A year after the Bali Nine
executions, Indonesia prepares firing squads again
Deaths of eight prisoners,
including two Australians, prompted a huge outcry – and a pause in executions.
But now foreigners on death row fear their own sentences could be just weeks
away
The chatter is ominous. Talk that
the death squad is at the ready; that a new, bigger execution ground is in the
making. Officials say it could be just weeks away.
And after the circus last year,
the security minister Luhut Panjaitan hopes there will be less “drama” this
time around.
One year after the international
uproar and the diplomatic fallout over the execution of eight drug traffickers
– including two Australian men, Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran
– it appears more executions could be on Indonesia’s horizon this year. Among
the foreigners on death row in Indonesia are two Britons, convicted drug
smugglers Lindsay Sandiford and Gareth Cashmore.
“I still don’t want to believe
it,” says lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis, who this time last year was fighting to
save the lives of Chan and Sukumaran. “Yes, there will probably be a statement,
but in the end I don’t think there will be any executions. I refuse to believe
it.”
After 14 prisoners were executed
at dawn in two separate rounds in early 2015, a third round has been on hold
for the past year, ostensibly for economic reasons, but perhaps, in part, for
political ones, too.
Yet after whatever fallout there
might have been, Australia’s recalled ambassador has returned (after a
five-week protest), and executions are back on the agenda.
Australians Myuran Sukumaran, left, and Andrew
Chan, two of the Bali Nine drug smuggling ring, were executed by firing squad
in Indonesia a year ago. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
This month, even as Indonesia was
being booed at the United Nations for reiterating its support for the death
penalty for drug offenders – a punitive action that runs counter to
international law – the attorney general Muhammad Prasetyo indicated that another
round would go ahead.
The British prime minister, David
Cameron, said he had raised the case of Sandiford – the English woman sentenced
to death for smuggling almost 4kg of cocaine into Bali – during an official
visit to Jakarta last year, but she remains in the same position.
When questioned on the death
penalty by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on a recent visit to Berlin,
the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, defended capital punishment
as a justified approach to the country’s “drug emergency”.
There is nothing definitive yet,
no date, and no official list of the next prisoners to face the firing squad:
the Indonesian government is keeping its cards close to the chest. But some are
still operating on the assumption that it is probably just a matter of time.
“The last information we received
is that the attorney general has asked the parliament for the budget for the
third round,” says Putri Kanesia, from the Jakarta-based human rights
organisation Kontras. “But they should stop and evaluate the first and second
batch. There were a lot of unfair trials.”
Bali Nine: Indonesia’s executions draw
worldwide condemnation
According to Amnesty
International, there were at least 165 people on death row in Indonesia at the
end of 2015, and more than 40% of those were sentenced for drug-related crimes.
Indonesia has some of the harshest drug laws in the world, and Jokowi has
stated that no drug prisoner will receive a pardon from him.
But the Kontras team is currently
pushing to get the case details of one death row prisoner on to the president’s
desk.
Allegedly tortured in detention,
and told by his lawyer that he did not have the right to appeal, Yusman
Telaumbanua was, Kontras claims, a minor when the crime for which he was
convicted was committed. This would make it illegal to execute him under
Indonesian law.
“We learned from the experience
of Mary Jane Veloso,” explains Kanesia, referring to the last-minute – albeit
temporary – reprieve granted by the president to the Filipino woman slated to
be killed alongside Chan and Sukumaran a year ago.
“We have to give Jokowi
information about unfair trials that led to the death penalty,” she says.
“Maybe we can make him think twice.”
Fresh to the presidency, and to
foreign affairs, some say Jokowi failed to anticipate the diplomatic blowback
of signing off on the executions last year. The more the international
community jumped up and down, the more the stakes were raised – and the harder
it became for him to back out without looking weak.
The reality, and perhaps the
uncomfortable truth for some looking in at Indonesia’s drug policy, is that the
executions generated strong support at home.
Mary Jane Veloso: what happened
to the woman who escaped execution in Indonesia?
Read more
“I think the discourse around
drug policy for Jokowi has always been and continues to be a very political,
politically convenient decision,” says Claudia Stoicescu, a doctoral researcher
at Oxford University’s centre for evidence-based intervention.
