. To execute Sukumaran and Chan whilst their appeal is afoot would be internationally condemned. And after weeks of sustained pleading from the government, five former prime ministers and the UN Secretary General, President Widodo must surely have heard the message: state sanctioned murder may bring unwanted consequences.
If the Indonesian President hasn’t given thought to all the pleas for mercy, he is surely aware that some Australians might boycott Bali, the economic consequence of which would be considerable.
Though in time most Australians will likely succumb to the allure of Bali’s beaches and fabulous food, those who are distressed by Sukumaran and Chan’s fight to stay alive won’t so easily forgive or forget the role played by the Australian Federal Police in the tragedy. Nor should they.
In 2005, the AFP volunteered information about the Bali 9 to the Indonesian National Police, rather than arresting them Australia where the heroin was headed.
The AFP has yet to say whether it would again volunteer information about its own citizens to countries where the death penalty applies. Instead of an apology, all Australians have heard is that the AFP does not believe it has blood on its hands.
Still, an apology would be of little solace to Myuran Sukumaran, Andrew Chan or their families. The only solace for the families is that the sons they will farewell are not the boys arrested in Bali in 2005.
Their rehabilitation and remorse is by all accounts, real. The men are, in Julie Bishop’s words “the model of what penal systems the world over long to achieve.”
In this she was wholeheartedly supported by the shadow foreign affairs spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek who knows more than most about the value of redemption.
Her husband Michael Coutts Trotter spent three years in jail when he was young, for conspiracy to import heroin from Thailand. He is now the NSW Secretary of the Department of family and Community Services, one of the most highly regarded public servants’ in the country.
“I feel a genuine debt of gratitude,” the father of three told me.
“As they say, from those to whom much is given, much is required.
“We all get un-earned opportunities in life, but mine are much more obvious than most and easier for me to be grateful for,” he said.
It’s hard to imagine how grateful Sukumaran and Chan would be just to be granted the human right to live.
Monica Attard is a Sydney based freelance journalist and former ABC foreign correspondent and senior broadcaster.
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