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| Scott Rush |
“IF I had my way, I would have been dead at 25. I just didn’t want to be executed in front of the entire world.”
So declares Bali Nine drug mule Scott Rush, now 28, in utter despair. Recalling the day in 2011 when his death sentence was commuted to life, he views his current fate as worse than the death he escaped.
Amid the roar and kerfuffle of the Schapelle Corby media circus, Rush, a despondent figure, is one of the forgotten Australian inmates in Bali, suspended in the shadows of the convicted trafficker’s spotlight.
He is particularly alone.
Now isolated in Karangasem jail, in remote east Bali, he’s at the end of his tether after enduring a prison hell for almost a decade. He constantly talks of death as his only way out.
Asked if he would commit suicide, he says he would not do it himself, muttering that he would enlist help. “I’m not going to be able to survive here. I wish I was dead,” he tells The Weekend Australian. “I’m trying to figure out a way to do it that’s moral. It’s a coward’s way out, but I can’t put up with this shit any more.
“I don’t know what my future is. I’ll never get out. I will be taken away from here in a box.”
Speaking from behind thick bars separating us in a sparse visiting area, he says he dreams of how things could be different, admitting he desperately wants a wife and children and to lead a normal life.
“I don’t want to be on a life sentence,” he says. “But I really don’t know what I would do (on the outside). I’m a good person gone bad. (Bali Nine ringleaders) Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are bad people who have come good.”
In September 2006, an Indonesian court unexpectedly replaced Rush’s life term with a death sentence. That decision was overturned in 2011.
Transferred 3 1/2 weeks ago from Kerobokan jail to Karangesem prison, a three-hour drive away, Rush is the only foreigner among 157 Indonesian inmates, one of 141 males and the first prisoner to be moved of his own volition. He sees it as a coup. He does not want to return to Kerobokan.
Of the furore Corby sparked over speculation she was being paid about $2 million for a TV interview, Rush cannot understand the public outrage. “Good on her. She’s lost 10 years of her life - she should be compensated. We should all get compensation when we get out.”
Source: The Australian, March 1, 2014 (local time)