“He’s seen a lot of support from
Indonesians on this kind of punitive discourse, both in terms of drug policy,
and this combative language with the war on drugs, but also with the death
penalty.”
Retrospectively, the lack of
diplomatic finesse on the international stage did not do Chan or Sukumaran any
favours.
“Some statements by [then] prime minister
Tony Abbott and also foreign minister Julie Bishop, those probably should not
have been made,” Lubis, the Bali Nine lawyer, told the Guardian during an
interview at his Jakarta law firm. “Because that offends Indonesia – not only
the government, but the Indonesian people. So it was very unfortunate.”
When Abbott implied that
Indonesia owed Australia “a favour” in return for the A$1bn donated in aid for
the 2004 tsunami, angry Indonesians started a coin collection drive to “pay
back” their neighbour. Plastic bags full of silver coins were later delivered
to the embassy in Jakarta.
Other countries with citizens on
Indonesia’s death row have also been forthright in their opposition to
Indonesia’s use of firing squads. French president François Hollande said his
government was “doing everything to keep Serge Atlaoui alive”; the Frenchman,
accused of being the “chemist” for an ecstasy factory outside Jakarta,
exhausted all legal appeals in mid-2015.
French death row prisoner Serge Atlaoui
pictured during a court hearing in 2015.
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French death row prisoner Serge Atlaoui
pictured during a court hearing in 2015. Photograph: Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty
Images
After Cameron said he had raised
the case of Sandiford during the official visit to Jakarta, on Jokowi’s return
visit to London earlier this month, there were no indications that her case or
that of Cashmore were revisited.
However, holding a stronger
position in parliament than he did last year, it might not be as politically
advantageous for Jokowi to conduct further executions in 2016.
Lubis – who recently agreed to
take on Sandiford’s case – is optimistic that the president might be
re-evaluating his hardline stance.
“Now I believe he understands the
pressure, the criticisms. And that has probably made the attorney general a bit
more cautious,” he says, “Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan were executed on 29
April last year, so this is going to be the first anniversary. So I guess they
feel the heat.”
But do they? The president and
his government have continued their enthusiastic drug crusade, with Jokowi
reiterating just weeks ago on the global stage that between 30and 50
Indonesians die each day because of drugs.
Last November, the head of the
National Narcotics Agency, BNN, even outlandishly suggested that drug offenders
should be placed on a prison island surrounded by crocodiles and piranhas.
Yet a look at the numbers shows
that Indonesia might not be facing a drug emergency at all. According to the
2015 UNODC World Drug Report, Indonesia is on the lower end of the scale when
it comes to drug usage around the region, and certainly ranks far lower than
north America and Australia.
“No, there is certainly isn’t an
emergency,” says Stoicescu, who has done the breakdown in her research. “In
that sense, the way he [Jokowi] has used the numbers and the statistics has
also been in a very selective, opportunistic way, to lend credibility to these
political aims.”
Professor Irwanto, a psychologist
at Atma Jaya University in Jakarta, agrees the war on drugs talk is not only
misguided, but counterproductive. The government, he argues, should shift its
resources toward harm reduction, rehabilitation, and education, approaches that
have helped countries with far worse drug problems than Indonesia.
A vigil in Sydney for the eight prisoners
executed in Indonesia in April 2015.
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A vigil in Sydney for the eight prisoners
executed in Indonesia in April 2015. Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Getty Images
Ultimately, there could be an
escape from the death penalty for drug offenders, but it could come too late
for most. A provision in the new draft of the Indonesian criminal code, which
could allow for inmates to have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment
if they are rehabilitated after 10 years, is currently awaiting debate by the
Indonesian parliament.
The new draft is a so-called
“priority” bill, but given the house of representatives managed to pass only
three laws in total in 2015, it is likely to be years before it is even discussed.
That Chan and Sukumaran were
rehabilitated failed to save them, but a year on, Lubis is still grappling with
why they were killed at all.
“I still, you know, find it
difficult to reconcile with myself because I know they were changed. They
became very reformed people. So they did not deserve to die,” he says.
“So I am still struggling to have
peace with myself.”
