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| The Bali Nine |
It's almost a decade since Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran strapped heroin to nervous drug couriers in the plot that would see them jailed. Everyone agrees they are reformed men now. So why are they marked for execution?
In a Bali hotel room almost a decade ago, 2 young Australian men strapped packages of heroin to the bodies of 4 nervous drug couriers - 1 package around each thigh and another to the back of their waists.
Andrew Chan, then 21, and Myuran Sukumaran, 24, both from Sydney, weren't taking the risk of personally smuggling more than 8kg of heroin to Australia. They were the organisers of a Bali "holiday" for 7 other young Australians. They gave the orders, booked flights and accommodation, picked up the heroin, even bought loose, gaudy tourist shirts to cover up the drugs.
The Bali 9, as they are now known, had been followed by Indonesian police since the day they arrived in the tourist mecca - tipped off by Australian federal police. Chan was arrested at the airport with the 4 couriers on 17 April 2005 - Renae Lawrence, Martin Stephens, Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj - just before boarding a flight to Sydney. Sukumaran was arrested the same night in a Bali hotel room with 3 other would-be mules.
The couriers admitted their crimes and are serving life or 20-year prison sentences. But Chan and Sukumaran denied they had anything to do with the scheme and blamed the drug mules for scapegoating them. The extensive surveillance, phone records and the evidence of the couriers made their denials unbelieveable. In 2006 they were sentenced to death by firing squad.
In their book on the case, journalists Cindy Wockner and Madonna King give an unflattering portrait of the 2 men at that time. Chan, the son of Chinese immigrants, was "a small-time brute" in his youth, and the "enforcer" of this smuggling attempt. Sukumaran, born in London of Sri Lankan heritage, was sullen and "always looked menacing".
During his trial, he was evasive, claiming he couldn't remember even basic details. Several of the small-time couriers said they were frightened of the pair, that they had threatened them and their families if they did not cooperate, a claim Chan and Sukumaran denied.
It was always hard at the time to elicit sympathy for the 2 organisers of this mid-level smuggling attempt. But a decade on there is no doubt that if Indonesia executes Chan and Sukumaran, it will be killing different men. They have admitted their crimes and expressed remorse. They are leaders at Bali's Kerobokan prison, organising classes in everything from computers to philosophy. They have learnt Indonesian and counsel other prisoners. Their reform is at the heart of their last attempts to save their lives, and it is the plea of their desperate families. Why kill 2 young men who have had a decade to change, to contribute, to reform?
It is not just their lawyers and families who say so. In a highly unusual intervention, then governor of the prison, Siswanto, told an appeal hearing in 2010 that the pair were model prisoners whose lives should be spared. Their reform was "not a camouflage act", he said.
"They are still young. They deserve to be given time to fix their past behaviour. I personally cannot accept it if they are executed."
In death penalty cases, after years of appeals and dashed hopes, there are the final, frantic, desperate days. Chan and Sukumaran are held in the crowded Kerobokan prison. Their conventional legal appeals are exhausted. The newly elected Indonesian president Joko Widodo, rejected Sukumaran's plea for clemency earlier this month, and Chan's last week.
They face being strapped to a pole and executed by an Indonesian firing squad, or a bullet to the head if the 12 marksmen somehow fail to kill them. Because they committed the crime together, they will be executed together.
The sentence could be carried out any time now, with 3 days' notice to allow the condemned men to say farewell to family and friends. Chan, now 31, and Sukumaran, 33, would be the 1st Australians to be executed under Indonesia's tough drug trafficking laws but they would be far from the 1st foreigners.
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| President Joko Widodo |
In December, Widodo said he would not grant clemency to any of the 64 drug convicts on death row, around 1/3 of them believed to be foreign nationals. Briton Lindsay Sandiford, 58, is among them, sentenced in January 2013 for smuggling cocaine into Bali.
Widodo was considered a reformer and moderate when he took office in October but he has not wavered on drugs. Going ahead with executions is "important shock therapy" in the struggle against the drug scourge in his country, he says.
He has been true to his word. In the early hours of 18 January, 6 convicted drug traffickers were executed by firing squad, including citizens from the Netherlands, Brazil, Nigeria, Malawi and Vietnam. Pleas for clemency were ignored, and the Netherlands and Brazil withdrew their ambassadors in protest. The Dutch foreign minister, Bert Koenders, said it was "cruel and unusual punishment which constitutes an unacceptable denial of human dignity and integrity". Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, was "distressed and outraged" that the sentence was carried out.
