Death penalty will be ultimate test for Aust-Indon ties

It’s been a mixed year for three Australians languishing on death row in Bali’s Kerobokan Prison.

But one thing is certain in 2009 - the fates of heroin smugglers Andrew Chan, Myuran Sukumaran and Scott Rush will continue to test Australia’s relationship with Indonesia.

What happens to the three might ultimately prove to be one of the defining tests of the relationship.

Indonesia understands what a sticky issue the drug smugglers pose for the Australian government, given the role of Australian police in sharing intelligence on the ring with Indonesia before their arrests.

But Indonesia is adamant too that the worst drug criminals, seen as contributing to the scourge of addiction in the country, deserve to die.

The involvement of Australian police in a case that exposed Australians to the death penalty is not the only difficult issue for Canberra.

The government did not speak out against the November executions of the Bali bombers, but has said it will seek clemency for Chan, Sukumaran and Rush if their legal appeals fail.

And since the bombers’ executions, Australia has announced it will co-sponsor a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly calling for a global moratorium on capital punishment.

An Australian cross-party working group also wants federal parliament to enact legislation to make it impossible for states to reintroduce the death penalty in Australia.

The inconsistency in Australia’s position could not have escaped Indonesia’s attention.

And the human rights group Amnesty International has said Australia’s failure to speak out against the bombers’ executions has imperilled the lives of the Bali Nine trio.

Certainly, Indonesia has asked Australia to respect its legal system.

“We heard that they, Australia, and western countries will try and approach us not to impose the death sentence because the death penalty cannot be accepted by them,” Indonesia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Hassan Wirajuda recently said.

“We understand this because it’s been abolished by them. But please understand that the death penalty is still a part of our positive law.

“In the end, in relations between states, we must respect each other’s legal systems.”

Wirajuda said there was nothing Indonesia could do about the Bali Nine, because their legal cases were ongoing and the government could not interfere with that process.

As ringleaders Chan and Sukumaran, and drug mule Rush continue to wind their way through Indonesia’s legal system next year, they will look back on 2008 as a mix of great and grave developments.

Early in the year, things were looking up.

Three other Bali Nine members sentenced to die for their roles in the failed 2005 plot to smuggle more than 8kg of heroin from Bali to Australia begged for their lives in an emotional March appeal.

And they won.

Indonesia’s Supreme Court commuted the death sentences that had been handed to Matthew Norman, Si Yi Chen and Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen to life jail terms.

For a while, the development seemed to buoy the hopes of Chan, Sukumaran and Rush that they too might be spared.

But in June, Indonesia showed how seriously it views drug crimes by executing the first drug offenders in four years, Nigerians Hansen Anthony Nwaolisa, 40, and Samuel Iwuchukwu Okoye, 37.

Senior Indonesian officials then vowed to speed up the executions of other death-row drug criminals.

Last month, the three condemned Australians saw their fates brought into minute and agonising focus with the bombers’ executions.

Newspapers were filled with every detail of the terrorists’ last days, hours and minutes, down to photos of the crosses the militants were tied to as they were shot dead in a forest.

Soon after the executions, there were ghastly images of a blackened patch of ground, which had been burnt to get rid of the bombers’ blood. There were photos of their graves too.

At the time, a regular visitor to Kerobokan prison, Pastor Ed Trotter, said the mood among the condemned Australians was “sombre”.

“It’s obviously very much on their minds. It’s been weighing more heavily upon them - particularly the three facing the death sentence - than it has before,” Trotter said in November.

“It’s really brought it home to them. What they’re facing and how serious the government is.”

Chan, Sukumaran and Rush have so far failed to have their sentences reduced on appeal.

They can still apply for a judicial review by the Supreme Court in Jakarta, and failing that appeal for clemency to Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

But Yudhoyono has previously said he will not show mercy to drug offenders.

It remains to be seen if Yudhoyono - or his successor, should he lose the 2009 elections - will soften that stance if the condemned trio fail to alter their fates through legal avenues.

In July, 150 million Indonesians will go to the polls to elect a new president.

Most analysts are tipping Yudhoyono will be returned. But there is a chance one of a swag of other contenders could emerge the new leader of the world’s biggest Muslim country.

Source: thewest.com.au, December 19, 2008