Chan and Sukumaran's Indonesian lawyers plan a last-ditch application for judicial review this week. Still, they know the denial of presidential clemency was devastating news. Their Melbourne-based lawyer, Julian McMahon, was in Bali when the decision was made public, and admitted that "there's not a lot of hope" now.
Supporters understand the complexity of all this, that the lives of Chan and Sukumaran are caught up in politics and history. Indonesia is a vast archipelago nation of 250 million people, a fast-growing democracy, but still a developing country struggling with rapid change and resentful of interference from former western colonialists.
They are careful not to criticise Indonesia too stridently, aware that to do so risks harming any remaining hope for the two prisoners. They know, too, that public opinion is mixed, even in Australia, where a small majority support the death penalty for terrorist cases and where few have sympathy for traffickers of heroin.
Yet as more Australians focus on what might happen to these men, others are involved in trying to highlight its pointlessness. The Mercy Campaign has gathered 30 prominent Australians, including Germaine Greer and the conservative radio host Alan Jones, to "stand for mercy". The campaign is gathering momentum, with more than 65,000 people signing a petition to the Indonesian president.
The campaign's co-founder, lawyer Matthew Goldberg, says the petition is to show that people care about this case, that it is being watched, "that members of the public have put their name to the movement to protect these guys".
Supporters understand that the Australian government's advocacy is critical but that it needs to be done quietly, out of the public eye.
And they know something that is gruesomely pragmatic. As much as they oppose the death penalty for anyone, they have to distinguish these 2 men as more deserving of mercy than others.
Peter Morrissey SC has worked pro bono on the case since 2007 and says the key is for the Indonesian authorities to engage with these particular individuals. The heart of the attempt at a 2nd judicial review is that there is "new evidence and circumstances" - the men are not the men they were.
"The campaign of persuasion is to try to get the president of Indonesia and those advising him to actually engage with the 2 boys, the 2 young men," Morrissey told Guardian Australia. "Once they engage on an individual level, these are the very 2 who ought to be given clemency. Their rehabilitation is a very uplifting story and they should be advanced as a success story of the Indonesian system."
It is common for those on death row to argue they have changed, have found religion, are remorseful, and it is inevitable for someone facing a death sentence to reassess their lives. Yet there is nobody who denies that the transformation of Chan and Sukumaran is sincere and profound.
Sukumaran has become a portrait painter, is completing a fine arts degree by correspondence, and is being mentored by the well-known Australian artist Ben Quilty, who has said: "As all stereotypes fall away, Myuran has done a horrible thing - but that's a long time ago."
Sukumaran teaches English, computer skills, graphic design and other classes to prisoners and has been appointed to a leadership position - supervising a group of more than 20 prisoners, resolving disputes and liaising with guards.
Chan, from a Christian family, is now deeply religious. He studies theology and runs services in the prison. Both counsel others on the dangers of drugs.
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| Andrew Chan (left) and Myuran Sukumaran (right) |
"Andrew is an extrovert, a cheerful lovely soul, a cheeky guy," says Morrissey. "His rehabilitation has been quite simple."
"Myuran is a complex, intelligent guy. He began as an artist and his engagement in the educational side of it has been a real journey for him about life. He's a very talented person, he's a thinker, he's introspective.
"Both of them are very sombre about being taken away and killed; they dwell on it."
The arguments are humanitarian but also legal. Morrissey says it is unlawful not to consider the cases of the 64 traffickers on death row individually. "When Indonesia says it is enforcing its laws, it's not. They have a law on clemency that says you have a right to apply for clemency [but] they've said in advance that all 64 are dead. That is a very serious matter."
According to Amnesty International, 13 countries executed people for drug offences in 2013, including China, Singapore, Vietnam, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It says there is no evidence that capital punishment deters serious drug crimes.
The death penalty is lawful under international law but is restricted to "the most serious crimes", such as those causing death or serious bodily harm. The UN human rights committee has condemned the death penalty in drug cases.
The legal appeals are made more complicated by the Indonesian judicial system, which has undergone significant reform but remains confusing. There are 2 senior courts, the supreme court and the constitutional court, which are at odds over whether a 2nd judicial appeal is even possible.
The constitutional court has said it is - it has also advised that someone who has been on death row for 10 years and has been of good behaviour deserves to have their case reviewed with a view to commuting the death sentence to a term of imprisonment. The supreme court has said there is no place for a 2nd judicial review. The lawyers are not even certain their application will be successfully lodged.
"One of Joko's interests is to not undermine the judiciary and that's a legitimate thing for him to say," Morrissey says. "However it has to be recognised that they still have major corruption problems, major inconsistency problems. At the moment, the constitutional court and the supreme court are at each other's throats, and it's an embarrassment to them.
"But our campaign is to persuade. It is not to tick them off and to lecture. What we have to do is to find a way to persuade the president that it's not weakness to show mercy."
Indonesia has been a transit country for drugs for years and drug use among its young, even in remote villages, is soaring, according to official figures. One response was for the government to abandon its unofficial moratorium on the death penalty in 2013. The executions of the 6 traffickers this month were the 1st in the new president's term of office and officials have little patience for mercy pleas.
"We should get this straight," Tedjo Edhy Purdjanto, the co-ordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, said. "Because of the drug lords, 40 drug addicts die every day." At the same time, Indonesia expresses outrage when its own nationals are handed death sentences overseas and fights to have them returned.
At home, Indonesia wages its "war on drugs", with the interdiction of traffickers its primary weapon. It is an approach mirrored in many Asian countries, alarmed at the rising drug use that has come with rising wealth.
The idea of harm minimisation for drug users, common in western Europe as well as in Australia, has not taken hold in many Asian countries and there is strong mainstream support for the death penalty among Indonesians.
Amnesty said in its 2013 report that, despite a steady trend towards the abolishment of the death penalty worldwide, there had been setbacks in the Asia Pacific, with Indonesia and Vietnam resuming executions. China is believed to kill thousands of people each year, more than all the other 20 countries which carry out the death penalty combined.
Ross Taylor, a businessmen and president of the West Australian-based Indonesia Institute, says Chan and Sukumaran's cases are entwined with politics. The new president's decisiveness is being questioned, he says, and his political enemies are looking for signs of weakness.
"If he was to give clemency to Chan and Sukumaran, the real danger for him would be that Indonesia's independence, its sovereignty, would be seen to be under attack from a big western country to the south," Taylor says. "He'd be seen as [having] been bullied, while he's still killing Indonesians. That would be where he would sign his own political death warrant."
The Australian government is treading cautiously around all this. Tony Abbott has spoken personally with the president and, while careful to emphasise respect for Indonesian sovereignty, has stressed the "evidence of genuine remorse, of genuine rehabilitation" of the 2 condemned men.
"In the end, mercy has to be a part of every justice system, including the Indonesian one," he says.
The prime minister says his government will say no more publicly, a strategy endorsed by former diplomats, who insist that any attempt to grandstand will make it harder for Indonesia to change its position.
"I've always believed that notwithstanding public pressures, results are more likely to be achieved if negotiations are carried out privately and without publicity," said Richard Woolcott, a former Australian ambassador to Indonesia.
There is some residual guilt in Australia about the fate of these 2 men. Before Scott Rush was to leave for Bali in 2005, his father, Lee, learned he was going and felt "sick in the stomach". He contacted a friend and expressed his worry that his son might be contemplating a drug run.
His friend called a contact in the Australian federal police, requesting that 19-year-old Scott be stopped at the airport as he had previous drug convictions and was on bail. Instead, the police contacted their Indonesian counterparts, requesting surveillance of the Bali 9, and handing over details about dates and flights. They must have known that if Indonesia arrested the perpetrators, they faced the death penalty. The federal police said they had no choice but to cooperate with the Indonesians.
The cooperation was widely criticised, with questions about why the police did not wait until the nine returned to Australia to arrest them, or follow them in Sydney to find the ringleaders of the drug operation, who have never been caught. Chan and Sukumaran might have been the organisers but they were not the big fish.
None of this matters now to Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, whose only wish is to live. The two admitted their involvement years ago and apologised for pleading not guilty at trial. They have expressed sorrow and remorse for what they have done and have worked hard to earn a chance at life. "From the bottom of my heart I can honestly say I am now a different person and a reformed person," Sukumaran said during 1 appeal.
Their families are going through a particular kind of hell. "It is like stabbing your own mother and father in the heart and ripping out that knife and watching them bleed to death," Chan said in an interview in 2010.
In statements at the weekend, family members spoke of their fear in contemplating that the Indonesian state is preparing to kill their son, or their brother.
"I'm terrified," said Sukumaran's mother, Raji. "I've been told my son will be taken out and shot at any time. I don't know what to do. He doesn't deserve to die."
Source: The Guardian, January 27, 2015
